FOUR-YEAR ONCOLOGY APPOINTMENT

my kind oncologist asks if I mind showing my scar    
           to the pharmacy student with  him;    
                        his thumb outlines  the scar on my leg twisted    

toward the  student; they were just discussing melanoma  
           removal, a football shape; he pauses at my extra    
                        perpendicular line— here’s the story: 

the first surgeon  cut me  open without  a  closure  plan  

 I awoke to an ace-wrapped leg, a gaping wound, a next-day surgery; 
           the plastic surgeon assessed: pray for a pivot instead of a graft 
                        I awoke in a room without oxygen—bees in my stomach, venom  

in my back—at the dermatology office, in classrooms, awaiting results,  
           gasps in grocery stores. Now, in this sanitized office, I just smile;  
                        the tenor too bright for those dazed  

days; their eyes on my  well-healed  scar.   

Jodi Andrews is the author of a chapbook, The Shadow of Death (Finishing Line Press, 2018), and holds an MA in English. She has had poems published in Atlas and Alice, Calamus Journal, Anomaly Journal, Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing, and Oakwood Literary Magazine, among others, and a few recent anthologies, including This Thing Called Poetry: An Anthology of Young Adults with Cancer and South Dakota in Poems.