bigger than a womb

emet ezell

my grandmother accompanies me to the imaging center and reads a biography of Dvorák in the

waiting room. there are, of course, no windows. plastic chairs and cream colored walls:

we could be anywhere. 

we wait. she glances up at me from the book, her lips a tightrope of judgement.

we don’t say anything to one another; we don’t have to. 

some roles should be reversed. 

in the backroom, the lighting is muffled. cursed aurora of a funeral home crossed with a day spa,

parking lot bigger than the sky. 

“it’ll just be a quick ultrasound,” the technician chirps. she smears warm jelly over my left

breast. distract myself by wondering where it comes from, what animal habitat was decimated

for these chemicals to touch my skin. the rudeness of the technician’s cold fingers, then heat.

nakedness of the body overwhelms me. 

i cannot tell if i am threatened from within or without. the technician calls the doctor. the doctor

calls more technicians. they are saying the word tumor. they are saying the word cancer. they

point to the bubbly gray screen. dissociate. associate. i concentrate on the ripple of breath leaving

the crosshairs of my nose. in the waiting room, my grandmother turns the page. 

the alphabet of my joints spells a scrambled and inarticulate hum. already i’m missing so many

letters. with the curve of my collarbone i pronounce my name. follow the dotted line.

here, the surgeons remove a series of tumors. 

here, i lose and find a body. 

in the midst of the polar vortex: “i think this is what it means to be queer,” i told my partner.

“no adults are coming. no one is coming for us.” we’ve been so many days without food,

grinding our teeth against the inflated electric bill. 

my partner orders coffee filters for $7.99—an extravagance—i love them for this.

how to describe the distinct texture of my mother cutting me off? 

a text from a friend: “my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer last week. we’re not telling

anyone yet, but i wanted you to know what’s going on. xoxoxo” 

for the first time this morning, i hear the ripple of the mockingbird. sky wrapped in velvet, heart

gilded silver. the question of death is not what but how.

“your tumors,” they tell me, “are hormonal. linked to estrogen.” i nod, having known for years

now that femininity is a poison to my bloodstream. my surgeon swivels in the small black chair.

“we advise that you refrain from both birth control and pregnancy, which will make your tumors

metastasize.” 

when i asked my mother if i could live, she said no. 

estrogen enables the following organs to function: 

-ovaries 

-vagina 

-uterus 

-breast

it’s all gone to the dogs, they say. 

part of a poem comes to me: my life a placenta, my god in canaan.

“a woman’s story begins when she separates from her mother,” writes Carmen Giménez Smith.

where does my story begin, then? being neither man nor woman means no perforated lines.

separation is more like curdled milk. 

surely there is parenting without the nuclear family, child-raising without the gendered

constriction. the children i co-parent live on another continent, along with the ghost of my son.

he would pull at my hands in the streets of jerusalem. such a grubby thing. every now and then,

he shakes his peyos in my doorway, throttles me with grief. 

“i’ll be your surrogate,” frida tells me in the park. we’re having a picnic. i’m complaining to her

about the narrowness of middle class motherhood. “it’s something i’ve been thinking about for a

while now,” she says.

i devour the instagram profiles of the people i grew up with. scroll through photos of them

posing with their rich husbands. rolls royce. porsche. maserati. all their bios are the same:

“Jesus is my all,” or a subsequent scriptural reference. 

i diagram my life against theirs only to know myself as unpronounceable.

a grammatical fallacy in inheritance, 

an indirect object of refusal proceeded by the proposition “against.” 

here, i had my flesh hacked open and the very first tumors scraped out. friends covered my face

in glitter for the occasion; i showed up to the surgery like a coupon from jo-ann fabrics. my

mother did not come. neither did my father. 

i was alone. 

i want to find everyone with breast cancer that isn’t a woman. 

where are we? 

in reverence and relief, i know that the size of my life will always be bigger than a womb.