by Howie Good
1. Resurrection Alley
When my phone rang, I had been sitting at the kitchen table for a while, laptop open in front me, hoping for inspiration to strike. I let the call go to voicemail rather than interrupt my morning writing routine. Two or three hours later, I finally listened to the message. It was from the surgeon’s office. They had received the biopsy report. The tumor was malignant; I had cancer. I stared out the window at the trees in the yard as I tried to absorb the shock. What looked like a strange green mist clung to the branches. After a few seconds, I realized it wasn’t mist at all, but tiny buds, thousands of them. The truth is always revolutionary. Spring had snuck back.
2. Donut Run
The surgeon stood on the other side of the room, about as far from where I sat on the exam table as he could get, his arms folded protectively across his chest. He was explaining how my form of cancer spreads via the bloodstream, causing murder and mayhem along the way. I listened in numb silence. My head felt like a crumpled ball of paper. I think I might have said “Thank you” when I left. The next thing I remember I was stopped at a drive-through window. A woman, her face shadowed by a visor, peered out. I handed her a ten-dollar bill. She hand me a box of donuts. “Have a nice day, hon,” she said.
3. How to Beat Cancer
Online acquaintances – I hesitate to call them “friends” despite being so designated by Facebook – offered unsolicited advice on how to “beat” cancer. One person claimed that the body repairs itself when denied food and recommended that I undertake a series of 72-hour fasts. Another cited a man in Blue Springs who got rid of his Parkinson’s on the Keto diet. Meanwhile, a neighbor who once worked as a counselor of some sort in a cancer ward told me that she had been able to predict just by looking at them which patients would survive and which wouldn’t. The ones who made it, she said, exhibited a positive attitude. Then she handed me a baggie of pot.
4. Staying Alive
I’m on WebMD reading about the survival rate of sarcoma patients. My mouth goes dry. My heart races. I forget to breathe. The doctors have given me a choice. I can undergo radiation or not, up to me. The side effects are, from everything I’ve heard, nasty: fatigue, nausea, skin rashes, even internal scarring. But a recurrence of cancer would be worse. As long as I might come through treatment still capable of making love with my wife and of recognizing the faces of our children and grandchildren, I’ll do what’s necessary to stay alive. Besides, I’m just starting to get good at writing.
5. Waiting
A half-hearted effort had been made to brighten the waiting room of the Radiation Oncology unit by hanging framed floral prints on the walls. But better art or even actual flowers wouldn’t have alleviated the glum atmosphere. Anyone waiting on the hard-backed chairs crammed along three sides of the low-ceilinged basement room – a long reception desk occupied the fourth side – was either a cancer patient or someone who had been guilted into accompanying them to radiation treatment. As a newcomer, I snuck glances at the other patients from under the bent brim of my Red Sox cap. Some dozed. Some nodded and trembled uncontrollably. Some had a book open on their laps while staring blankly into space, their faces leeched of color. If they weren’t old when their treatment started, they looked old and shriveled now. Every fifteen minutes or so one would have their name called and disappear through a set of double metal doors with a radiation tech in blue scrubs. Behind the doors was a special X-ray machine called a linear accelerator. It destroyed the cancer cells, but also nearby healthy cells. I felt like an early Christian martyr about to be burned alive at the stake. Strangely, radiation treatment would become so routine in time that I would actually fall into a twilight sleep on the table as the machine blasted me with invisible lethal particles and rays. For those few moments, I was somewhere else, aloft over precipitous mountains covered in dark pines.
6. The Epoch of Artificial Tears
Everything has changed, and nothing has. It still rains when the forecast says it won’t. Hummingbirds still come to the oriole feeder. The angel of history still hosts orgies of torture and murder. Doors still open from both sides. The abandoned buildings of defunct chain restaurants are still being converted into Hispanic churches. Simone Weil still starved herself to death in a deliberate effort to pay back God for her existence. Girls still hide themselves behind too much makeup. The cancer diagnosis still makes me cold all over. I still put drops in each eye first thing in the morning as if there’s an afterwards I still have a chance of seeing.
7. Holocaust
A Midwest poet, a guy about half my age, lost an eye to cancer over the winter. Another online acquaintance, the poet laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, is suffering from pancreatic cancer. “Chemo week,” he texts me. “No sleep last night. Jabbing cramps today. And I’m still dying.” An old colleague at the university has had his intestines rerouted because of colon cancer. The brother of one of my sisters-in-law is receiving treatment for liver cancer. A first cousin of mine was in his early 40s when he died of esophageal cancer and now some 20 years later his widow has been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. As an introvert – or maybe misanthrope – I don’t personally know that many people, but cancer is epidemic among those I do know. It just confirms what I’ve I always suspected, that we exist on the sufferance of a hostile universe, and that at any moment and for no justifiable reason we can suddenly be pulled out of line and marched to the showers to be gassed.
8. The Sincere Assassin
Outside the double glass doors to the Cancer Center, a woman with pale, stringy hair and puffy eyes stands morosely contemplating her phone and smoking a cigarette. Inside, the chatter is all about a sincere assassin with the menacing expression of a pre-Christian angel, and though his presence isn’t actually prohibited, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a kind of crime. Today, like yesterday and days before, I’ll ride a creaky elevator to the basement. Stripped to the waist, I’ll lie face down and still as a corpse on a padded table while receiving radiation, determined that my life, for all its obvious inconsequence, be worth the anguish of living.
Howie Good’s latest book, Frowny Face (Redhawk Publishing, 2023), is a synergistic mix of his prose poems and handmade collages. He co-edits the online journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.