Cancer Cookies

When I had cancer, the cookies kept coming;
Chocolate Chip, Peanut Butter, Lemon Cream.
Thin Mints practically fell from the sky.
People were so lovely;
Snickerdoodles, Oatmeal Raisin, Whoopie Pies.
Shortbread cookies
with a dollop of raspberry jam in the middle.
After the surgery
I asked a nurse,
what are you guys gonna do
with my lopped off breasts?
The nurse told me
they would be incinerated,
the ashes disposed of.
I tried picturing that.
But instead of fire and ash,
I saw two large butter cookies,
twinkling with sugar dust,
float up to the cosmos.
I smiled when I measured my scar.
18 ½ inches. Wow!
I’ve never seen anything like it!
In my dreams, I did cartwheels.
I was a kid again,
fresh and new to the world.
Now, on clear nights,
when I look deeper into the void,
I see cancer cookies
raining down on me.
I see my breasts,
sparkling
in a galaxy
no one will ever find.

Wendy Rainey is author of Hollywood Church: Short Stories and Poems and Girl on the Highway. She is a contributing poetry editor on Chiron Review. Her poetry has appeared in Nerve Cowboy, Misfit Magazine and beyond. She is the 2022 recipient of the Annie Menebroker Poetry Award and a runner-up in the 2022 Angela Consolo Mankiewicz Poetry Prize. She studied poetry with Jack Grapes in Los Angeles and creative writing with Gerald Locklin at California State University, Long Beach.