POST-OP POP

When I woke up in recovery, I had this song in my head. [...]

by Kathryn Kirkpatrick

When I woke up in recovery,
I had this song in my head.

I’ve got you under my skin.
I’ve got you deep in the heart of me.

Frank Sinatra wasn’t who I’d expected
after losing my breast.

But all that night in the medical
twilight, he kept singing,

so deep in my heart
that you’re really a part of me

The part of me that chose the song
wouldn’t switch it off or change it,

persistent broken record, insistent wooer.
I’d doze and wake. Nurses. IV.

I tried so hard to resist.
I said to myself this affair

it never will go so well.
Strange how I wondered

what it meant, the song opaque
as the surgical bra I couldn’t look into.

Kathryn Kirkpatrick

Kathryn Kirkpatrick, poet and literary scholar, is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Our Held Animal Breath (2012), which was selected by poet Chard DeNiord for the NC Poetry Society’s Brockman-Campbell Award.

She is also the editor of two collections of essays on Irish writers, Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities (University of Alabama Press, 2000) and, with Borbála Faragó, Animals in Irish Literature and Culture (Palgrave, 2015).

Find out more here.

POST-OP POP

by Kathryn Kirkpatrick

Kathryn Kirkpatrick

Monika Kozak