Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

Mammogram

D E B O R A H P O P E Mammogram I made the mistake of looking down breast coaxed away from my chest to end in a thinned-out puddle of tissue, between plastic clear as a grade-school petri dish, some specimen pithed and opened, suspended for view in a jar, and all those playground taunts come true, flat, in fact, as a pancake. But the film clipped up later in the doctor’s light transformed the world, like the first satellite reports of a visionary landscape, celestial, sublunary, nicked with grainy brilliance, a curved, primitive planet I floated, tethered, proprietary, above. Then there and there, his offhand ballpoint tapped like a miner at the marvelous crust, The 1990s ❚ 183 The 1990s ❚ 183 gauging the find, the wedge of entry, and I turned back from the black and white prospects of that surface to the featureless scape drawn out by machine, saw it for what it might easier, better, have been a cheek fast under ice, or a face, hard against a windshield. 184 ❚ The 1990s ...