Post-Op Letter in the Field Between Us

Dear Maker,
Listen, if I can't know
           what you first
whittled me out of
           I would like to see
the knife. The quick
           groove in an upper lip
is called a philtrum, like
           a blade slipped once,
caught just before
           the damage grew
too large to make
           the best of it, to fill
a body up with neat
           little canals and say
           you meant to cut
a river there. If I can't
           know my body before
it was riven, show me
           your hands.
Right now there's just
           the ghost of how they
turned around my body,
           wrenched the whole thing
toward another north.


- Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison (from Missouri Review)

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