Ana Paneque

Cyst

Winter struck down overnight, clean
as a cut before blood. I spend the morning hunched
over a shoebox, the rasp of the paintbrush
like a croak,                 something low in the weeds. Shut eye, says the man
I married. His palm is warm beneath my hair, an
alive thing—cupped at the nape.
It’s a reasonable prescription, really. He’s got trough
in the throat, wheat field, slaughterhouse. The turn of the wrist
round the neck. Nothing he hasn’t seen before, 

in-the-sticks, late November, where things go to die. The first
of the pale blue light slices through my hands
like an antiseptic. Shut eye he says. He’s good. A good man.
He finds me a faded hand towel to line the inside. The world stirs
in its sleep as I make my little bed. By sunrise, my knees are caked
in the garden like a     relic from childhood, like I’m digging
to reach back for the crimson pulp of the matter.       A strange shame flickers

in the distance. The perfect slope of the cat-nose,
runt, the still-wet calico body I hold at a distance, despite myself,
despite myself.            Was this a sickness instead of a
kindness? Like this, I existed as an egg within
an egg within the first follicle that roamed
the earth,         weak and coiled, emitting strange dim
light     unknown by my anonymous
mothers.                      Later, I watch myself in the fertility 

clinic, paper-gowned, in the room I must
go into alone, somewhere beyond myself. She starts to lift her head. 

Then the metal rings,
the curtain is drawn,
the lid slides shut.

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Ana Paneque (she/her) is a Mexican-American writer working towards an MFA in creative writing at Texas State University, where she plans to complete a short story collection. She's interested in childhood, memory, and queerness. She lives in San Marcos.