Before Top Surgery

I.

On the way to the hospital
I see breasts everywhere:

yellow-tagged dairy cows
professional lactaters;
sagging barns beside
red-topped grain silos;
murmurations of sparrows
blobbing and dispersing
over the Catskills foothills.

II.

We wait, masked and distanced,
in the mid-December soundscape
of Frank Sinatra and Mariah Carey,
tap at the Times crossword,
take turns visiting the gift shop,
scan the wall of last millennium’s donors,
share selfies the kids took yesterday.

III.

The sleep is in my arm now
and I’m sarcophagused
in toasty blankets.

The surgeon’s been in.
I stood like a Renaissance Jesus,
palms up, gown shrugged off
to my elbows as she marked up
my torso like a new play
for the offensive line.

When I wake, I will be
a mismatched children’s puzzle:
giraffe on the top, lion on the bottom
as if men and women were ever really
different species and not
variations on the same themes
of salty carbs and worrying
and walks around the block
just to see if anything’s different today:
the neighbor’s pinecone wreath
tiny icicles on the mailbox
dark-eyed junco at the feeder
fat with feathers
and the dream
of sunflowers.

Holly Painter

Holly Painter is the author of the poetry collections At last we listen closely: cryptic crossword poems (Black Spring, 2026), The pressure of all that light (Rebel Satori, 2022), My Pet Sounds Off: Translating the Beach Boys (Finishing Line, 2020),andExcerpts from a Natural History(Titus, 2015). Holly teaches in the English Department at the University of Vermont and also directs the Center for Research on Vermont.