29 April 2008 | Vol. 8, No. 1
Losing Your Breasts
Every night you lose your breasts.
First one and then the other.
Every night one breast falls into an inaccessible place
A crack between you and you
Between the you you were and the you you will be
If you ever find your breast.
There is no sound when it falls.
There is a sound a very soft sound
As you stare into the inaccessible place
Between you-will-be and you-were.
When you look up the other breast is gone.
You have lost yourself yourselves I mean.
No–a breast is not a self.
A self isn't too large and too small
Doesn't give milk no matter whose lips are on it
Doesn't disappear every night the self
Isn't tender the self is not attached.
Of course neither are your breasts
When you grope for them in the inaccessible place
Between you and the something less
That is you when you lose your breasts,
When they lose themselves like girls
Watching each other disappear
Into the future that opens in the dark
Between the wall
And the bed.
About the author:
Joy Ladin is on leave from Stern College of Yeshiva University, where she holds the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English. Her first book of poetry, Alternatives to History, was published by Sheep Meadow in 2003; Sheep Meadow published her second, The Book of Anna, a novel-like combination of poetry and prose, this past spring, and will soon bring out her third, Transmigration. Joy's poems have appeared in many periodicals, including Parnassus: Poetry in Review, for which she is a regular reviewer. She has been the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, and a nomination for Pushcart Prize in Poetry. She is currently finishing up a new book of poetry, Coming to Life, and writing a book of autobiographical essays called Inside Out: Confessions of a Woman Caught in the Act of Becoming. Joy will be the featured poet in this spring's Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, and has essays coming out in the Southwest Review, the Robert Frost Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, and The King's English.
For further reading:
Browse the contents of 42opus Vol. 8, No. 1, where "Losing Your Breasts" ran on April 29, 2008. List other work with these same labels: poetry.
