KELSEY ANN KERR

Poem from the fire escape

At the Mütter Museum, in thin clear acrylic, is a thinner
slice of a 43-year-old specimen’s brain, I’d like to name her Robin,
with multiple metastases from disseminated malignant melanoma,
and no, she isn’t you, Mother, but she’s the same age you were
when your cancer came for its first visit, and I still remember that day,
when I came home, an ambulance across the street, it seemed to be waiting
for Dad, waiting for you, but in truth for our neighbor
who’d had a heart attack, the exact thing Dad helped mend daily
in his profession, but you, you I’d honestly expected to be fine,
but just like when we were in that car accident when I was four,
and your head smashed into the steering wheel as we slid
on ice into the 18-wheeler, the wreck of the day, your nose
ran red, and red, and red, bright as the color of the hearts dyed
so the doctors could see each artery, bright as the kid’s at the museum,
and his mother, that age, fussing, who wondered why, wondered how
such trauma could’ve occurred from seeing distorted babies
in large Ball jars, and I tried not to look too closely at his tissue
as I rushed away from the cigarette burns, coffee stains,
carcinoma, dripping from the woman’s brain down into my stem,
that twist of nerves that never failed to tingle with your breath
as you tucked me in— Guten nacht, you’d whisper. Schlaf gut.