removed
The music playing while they cut me open,
while they redistributed my nipples,
while they took the breasts misdelivered to my body
and left them somewhere in a medical grade bin in Connecticut
was a mixtape of Broadway’s best, Cyndi Lauper,
Cardi B’s B-sides.
NPR news interruptions,
my mother eating saltines while sucking on cigarettes and Folgers when she used to do all three,
the sound of a mouth swelling open into a love song,
The Sex Pistols on a lunch break
Judy Garland,
my teeth shivering from panic that time I ate too many weed gummies,
that episode of Oprah when she wheeled out a cart of her “fat” removed from surgery or diet or both I can’t remember,
Trae snoring beside me,
construction from down the street,
Madonna post-Evita years,
The Velvet Underground draped in Velvet
the moon stretching its bones in the sky.
