I am La Llorona in the Exam Room at the Breast Cancer Center, by Felicia Zamora
wailing behind a smile. I learn quick to play the part. Smiling-Patient gets tentative questions, eye contact, emails answered. Surgeons love Smiling-Patient. Smiling-Patient always rates pain below 5 on the scale of 0-10, because Smiling-Patient understands that numbers 6 or above are false-bottom answers that fall & fall & fall until finally the sounds trickle out of earshot. Smiling-Patient knows when her doctor says, You shouldn’t be in that much pain, you just keep smiling. How the world trains me. Let let let, I think. All the ways I must untrain myself (often, too, from myself). A phrase such as self-advocate seems powerful until you’re left-breastless, naked in an exam room, a surgeon finger poking in your armpit as you wince & crocodile-tear while the med student in clinical rotation steps back, adverts her eyes, & the words This cannot hurt separate & slither on the floor at your feet. & neither Smiling-Patient or self-advocate appear. You stand left with the inverted mountain of unsaids & a sickening sadness. (How I/you when often unable.) (How when often unable, a memory gets packed up, put away, clayed into antimemory. Think survive, survive.) Just below hairs of Smiling-Patient, I linger. Dissect each of my trillion cells to find nano-versions of me wailing multiverses of decibels, caked in cytoplasm, DNA, lysosome, Gogli apparatus. A concerto of sorts. Wailing never interested me, of course until uncorked, blowhole-esque, unable to be stuffed back into my lungs. I think of all the wailing I ignore. Selfish shit comes to mind, to ignore wailing until I wailed. How often the gaps (cognitive, anatomical, metaphysical) constitute me. I think of how the world wails & I look away. My nano-versions & yet I, Smiling-Patient. I wonder about the tale, when the ghost roams water in mourn of the children she drowned, did she mourn the children’s death or her act? Did she play a part? Did she invest too cruelly in antimemory? A wail becomes a prayer as an act of absolution from what-we-cannot-bear-to-acknowledge.
Felicia Zamora is the author of six books of poetry including, Quotient (2022), I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize (University of Iowa Press, 2021) and the 2022 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner (Red Hen Press, 2020), and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner (University of Notre Dame Press). She won the 2022 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize from The Georgia Review, a 2022 Tin House Next Book Residency, and a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, The American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry 2022, Boston Review, Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Orion, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, West Branch, and others. She is an associate professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and a poetry editor for the Colorado Review.