~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Sara Pirkle

Weighing the Options

When I thought I was going to die,

I said to myself, as if I had the right,

Sara, because you are suffering

and will die soon, your choices are

to be a tomato vine in your next life,

or an astronaut.

Perhaps the astronaut sounds better.

But consider the icy wind of Mars,

how lunch in a rust-frozen tundra

wreaks havoc on the nerves,

not to mention surviving on pastes

made to taste like roast beef.

Besides, I could never remember

to pack thermal underwear for trips.

The tomato’s life is brief, no botched biopsies,

no data to collect, no aspirations

beyond growing and feeding a farmer’s wallet.

I said to myself, Sara,

whichever life you choose will be right,

believing the choice begat

an infinite daisy chain of choices.

At my next ending, my tomato self

could choose between a giraffe

and a mechanic, my astronaut self

could reincarnate as a grasshopper

or a seamstress in New Jersey.

Sara, I said, Don’t worry.

I once held the idea that happiness

happened in the absence of grief.

Chemo cured me of that notion.

All lives feel long and full of longing

to the one living them, for an hour

is equally a lifetime to the mayfly

and the woman who has just woken

from being sliced open, her hollow

chest scraped clean of cancer.

Sara Pirkle is a Southern poet, an identical twin, a breast cancer survivor, and a board game enthusiast. Her first book, The Disappearing Act (Mercer University Press, 2018), won the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. In 2019, she was nominated for Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry, and in 2022 she was shortlisted for the Oxford Poetry Prize. She is an Associate Director of Creative Writing at The University of Alabama.