Every year from now
until—
a woman I don’t know
will press my breasts
into a darkened
window.
Today isn’t
my first, I know the drill.
Even so, I’m
like a restless
toddler.
As I expect
she says, Be still—
a command as gentle
as a comma,
a pause en route
from one breath
to the next.
But when she turns
away she says,
Stop breathing.
My funniest, eldest
cousin died.
She had just
reduced, told me,
Girl, I got some pretty boobs.
The same atomic eye
through glass
would peer at her.
Watching for
flesh she’d made
and mustn’t trust.
It shuttered
on nothing,
missed that last
nascent shadow.
Showed breasts
as light, as
pretty as frosted
sponge. Safe, soft,
inconsequential.
How many times
did someone tell her—
Stop breathing?
A woman
I do not know
has her hand
on my breast.
Not cruel, not fresh.
Just diagnostic
business.
Lean forward,
she keeps saying,
lowering me down
into the cold
of her machine.
Lean forward.
Stop breathing.
Amanda Gunn’s debut poetry collection, Things I Didn’t Do With This Body, was published by Copper Canyon Press. Raised in Connecticut, she worked as a medical copy editor for 13 years before earning an MFA in poetry from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She is the recipient of the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize, the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships from the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and MacDowell. She is a PhD candidate in English and American Literature at Harvard.