The cherry’s juice bled red across my hand,
my nail ripping boldly at the rot, a spongy darker spot.
Surgery sometimes succeeds, sometimes not.
So friends’ ordeals attest, when scalpel invasions
wielded by the best, excised silently incubated
tumors of the brain, birthed amid mist and convulsions.
On my small fruit, the odds of rescue were not great.
On the bigger brain, heroic acts claim better chance
but deliver results less clear cut: tortuous waits
while interim results imprison family members’ lives
in complex, tangled fate. My debate? Short.
When the pit was hit, I abandoned acts of last resort.
