Welcome to Poetically Yours. Poetically Yours showcases poems by northern Illinois poets. This week’s poet is Briana Lee.
Lee is a veterinary technician from Elburn and writer. She’s involved with the Drink and Draft Poetry Roadshow, a travelling poetry workshop that meets online and Chicago area suburbs.
This week’s poem recognizes Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Over the summer, Lee found a lump in her breast. Her diagnosis was fibroadenoma, a benign breast tumor. She will continue to be monitored by her medical team.
“I know that so many women and even some men struggle with breast cancer and the anxiety of finding a lump,” Lee said.
This experience prompted her to write the poem “Anatomy of a Horror Film.”
Fear rarely knocks;
it likes to germinate beneath the skin,
patient as mold and musty mutters growing behind damp wallpaper and tiles.
My hands drifted over the usual contours
until I abruptly gripped the handle on the shower wall.
Instead of The Shining’s Jack Torrance cracking his cranium through my bathroom door, my fingers traced something
firm-
an uncooked popcorn kernel
resting deep in the butter of my breast tissue.
The bathroom fan stretched into static,
the shower curtain clung to my leg,
the drainpipes gargled and groaned beneath me,
the steam thickened like movie fog,
the water droplets striking the porcelain tiles with the cadence of a ticking clock,
and the small tanager trapped in my ribcage
tried not to flutter in fear. My eyes prickled with tears,
shearing spikes like a Saw movie bear trap.
I retouched
and re-palpated,
until I felt there was no debate
between the rock in my stomach and that
stark hard place.
My brain unraveled blueprints
building a city of shadows,
populating the streets with statistics and alleyways that swallow sunlight.
The crosswalks with waiting rooms and white coats,
the highways littered with familial history of breast cancer and dense booby traps,
the local markets lined with mammograms and MRIs,
city pigeons cooing why and where to start,
the industrial building window panes displaying insurance pains and financial claims,
traffic stalled by sterile cots under stoplights primed with chemo IV lines,
and the pedestrians passing by,
hushed tones trying to theorize that
maybe it’s just body fat,
or menstrual woes,
or “I’m too young for this”,
or some other girl glitch.
It was some nightmare on Elm Street,
but all of the city street signs shrugged their shoulders,
and GPS couldn’t detect any sort of direction on how to process this information.
And when the billboard for breast cancer lit the cityscape,
Freddy Kruger and Jason Voorhees became scream queens, Pennywise shimmied back into his drain vent dive bar,
and Jigsaw didn’t want to play this type of game with me,
slowly backpedaling off, his tricycle tripping over his puppet strings.
No special effects could conceal this little spot of horrors.
No movie prop could feel as heavy as this plot twist.
But I want to stay for the credits,
I want to change the director’s cut,
and the next time Jack tries to barge into my bathroom with a smirk and
“here’s breast cancer!”
I want him to hear my ribs become floorboards,
each creak announcing I am still here.
I want my heartbeat to thunder through the walls
until he forgets which of us is the monster.
I want him backing away from the doorway in desperation,
his axe suddenly too small for this horror story.
Because no slasher on screen ever frightened me
the way one quiet fingertip did.
Spoiler alert: I won’t let this kernel cook in the kettle any longer.
