Green Linden Press

What if My Body Could Imagine Its Tumor as Something Beautiful?

ripened taproot of vascular stasis          tickling fern          your productivity astounds me
such an industrious decade          right when I thought you were gone you appeared          again
clinging to me with the blue grace of mold          multiplying like frogs’ eggs
sprouting feathery tails          heads round as marbles          I am thunderous with you          
your radioactive afterglow          I am electric with your ambush          the air around me 
crackles and splits          feline caress nosing my neck          you embroider me with your love bite
you seed me with yourself          your sand grains stick to me like glitter          spigot flapping with water 
you slake me         sugary tonsil stone          I am laid up with you          my epiglottis has gone purple 
in adoration of you          I could plink you into a teacup and drink you piping hot          dust crystal          
pink geode          scattering like dandelion fur          you siphon me like nectar          how I thrill to fill you
slug fat as a blackberry          leaking rainbow shimmer          you wring me in one tight fist
you were with me when I squeezed through the silo of rock          you were with me in the naked river
in the field where the jackrabbit exploded through the fog          tunneling one          
you have tracked me with your mud          you have puddled me          raveled and riveted me
clutching my carotid gentle as a petal         no one has held me as tenderly as you

The News of My Cancer’s Return Comes on the Beach

Cape Cod is seeing sharks this summer, great whites, 
E. reported at dinner the other night, so many that helicopters 
prowl the shoreline, hovering like giant flies 
above swimmers who won’t go deeper than their waists 

they are so careful. They can’t help but imagine the ripping 
teeth, blood spooling out into the Atlantic, though
a human being is more likely to die from being struck 
by lightning than from a shark attack. 

Today my parents and I sit on a different beach, 
it is high tide, the waves have pushed us up to the dunes 
where piles of seaweed lie like tangled brown wigs. 
Sharks attack to protect themselves, or when they mistake 

a person for their prey. All day we have waited for the phone to ring. 
When a doctor says “I’m calling to discuss the results of your fine 
needle biopsy,” things are not, in fact, fine. Sandcrabs 
tunnel at our feet, sending pillars of bubbles in their wake.

A human being is more likely to die from being crushed
by a falling vending machine than from a shark attack. 
My father grips my wrist, my mother’s cheeks fill 
though she does not vomit. A human being is more likely to die 

of cancer than from a shark attack. The odds are not
in our favor. “It’s like lightning striking twice,” the doctor says
on the phone, and my throat swallows itself. I want to ask
“Is that the clinical term?” but there is too much water. 

Great white sharks can have up to three hundred teeth. 
They can grow to nearly the size of a school bus. 
Sharks, as it turns out, are just another kind of fish. The sea,
fathomless, is just another kind of body. 

Arielle Kaplan is a poet and educator from Philadelphia. She is currently an MFA candidate at Boston University and is the recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. An editorial assistant at AGNI, she also holds an MA in Education and has taught in the U.S. and in Spain.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2021