by Ross Losapio

“5 cm. fir tree removed from patient’s lung”
-mosnews.com, 13 April 2009

I choose to live
            in a world where cancer
                      can become a spruce,

sprouting in the biopsy,
            needling the capillaries
                      in painful affirmation

of two lives insistent
            in surviving, defiant
                      by not killing. Who

is to say that blood
            cannot nourish
                      like water, that the heartbeat,

magnified
            by proximity, cannot
                      replace sunlight

in each of us? It was
            there, wasn’t it: tumor
                      turned sapling when

the doctors cut
            into the lung? The only
                      question now is who

will be brave enough
            to plant it and see
                      what grows next.

ROSS LOSAPIO is a New Jersey native and graduate of Loyola College in Maryland where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Writing and English. There he was awarded honorable mention by the Academy of American Poets twice and had work appear in the school’s publications The Garland and Warnings. His poetry has formerly been published in Soundings East and Italian Americana. He has also self-published a chapbook of poems entitled The Measure of Healing.