About the Feature
And then I met the inverse of my power
which came as cancer
And it whispered open your mouth
And indeed, black spots had sprouted
on my tongue and the insides of my cheeks
And a surgeon from town
had already been hired
And he brought photographs showing how
others had undergone the procedure
How their faces were cut out
then cinched in the center with a drawstring
And how all my ideas, dilemmas, doubts
I held most dear would be erased in five days’ time
And the inverse of love was drought
and the inverse of health was fear
And all my speech and all my power
rotted at the root
About the Author
Sarah Rose Nordgren is the author of the poetry collections Best Bones and Darwin’s Mother (fall 2017), both from University of Pittsburgh Press. Her poems and essays appear widely in journals such as Agni, Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review Online, Copper Nickel, and American Poetry Review. She lives in Cincinnati.