TWO POEMS BY THEO LEGRO

Theo LeGro is a queer Vietnamese-American poet and Kundiman fellow whose work has earned two nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Their work appears or will appear in Brooklyn Poets, diode, Plume, The Offing, Raleigh Review, and others. They live in Brooklyn with a cat named Vinny.

GESTURES OF THE INCONSOLABLE

June. Another biopsy. I bleed through the bandage. I photograph
myself bleeding. The hospital calls. I let it ring twice before I answer
the phone. I don’t want to seem desperate. The radiologist is nervous.
There’s no easy way to tell me. She doesn’t want to say cancer.
I can’t help but laugh. I don’t tell my mother. I tell my brother
not to tell my mother. My mother sends letters. I tell myself
I’ll open them later. My oncologist tells me I’m strong. I want
to prove her wrong. I learn to spell mastectomy. I count backwards
from ten while they look for a vein and the rest of the summer
circles the drain. I don’t remember September. October. Blood moon.
All moons are blood moons. The clouds cough up meteors. The night
is a belly bloated with stars, clots of light throbbing red in the sky’s
hollow heart. I walk into November. I never come back. I wear
lipstick to surgery. I go home reeking of rust. I don’t cry.
I stop sleeping. The incisions stop weeping. I take my new scars
out for a drink. Whenever someone looks at me, I want to apologise.
I miss my old body. I show my new body pictures of how pretty
it used to be. Look at us now, I say, but I don’t want to look.
I want my old body back, so stupid with poison it didn’t know
we were dying. My new body just listens, calls us a cab
once I’m drunk. Who is going to love us now? I ask. Nobody
answers. While I sleep, my new body swallows our stitches in silence,
forgets our bad dreams and keeps all my secrets.




MIRACLE

It’s the year my eyelashes choke the sink
and someone’s always looking for a better vein. I leave
a piece of me in every white room: freckle suspended
in formaldehyde. Scumble of tissue under a microscope.
Knot of nerves in a red can marked biohazard. My breasts
slump in some pathologist’s hands, nipples alert long ago
and far away. I almost feel it. For weeks I wear the same
shirt and cry every time I take it off. I’m nowhere
near as beautiful as I was last year, and who will
forgive me? It should be a miracle, to be so young
and ancient. To watch a scar’s colours change.
How easy it is to abandon grace. To hate
the body for how it holds you. To punish
the body for being no more than it is:
a doomed and needful animal
with a heart made of meat.