I think about the sages who forbid
such incisions, each slice small
as a pomegranate seed buried in the skin.
I can’t decide what scares me more.
The chance that I might sleep forever,
sedated, in a landscape poked with stars.
Or that I wake in a country
where a body does not belong to itself,
every part a plot of earth to be raked over.
I don’t fear fasting before surgery.
It’s a minor sacrifice, all food stopped
in the name of clip and ligature.
As for the camera attached to a tool
slender as the stem of an apple—
better that surveillance than a greater
intrusion. Remember how God walks
and his weight is felt everywhere
in Eden. Here’s what frightens me:
to be soil underfoot, all that possibility
of green and tender shoots
if only the divine would intervene.
I’m not afraid of the cuts left by a scalpel.
Let me be a garden of unfruitfulness. Let me
give birth to new defiance every day.