The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Cancer Voodoo by Melissa C. Johnson

This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from Cancer Voodoo by Melissa C. Johnson, released by Diode Editions in 2022.

content warning for cancer

Trop Cher

None of Mama’s clothes fit by October,
so she’d had to replace her stained favorites,
sacrifice comfort and habit for warmth.
When I took her to chemo, she wore the size 2 jeans
of her best friend’s 13-year-old granddaughter,
a red fleece top, and a houndstooth jacket
from Goodwill with a black turban.
I admired the stylish figure she cut, vaguely French,
her legs so thin she actually looked tall at 5’2”.
For the first time, she looked like her mother,
a fierce beauty who threw back her head in photos
and rocked a blonde wig after chemo—light
and brassy above her olive skin and black eyes.

We stopped at Publix—she’d never been—
and the nausea was still hours away though
she was too weak to walk the long aisles.
I cajoled her into a motorized cart with touchy brakes,
her oxygen tank in the basket in front. Scoffing
at the prices, the gourmet food I’d hoped
would tempt her, she careened through the aisles,
endangering toes, picked out birthday cards
for the grandchildren—still in the bag, unsigned,
on her dresser among all the meds,
other illness paraphernalia, her little treasures,
now a part of the preserved moment months later
when she was gone—opening and closing
like a telescope, occluding the time before and the time after.

Melissa C. Johnson is a Southern poet living in Central Pennsylvania where she serves as Associate Vice Provost and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education at The Pennsylvania State University. Her first poetry chapbook, Looking Twice at the World, was published by Stepping Stones Press and the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. Diode Editions published her second chapbook, Cancer Voodoo, poems from which have been featured at American Life in Poetry and Verse Daily. Her poetry has also been published at NELLE, Waccamaw, Borderlands, The Cortland Review, The Northern Virginia Review, and elsewhere.