By Cynthia Bernard
He didn’t know where to stop
so he kept going, kept going,
excising strip after strip,
two millimeters at a time.
He wanted a clear margin,
he wanted, for her,
all of this to be over,
so he cut and he swabbed,
and he cut some more,
and he thought, well, just a bit more,
let’s be certain to get it all,
out, out, damn spot
and anything spreading
from the spot,
so he kept going,
cut, swab, cut, swab,
until it was all gone,
she had no skin left,
then he wrapped her
in parchment paper
to protect the furniture
and sent her home,
dripping, happily dripping,
so relieved—no skin,
no melanoma,
no worries anymore.
Cynthia Bernard is a woman in her early seventies, a long-time classroom teacher and an emerging writer of poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction. She lives and writes on a hill overlooking the ocean, about 25 miles south of San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Multiplicity Magazine, Passager, Verse-Virtual, Poetry Breakfast, The Seattle Star, and elsewhere. She was selected by Western Rivers Conservancy to serve as the Poet-Protector of Deer Creek Falls in the northern Sierra Nevada foothills.