New Top Surgery Just Dropped!

Art by Ashley Mintz (2026)

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The hospital room formaldehyde stinks up the sheets

Upon which you lay—ribcage blasted open for your father to crawl out,

Like the chestburster from Alien. What a role reversal of familiar and absurd this is.

His whiskers scrape your cheek, and you want to laugh, but that is very hard to do

When your mother has a doughy hand upon your lungs, pushing herself up,

Limp-legged, and your father reaches back into your torso to help her to her feet

As if he’s apologizing for something, for the mess you’ve made of the white walls,

The white bed, the pure name that she gave you out of a white magazine page.

Then comes your grandmothers, grumbling into each other’s ears about where the rot

First started to spread upon the tulip poplar, who introduced it to who, and it is while they

Whisper like hornets in a cornucopia that your grandfathers arrive, catching themselves

By surprise when no extra rib provides a handhold to emerge from the cavity.

Aunts, uncles, cousins, they all come filing out, a parade of ghosts alive and dead,

To stand around your dilapidated form and click their tongues, squint their eyes, and

Wonder what could’ve, would’ve, should’ve been done to contain this inconvenience.

You’re done playing possum when they eventually depart, still shaking their heads,

So they don’t see you embalmed and stitched up by your own hand, rolling the rock

Away from your so-called tomb to tell the first Magdalene doll you see:

“It’s a wonder what 20 milligrams of Lexapro can do!”

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