Lost and Found
Barren whelk shell— flesh,
warm and enviable, once. Whorled
scars ravish bleached calcium.
Is there a conspiracy? I ask my best friend who laughs too quickly.
We’re walking along Priscilla Beach two weeks beyond my mastectomy.
The Atlantic, too, has a story spilling fast beneath its veneer— vast
current, forging this island where I nurse from stapled fruit.
Luckily my babies have grown.
This ductless wound
overflows.
Twenty years from now,
will the knife hang on a rafter, replaced
by the nucleic;
will this shore find
the trodden peat, the
battered shell intact?