Barbara Costas-Biggs | Justin Timberlake Sings During My First Mammogram

Barbara Costas-Biggs is the 2017 winner of the Split This Rock Abortion Rights Poetry Contest. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared recently in Moria, Jarfly, Dodging the Rain, Bird's Thumb, Calamus, District Lit, Literary Mama, Compose, and others. She also is a member the juried poetry series Women of Appalachia: Women Speak. She lives in Southern Ohio.

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Also by Barbara Costas-Biggs: First Inclinations Burying a Horse in February Naked in the Macy's Changing Room Trying to Think of Anything Other Than the Election

March 2018
Ohio Poets

Barbara Costas-Biggs

Justin Timberlake Sings During My First Mammogram

It's not that the room is cold or that the radiology tech sings-songs to me Now you can breathe as the massive machine rotates and whirs around my naked upper body. I don't know that I can even name what it is other than discomfort, worry. Since my father's death from a cancer that wormed its way to every molecule of his body before it was found, a cancer that required extensive testing to find its origin, I am swelled with the feeling I must be next. But I have always been prone to hypochondria. Above the machinations of medical devices is Can't stop the feeling. My hips want to move, like when I drive over Sherer's Hollow: car zigzagging, my body thrown side to side in the driver's seat. But this is a time for stillness. She tells me that, the radiology tech in a voice usually reserved for small children and puppies: Don't move, don't move Now you can breathe.

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