Poetry Month Feature: Heidi Seaborn

In Menopause I Lost My Sense of Direction

I’m driving my sister to her radiation appointment.
Her breast cancer having returned again
and again and again.

I turn right instead of left.
Everything feels wrong. 
I want to drive north to the border. 

Escape is a direction.
Our mother still carries maps torn 
along the creases. 

How worn out we all are--
travelling does that to a person.  
I knew where I was going once.

“San Francisco” I said, hailing
a jet with my thumb 
during an Idaho snowstorm in 1982. 

Instead, the click 
and grr of the radiation machine 
prowling my sister’s body 
pinked, marked with Xs,
u-turned on the table. 

Her hospital gown ties stray 
and I want to reach over, fix things.
Such a muddle 
this middle, this road failing 
to fork or cloverleaf.

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Heidi Seaborn is the author of [PANK] 2020 Poetry Award winner An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe (2021), Give a Girl Chaos (C&R Press, 2019) and the 2020 Comstock Review Prize Chapbook, Bite Marks, as well as chapbooks, Finding My Way Home (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Once a Diva (dancing girl press, 2021). Since Heidi started writing in 2016, she’s won or been shortlisted for over two dozen awards. Her work has recently appeared in American Poetry Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, The Cortland Review, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith, Tinderbox Poetry Journal and elsewhere. She is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal, on the board of Tupelo Press and holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU. www.heidiseabornpoet.com