ARS POETICA
Kelly Weber
After the plastic surgeon poses me topless in front of the blue screen to document my breasts for insurance purposes, after she handles each one as both the most the delicate and most hated part of myself, after she says we will cut them off with two eighteen-inch incisions across my chest because to do otherwise would leave two empty windsocks of flesh, after she draws my nipple options for me, after she presses the cold tape measure from my clavicle down to areola and my skin puckers, after I decide not to keep the nipples that hurt in the cold, after I look over the foothills through her tinted window, after we talk about my drains and wound care, after she asks, again, which pronouns I would like her to list in the letter, after she tells me maybe spring for the surgery, after I pull my shirt back on and walk outside to the bees sugar-stunned fumbling over the October violets, after I text my mother again that I love her, after I find the frozen ground littered with dead bees two weeks later and cup one body in my hands, after I remember the winter I didn’t rip my skin open again and instead put a slash between my pronouns, after I put the bee back down and tuck all the bees’ comma bodies into the preceding paragraph block, I remember that a poem is left after whatever is unnecessary is cut away, and we don’t call this a mutilation—we call it a miracle.