Karen Greenbaum-Maya

Blue Egg

A chilly room, dead quiet.
Your free eye’s corner sees
blurry taupe wall, black curtains,
the mural: green tree, bluebird’s
nest, hatching three blue eggs.

Why the mural was so close to the ceiling?
Now, table lifted high, you and it are eye-to-eye.
Your breast, wiped blue with iodine, an uncracked egg,
suspended out of sight
through the padded hole in the table.

Under you, out of your sight, you hear
the radiologist and her nurse,
like kids having a tea party
under the dining room table.
The part of you they need is eye-level.
She asks for the scalpel, the first needle.

Preparing the way for the cannula.
they nick your pendant breast.
Now lidocaine’s familiar burn,
as reassuring as getting a cavity filled,
though this is the opposite
of cavity. Don’t move. Relax.
Is it better not to be able to see?

Two hours’ holding still,
enough radiation
to fill all the lead aprons
you wore diligent at the dentist.
A pluck at the lump’s blurry edge.
A surgeon will call you,
tell you what will hatch.

My Sister the Survivalist

Early on was when she started.
She sold herself as six not nine
to trick-or-treat again on All Souls’ Day,
then hoarded the pillowcase bumpy with candy.
Wore our drunken step-father’s Halloween costume,
the little old winemaker, icon of honor and virtue,
on her little kid body. She was too small
inside the plastic shell and its domed belly,
transparent mask with painted cheeks and lips,
child’s face behind the white moustache.
You could almost make out her muffled features.
She took second at the school’s contest, won
a case of Crackerjack, each box with its prize.
She kept them all potential,
never ate a single caramel peanut.

I can guess how her first time must have started.
He’d tried the same number on me,
pressed me against him, called me baby.
I squirmed myself away, ran outside.
That was when I started fearing nuclear Doomsday.
Was I being spied on in the tub?
Kept re-checking the locks on the doors.
Feared earthquakes would send me out
into a ruined world
with no clothes at all.
And my cold-sweat terror of mosquitos.
They attack you while you sleep
and can’t keep watch. They sneak in under the door.

A few years on my sister asked me
What is rape.
I started to explain, but
our mother shouted from the doorway
Don’t tell her.
Odd, how both were sure I knew.

A psych prof told me Test the power of listening.
Resolve to say nothing, only receive, six minutes.
That time was when my sister told me.
I’d known to detest mother’s husband, so
how could I not have known this too?
And my sister started to flirt with suicide.
I wept the first time, less so the twentieth.
Mother was paying the rent on sister’s apartment,
but why pick me to go clean up?
I never thought to ask.

All curtains drawn, earth-toned living room
full of supplies, a bunker.
Sealed plastic buckets held
gallons of roasted almonds
she had stolen from her ice cream scooping job.
Strappy high-heeled sandals and pencil-skirt suits,
for the job someone told her she wanted,
untouched costumes still carrying their price tags.