I saw another oncologist yesterday. I took notes. I could share those with you. I feel like I am supposed to give a medical-terms filled update. But the outlook is still mostly on the spectrum of hopeful-to-we-don’t-know.

I have seen six or seven doctors about my cancer now. Here are words that have never been uttered in those meetings: sorrow; loss, grief; heartbreak; terror; anguish; amputation; transformation; body forever altered; soft; tender; care.

And so, I am so grateful for the poets. Audre Lorde, in The Cancer Journals, writes, “I have found that battling despair does not mean closing my eyes to the enormity of the tasks of effecting change, nor ignoring the strength and the barbarity of the forces aligned against us.” I can’t find the quote right now, but she writes about waves of grief and sadness at the loss of her breast after mastectomy, and I was so grateful to her for putting those words to paper.

Yesterday I opened John Murillo’s book, Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry. One of the opening poems, “Variation on a Theme by Elizabeth Bishop,” pulls no punches. Does not try to pick the reader back up, dust us off, offer hope about the future. Reading it felt so fucking good. Like, finally, someone else can acknowledge the evisceration, the cutting feeling that comes with loss. And so I decided try, to take his first three lines and keep going.

Variation on a Theme by John Murillo

Start with loss. Lose everything. Then lose it all again.

Lose your keys. Lose your phone. Lose your mind circling the house looking for stamps, then lose the envelope.

Lose a few pounds. They are the only thing that will easily be recovered.

Practice losing. The cycles of gain and loss, pleasure and pain, birth and death are relentless, and the gain comes easily. Practice giving it all away: twenties or hundreds to the men with the cardboard signs. Practice receiving water with your hands open, even when you are thirsty.

Lose your body, one part at a time. Lose your friends when you demand they look into the abyss. Scare the neighbors when you look at their babies, so neatly swaddled in strollers, and remember not to speak out loud that death comes for all of us.

Lose hope. Lose faith. Lose charity. Demand alms from the men with the signs, all the money back with interest. Build futile fences and hoard canned goods for the looming disaster. Lose the key to the house, lose the cans, lose track of what you were supposed to be afraid of.

Lose hair, lose limbs, lose blood. Feed the vials. Fill the beautiful glass tubes the phlebotomist arranges like tiny eggs on her tray.

Lose sight. Lose track. Lose the line that marks the end of self and the beginning of something else. Lose the right to consent when the invasion arrives.

Lose self-deception. Lose the fantasy of another 45 years.

Lose coins, lose numbers. Lose the grocery lists scrawled on scraps of hopeful paper when you discover there are holes in all the pockets.