I woke up, and the surgeon said, ‘You’re cured.’ Strapped to the gurney, in the cotton gown and pants I was wearing when they slid me down onto the table, made news straps secure while I stared at the hydra-headed O.R. lamp, I took in the tall, confident, brown-skinned man, and the ache I couldn’t quite call pain from where my right breast wasn’t anymore to my armpit. A not-yet-talking head, I bit dry my lips. What else could he have said? And then my love was there in a hospital coat; then my old love, still young and very scared. Then I, alone, graphed clock hands’ asymptote to noon, when I would be wheeled back upstairs. (…)

The hand that held the cup next was my daughter’s – who would be holding shirts for me to wear, sleeve out, for my bum arm. She’d wash my hair (not falling yet), strew teenager’s disorder in the kitchen, help me out of the bathwater. A dozen times, she looked at the long scar studded with staples, where I’d suckled her, and didn’t turn. She took me / I brought her to the surgeon’s office, where she’d hold my hand, while his sure hand, with its neat tool, snipped the steel, as on a revised manuscript radically rewritten since my star turn nursing her without a ‘nursing bra’ from small, firm breasts, a twenty-five-year-old’s.

Excerpted from WINTER NUMBERS: Poems by Marilyn Hacker. Copyright © 1994 by Marilyn Hacker. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Chosen by Femi Oyebode.