THE HOURGLASS AT THE DOCTOR’S OFFICE
by Shannon K. Winston
I. The grains of sand are bigger than the calcifications in your breast.
1. And yet, you press your eye up to the glass.
2. You shrink the particles before you and imagine them inside you.
3. Sand passes suddenly through you.
II. While awaiting your biopsy results, you study hourglasses.
1. Read about the elements: the powdered marble, tin oxide, and burnt eggshell.
2. Imagine the salt plains of Oklahoma.
3. Run your fingers through selenite crystal.
III. You never knew your body contained hard, rock-like chunks.
1. How many other things have you been wrong about?
2. In hourglasses, the ratio of granule bead to bulb width is what matters most.
3. What is the right balance between breast tissue and white matter?
IV. The time between test and result is air, a long ripple, a void-.
1. You avoid the clock. You ignore the date.
2. On his trip to Barcelona, Ferdinand Magellan had 18 hourglasses in his boat.
3. The curves of an hourglass are two noses touching or two breasts.
V. Your body is not an hourglass.
1. This should not be happening.
2. Your chest is flat, flat, flat. Finally, at forty, you like it better that way.
3. The grains go down, go up, go back down—
VI. You want more time when you’re afraid you have less time.
1. The grains go down, go up, go back down—
2. Before you go home, you look around the waiting room.
3. Women’s bodies around you are silent. Quiet. Everyone is an hourglass.
VII. On the drive home, the sun fills your blind spot.
1. Your car drifts between white lines.
2. You’re Magellan drifting to an uncertain port.
3. The world’s contours are mostly clear but tinged with shadows of fear.
Shannon K. Winston’s book, The Girl Who Talked to Paintings (Glass Lyre Press), was published in 2021. Her individual poems have appeared in Bracken, Cider Press Review, On the Seawall, RHINO Poetry, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and lives in Bloomington, IN. Find her here: https://shannonkwinston.com.