by Anne Boyer
"Chemotherapy is boring," I'd warn people, and "cancer is terrifying but mostly banal," and it was true, but by the time Juliana Spahr came to visit, I'd discovered cheap blonde wigs--my favorite one called "the Juliana" because of how much it made me look like her plump cousin. Wellness, like gender, was so constructed, on a good day I could fabricate its appearance in eighteen minutes. I took to wearing blond wigs, red lipstick, thrift store silk pajamas, and a white fox fur coat I'd found for $35 at a garage sale.
I was a spy to myself, I looked so different, and this was all part of me getting through. I was to become unfamiliar in the mirror not just by the anonymizing effects of cancer treatmen--the disfigurement of a cancer patient so ordinary it is a filmic cliché, bald head, gray skin, large eyes--but by my own hand. My friend Rafi sent me D'Angelo's new album and a dozen pairs of false eyelashes, and I now existed in sick glamor and a cosmetically-rendered appearance of health in the first dusting of snow. Juliana and I went to the wine bar in the dark winter of all that pain. Men would talk to me like I was attractive. It was a funny weapon against the patriarchy that my body itself had become dangerous just by being ill. I was so full of the red death by then that my sweat, my tears, my urine were actual poison.
In a photo, David Buuck and my friend Cara are in the Quiktrip parking lot at night, touching a giant hot dog on the side of semi-truck. We were often silly, or mostly it was our silliness that we wanted in our pictures. Buuck pretended to be my husband for the insurance company, whom he had called to help me work some stuff out. My friend Daniel, an art historian, came next from LA, and we played backgammon near obsessively after chemo, got dressed up (I wore a light blue suede vintage maxi skirt) and listened to a very old man (who had himself just been very ill) play jazz organ--it was, after all, Kansas City, and I wasn't dead yet.
Read the full essay on the Poetry Foundation website.