My cancer will kill me.
This I have known
for months, a certainty
as knowable as my small bones,
my gift for telling stories
in poems, for keeping
family and pain close.
I do not let things go,
not the stories, the poems,
my family, the painful
quest for perfection,
and now, not this cancer,
relentless as manifest destiny,
its growth a greed
of pioneering, hubris,
blind appropriation.

I know I must keep hope,
let a miracle grow
like the winding heart
of a hurricane, swell
like a rip current’s
sweeping vortex, belch
like an earthen tear
spews boulders and lava.
I must become inhospitable
ground, reject cancer’s claim
on my body, my life,
must let go instead of keep,
become my own force
of perfect destruction,
wildfire run amok,
tsunami sweeping it all
into the salty sea,
a damaged landscape,
unforgiving as drought,
an underworld
to avoid and overlook.