You look like a fucking lunch lady in that hair net, 
my mother says to her mother, as they wait together 
before the surgery. And they laugh so hard they lose 

their breath. And they laugh again, telling me 
over the phone—how the anesthesiologist pulled back
thin curtains onto two women gasping like largemouth bass. 

I could tell you about tissue margins. I could write
another poem where our bodies are cursed, but there she is
laughing, my grandmother in her hospital gown— 

laughing before the sleep, laughing before the scalpel and flesh,
before the breast, the breast shaking with laughter, the breast
giving bits of itself away, spooned warm from my little lunch lady, 

laughing in her cap, holding her daughter’s hand. 
These are the women I come from— made of so much flesh,
so much body to keep and give away.

Published August 10, 2025

MaKenzie Jean Copp teaches at Purchase College, SUNY. She is originally from Maine, where she received a dual BA in English and Writing/Publishing from Saint Joseph’s College of Maine. She received her MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, where she concentrated in poetry. She was nominated for Best of the Net in 2021, and her work can be found in Pigeon Pages and Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts and Letters.

Christina Quarles (born 1985) is a queer, mixed contemporary American artist and writer, living and working in Los Angeles, whose gestural, abstract paintings confront themes of racial and sexual identities, gender, and queerness. She is considered at the forefront of a generation of millennial artists and her works shatter the societal manners of physical classification.