Ann Leamon
Orders
Left breast.
My orders, stacked
on the radiologist’s desk with
others like so many
lunch slips at a diner.
Cook this one well done.
Excuse me, I couldn’t help seeing, it’s the right.
My poor right breast, excavated, lacerated, irradiated
all that summer, 8AM, screeching
off the highway on two wheels to hang
clothes in the locker, wait
in the colorless,
windowless room with old
magazines no one
reads, study
for ten trudging
minutes the poem
I never memorized while
the machine muttered
its language of zaps and pings.
Oh, he said
and laughed. We make mistakes
sometimes. Of course. The right.
A Mainer who’s been blown around the country and recently fetched up on the rocky shores of Gloucester, MA—Maine in attitude if not zip code—Ann Leamon has written professionally for more than 20 years. Along with co-authoring a textbook about private equity and venture capital, she has written more than 150 business cases for Harvard Business School. More recently, she researched and wrote reports for groups including the World Bank, CDC Group, State Street Global Advisors, and Knight Foundation. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Bennington Writing Seminars, and have published poems in The Lyric, the Charles River Review, The Barefoot Muse, and The Trouvaille Review.