Chemo Becomes Me
Lost all my hair and too much weight
yet everyone tells me I look great.
Chemo becomes me.
Don’t mind the toxin in my veins
‘cause no bad hair days when it rains.
Chemo becomes me.
Sick in bed or on the bathroom floor
it never mattered what I wore
‘cause chemo becomes me.
Nails nut brown, face fever red.
I’m lovelier than being dead.
Chemo becomes me.
I don’t worry ‘bout being mauled:
got that covered by being bald.
Chemo becomes me.
A shitty change in my fate
got my skewed priorities straight.
Chemo becomes me.
Cut, poisoned, radiated too
beats a dirt nap before it’s due.
Chemo becomes me.
Lily Jarman-Reisch has been a journalist in Washington, DC, and Athens, Greece, where she lived aboard a small boat she sailed throughout the Aegean and Ionian Seas. She has held administrative and teaching positions at the Universities of Michigan and Maryland, sailed across the Atlantic, and hiked on four continents. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in CALYX, 3rd Wednesday, Snapdragon, The Fourth River, 1807, The Military Review, Route 7 Review, Rise Up Review, Light, The Dewdrop, Gleam, Mediterranean Poetry, and other international literary journals.