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?