All right.
Tell It Slant.
So the word spiculated in this poem just means spiky.
It's doctorese for spiky.
But if you have to go to school that long,
you should be allowed to add a couple of syllables to a word
if you want so that's fine.
And I'm trying to think if there's
anything else you need to know.
Carcinoma is a cancerous solid tumor, basically.
I think that's everything.
Oh, and Emily Dickinson, of course,
patron saint of all of us who struggle with illness
and poetry, said, she said to tell the truth,
but tell it slant, so this is tell it slant.
You float in the MRI gloam, several spiculated masses.
I name you cactus.
Carcinoma be damned.
You make a desert of all of me.
Have I said it slant enough?
Here's a shot between the eyes.
Six days before my 37th birthday,
a stranger called and said, you have cancer, unfortunately,
and then hung up the phone.
I had the incredible beyond my wildest dreams privilege
of having an op-ed published in the New York Times about a month
before my book came out, and seeing my name in that font made
me--
I don't think I even realized it had
its own font until that moment.
I was like oh, my God, there it is in the font.
I think it said, Ms Farris is a poet.
OK, sure.
Yeah, now I am.
And she and the editor at the New York Times--
well, they do a very thorough fact check.
I'm pretty sure they called up my kindergarten
teacher about this New York Times op-ed that I did.
And one of the things they did was they were like,
OK, we've been hunting this down,
and we can't seem to find the person who called you.
And this seems very abrupt, like, not something
that would actually happen.
You have cancer, unfortunately, and then hung up the phone.
And I said, no, actually, it was a slightly longer conversation
than that.
I said, can you give me any more information?
And this person said, no, someone
will contact you in two weeks, and then they hung up the phone.
So I think it was perhaps actually
I might have made it better in the telling
than the actual experience, but it was very important for me
because I learned something that I'd never
learned how to do before, which is in the face of--
and keep in mind, this was August 2020, right?
This was pre-vaccine.
This was the second spike of the pandemic, not nearly
as big as what was to come.
But it was a stressful time to be in health.
But at that time, I got up.
Wiped my eye.
Well, I cried a little, OK.
I cried a little, and then I got up and I got dressed,
and I drove directly to the Oncology Center,
and I went up to the front desk and said,
I don't have an appointment, but I'll be sitting over there.
And no rush, I know you guys are busy,
but if anybody has time during the course of today,
I will be sitting over here because I
need to talk to somebody.
I cannot wait for two weeks to learn more about the situation.
And that was when I learned--
the beginning of how I learned to advocate for myself,
medically speaking.
And I mention it because I think it's important,
because I didn't know.
My family didn't have a lot of money.
We did not go to doctors very often,
and to learn that it's important to learn how to advocate
for yourself medically.
Just it's like, I want to pass that
on to people who might not know because I did not know.
All right.