“For the Other Girl” by Kristine Nowak

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In order to impress upon me
that skin cancer can happen in your twenties,
my doctor tells me stories:
one of my patients—she couldn’t
have been out of college yet—
there was this mole on her leg
that I didn’t like, he pauses and glances
at the mole on mine, when I saw her later
her whole leg was covered in bandages—
it had metastasized—I never saw her again,
I don’t know if she made it. He looks hard
at the ground below me like some shadow
of her is cast across the floor. Later,
after I listened to another doctor
snip the mole off with a pair of scissors
along with a circle of skin, after the biopsy
came back with a technical
term for this is fine—not the thing
that will kill you, not this time, after I drove home
under a fluffy-clouded sky, kissed
my husband, and ate fresh strawberries
over the sink, then I wondered for the first time
what had happened to her
and wished she was still alright.

-Kristine Nowak

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