(without)
(See larger view of this poem.)
—Sara Greenslit, Madison, WI
Sara Greenslit works as a small animal veterinarian in Madison. She earned an MFA from Penn State and a DVM from the UW. FC2 is publishing her second novel in 2011, As If a Bird Flew By Me. Her first novel came out from Starcherone, The Blue of Her Body.
The poem, "without," comes from my poetry manuscript, cleave, that explores illness and the erasure created by illness, specifically breast cancer. The poem uses my surgical report and the absence of first person to investigate how disease interrupts, silences, and sometimes remakes us. The poem emphasizes the report's adjectives; the rest of the text is greyed out in various shades, so that new narratives are created within an already existing text, depending on the order one reads the poem's content.