Excision Meggie Royer I ask my mother about the mastectomy like its presence in our lives is an old friend. Growing up, she dragged the fish from the river, slit the minnows on the cutting board til their sides burst into glitter, ran through the fields after her brothers as the plough went through to gather what it had missed. Inside her blouse, the remaining one is as soft as it ever was, opening like a tulip into the wine pink of the scar beside it. Her parents scolded her for bringing home birds folded into ink on the roadside, squirrels with tails run over into grime. Everything in the world missing, some of it trying to come back to life again, most of it gone.
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