Woman with Amputated Breasts Awaits PET Scan Results
The waiting, sleek as otters, slipsbetween your lips.Without the waiting, who can know when spring will come, or snow?Heading south, the geese all beatthe waiting with their wings.Turn on the light at 2 am;the waiting stands, handon your head. A most maternal haunting.Swimming, the human body humps along: each dive in timeends so close to its beginning.Help me to spell waiting? I forget. And whomcan I tell how much I want to live? I want to live.A stone, the waiting weights my body into stone:what's left, almost a palindrome.
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- June 2, 2023
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“Woman with Amputated Breasts Awaits PET Scan Results” (poem) from Standing in the Forest of Being Alive by Katie Farris, Alice James Books, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Katie Farris.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Katie Farris’s work has been commissioned by MoMA and appears in American Poetry Review, Granta, McSweeneys, The Nation, and Poetry. She is the author of the chapbook A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, which won the 2020 Chad Walsh Poetry Award from Beloit Poetry Journal, and boysgirls, a hybrid-form book, as well as co-translator of many books of poetry. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Brown University. She is currently Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Alice James Books, 2023) is her first book of poems.
"One must train oneself to find, in the midst of hell, what isn’t hell, Farris writes in her poem 'The Wheel'—'For instance, the way you folded love into a booklet/and gave it to me to read.' If such a lyric art is possible, of finding one’s way through the inferno of cancer survival, of writing despite and with the body, commending to paper the luminous terror of having come through, these pages would be an account of that love, folded into a booklet. Brava!"
—Carolyn Forché, author of nationally acclaimed The Country Between Us
"The language fresh as a peach, honest, precise, imaginative, full of life: in the midst of shock and pain, this book rings with love of language."
—Rae Armantrout, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Versed
"Farris writes a gorgeous self-elegy: 'I will need a rope/to let me down into the earth./I’ve hidden others/strategically around the globe,/a net to catch/my body in its weaving.' She provides an account of the dailiness of illness, long after the visitors disappear. With signature wit, Farris engages in a power struggle with mortality and in the end, her ferocity and conviction win through language that sings."
—Victoria Chang, author of the nationally acclaimed Obit
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