Poetry Magazine
“No longer if we’ll get cancer but when”
No longer if we’ll get cancer but when, the doctor said. Now questions accrete around the irritant like pearl: Not when but how? Not how but whom? And then why. And then why not. I take a can of ashes to the beach and empty them into the wind. Outside the trash man collects bottles like a miser rattling his jewels, tossing them onto the growing heap.
Source: Poetry (October 2011).
Biography
Melanie Braverman’s most recent book is Red (Perugia Press, 2002), winner of the Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Poetry Award. The poems appearing here are from a book-length manuscript called “The World With Us in It.” She is a poet-in-residence at Brandeis University.
Poems by Melanie Braverman
Poem Categorization
SUBJECT Living, Death, Health & Illness, Time & Brevity
Poetic Terms Prose Poem
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