The three-year-old with tight
yellow curls stood by the back porch’s

screen door, his stolid legs
in shorts, wearing a sweater, holding

a carrot in his right hand:
I feel myself inside his face.

For a week my mother pulled a carrot
from the back garden

for my supper; this evening
I pulled it myself and brought it

to her. Her pride wrote postcards:
“You’ll never guess what Donnie did!”

Today, sixty years later,
I gaze at the loose flesh of my

upper arm, where muscle flourished,
sagging wrinkled and puckered

like the flesh of my calves and thighs
hanging punky and useless.

As I wait outside the Infusion
Room for the 5FU

to heat my hand with its eighteen
CCs of poison, among

other skeletons of flesh
ingesting similar poisons,

I feel pity for my racked body
that sickens itself to

try to remain itself. Then I forgo
self-pity by the

only turn that discharges self-pity:
Among reading stacked

in the waiting room, I observe
a copy of Goodnight Moon.