Nina Bannett

Featured in medmic

I ask her surgeon to repeat herself. The heart of a twenty-five year old. An incantation soaring, new scar on her wrinkled abdomen. No one’s fault she and I not in generational order. She has the heart of a twenty-five year old. Broken by the damage of parents who wanted a boy instead. Washing windows in exchange for plates of food at a friend’s house in Brooklyn. Rose demands on a scale that shakes Fukushima. Starved for eight days before doctors can first cut into her famine. Walking in front of cars, eyes closed, praying to die forty years ago, or was it last week, first bout of widowhood quaking to the surface, and this is the needle coming up through our skin, the mouth bearing witness, rapture of every unsolved problem, repeated, an assumption I have given up on correcting. Tossed into the air by every doctor, aide, therapist, technician, nurse. Her only child long scattered and I whisper so only I can hear the correction. Granddaughter. Granddaughter. Granddaughter.