An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine
Refugees
We crossed the border
to the small province of your body
like refugees home from the war.
The red escarpment of the scar,
the place they took the cancer from you,
stretched beyond your breast
crooked through the navel, down,
down to where your pubic hair once grew.
Below your right shoulder
where a general might pin a medal,
they left an open port, a bunker for Benadryl
and Taxol and Carboplaytin: defoliants
that poison everything in their path
should the terrorists return.