Ludovic O’Followell’s Le Corset (1905–1908)

Stage 2

Bar again after the biopsy. 

Pinned pupils, melt 

of my cheeks in the warped 

mirror, stall door flowered 

with graffiti: tom waits for no one,

will anyone ever love me? 

Beneath it, scrawled in red, no.

Outside someone wails 

why can’t we do that?

It’s easy to forget you 

will die one day.

I order another whiskey 

while the tumor pulses 

like a second heart. 

I understand. I, too, 

just want to live.

Death follows me in and out of every door

The moon is a hook 

in the sky’s mouth. I belong 

to side-streets after midnight, 

airless hospital hallways, 

the dirt. Twenty pounds gone

and a mouth full of stones. 

I’m talking to myself again. 

I make lists of things to do:

     1.) don’t kill yourself. 

I fill the ground 

with cashews and chocolate bars, 

sawdust and flint. I light 

thirty-three candles and forget 

the rest of the spell. We turn 

my father in bed. The overhead lights 

gleam off the bone 

protruding from his shin

so we turn them off.

Nudes before the mastectomy

For what it’s worth, you have never loved yourself 

more. It’s a gray, impermanent kind of love, 

like you have for strays or dead you haven’t met 

yet, a love you do nothing about, an ache you get 

too used to. It wasn’t so long ago you were 

draped over a balcony in lingerie you couldn’t afford, 

whirr of the camera eaten up by the wind. You held 

your legs open for the money knowing nothing lasts 

like the need to be seen. Look at you, naked 

in a strange bed, almost smiling. You only had 

two scars. You didn’t need forgiveness. 

You weren’t thinking about the end. 

Theo LeGro is a Vietnamese-American poet who has received a Pushcart Prize nomination and fellowships from Kundiman. They have performed extensively throughout New York City, and their work appears in Frontier, No, Dear, diode and other journals. They live in Brooklyn with a cat named Vinny.