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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wanda Coleman
Wanda Coleman
Wanda Coleman was born in 1946 and is the author of Bathwater Wine (Black Sparrow Press, 1998), winner of the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. A former medical secretary,...
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FURTHER READING
Poems About Illness
A Litany in Time of Plague
by Thomas Nashe
Bedside
by William Olsen
Breathing
by Josephine Dickinson
Evening
by Gail Mazur
Having it Out with Melancholy
by Jane Kenyon
In Memory of W. B. Yeats
by W. H. Auden
Sick
by Shel Silverstein
The Embrace
by Mark Doty
The Land of Counterpane
by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Sick Child
by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Subalterns
by Thomas Hardy
The Transparent Man
by Anthony Hecht
Tubes
by Donald Hall
Units
by Albert Goldbarth
Visits to St. Elizabeths
by Elizabeth Bishop
Waking in the Blue
by Robert Lowell
When I Consider How My Light Is Spent
by John Milton
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Mastectomy  
by Wanda Coleman


the fall of
velvet plum points and umber aureolae

remember living

forget cool evening air kisses the rush of
liberation freed from the brassiere

forget the cupping of his hands the pleasure
his eyes looking down/anticipating

forget his mouth. his tongue at the nipples
his intense hungry nursing

forget sensations which begin either
on the right or the left. go thru the body
linger between thighs

forget the space once grasped during his ecstasy

sweet sweet mama you taste so



Copyright © 1993 by Wanda Coleman. Reprinted from Hand Dance with the permission of Black Sparrow Press.
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