her solitude always uneasy

She had once had an abortion, she said, and later
an affair with a married man,

then another, her solitude always
uneasy, her body

lonely for something nameless as they had been,
or as she made them.

She said it began as pressure not quite pain,
and they found it outside

the womb, clinging to an ovary, having
conceived of itself.

When they removed it, they told her she could see it
if she wanted to:

just a curiosity with teeth, hair, and nails. Odd
but benign, the doctor

said, most always benign, nodding toward it
as though it could agree

with him, as though that were the fact,
the whole of it: curious

mistake a body can make.

[Claudia Emerson {1957-2014}, 'Cyst', from The Best American Poetry 2016; originally appeared in Subtropics]