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24 Scar How delicately it runs down your sternum, this seam paler than your pale skin, sign that something within has been repaired and healed over. After they cut you open and sewed you back together, I longed to hold you but could only stroke your head, cradle your hand. Your eyelids fluttered, your face reddened in a scream silenced by the tube pressed against your vocal cords. “She’s crying,” the nurse told us. Your voice, softer than most infants’ to begin with, was lost until you coughed up the tube and they had to take it out, breaking post-op protocol. I must be heard, and so you were, returning from the anesthetic haze, dazed by pain and morphine for the pain. Next morning, the white-shoed woman who shuffles in to take your x-ray hums, not gospel or “Amazing Grace,” but “Que Sera, Sera”— a mother telling her child What will be, will be— not quite All’s well, but close. Your cries get stronger, I beg another morphine shot for you. Third day, I can nurse again, mindful of your mended-china ribcage. Tears 25 come with the milk, and these liquids are all I have to give, O daughter, tiny warrior, silver-scar-bearer, nothing at all wrong with your great heart. ...

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