Pamela Miller

7. The Body Embellished

Once I wore
a camisole of knives
that carved my left breast like a leg of lamb.
Undetectable as a princess
sleeping in a pea
but lurid beneath my evening gown
is a crocodile scar with its mouth stitched tight
where a small, hard truth has been whisked away,
the pathologist's damning signature
scrawled in the cement of my flesh.
As secret as a worm in a golden apple
is a scar I wear like a holocaust tattoo,
a hieroglyph of fear,
a one-line poem with the last word a mystery.
It's the unequal wages of womanhood:
the red slash of courage,
Congressional Medal of Horror,
engraved too near the heart of a veteran
of too-familiar wars.