LaWanda Walters

Two poems from LaWanda Walters’s How We Really Live

followed by a note on the author

ReLeaf, Relief

We asked for a Japanese cherry,
a redbud, and a sugar maple.
The Friday before my surgery

is when they will arrive. Then Monday
is my lumpectomy. It’s Stage One, small,
and I’ll come home to the Japanese cherry

in our yard that same day.
And my children will be here. I’ll heal.
I was thirteen when I read about this surgery

and felt titillated. A woman’s worry
in “Tell Me, Doctor,” Mama’s Ladies’ Home Journal.
Sposin’ that he says that your lips are like cherries,

Ado Annie sings in I Cain’t Say No. To me it was a story,
like in Oklahoma, the bad girl in the musical
we played on our hi-fi stereo. The doctor mentioned surgery

and said a doctor should examine her breasts and to me
this was sex, Lady Chatterley’s breasts swinging like bells.
I knew people died when they were old. The Japanese cherry

and the other trees are part of ReLeaf, free trees
if you sign up early. I’ve been told that I’ll feel
relieved to get this behind me, the surgery,

which is what Dr. Goodrich C. Schauffler advises
in Tell Me, Doctor in 1962, when women had to feel
for the cancerous lumps and I sang your lips are like cherries

to the record player heartlessly, in Mississippi,
not thinking that the woman in that column, in Tell
Me, Doctor, probably would die. Surgeries

were worse. Jacqueline Susann had a double mastectomy,
but the model in her novel, Valley of the Dolls,
only knows how to take off her clothes. A Japanese cherry

planted in our yard, a redbud and a sugar maple. These trees
won’t have cherries or maple syrup—they are ornamental,
as breasts seem until you hear you need to have surgery.
Sposin’, I sang, your lips are like cherries?

 

LaWanda Walters

 

The Flamingo’s Instruction to John James Audubon

Must you kill me to paint me right?
I say, I’m pretty good at posing, myself.
I don’t need to be shot by a gun
and then arranged like I’m a still life,
some poor goose’s liver
with sweaty grapes on a plate.

I’d never lower my head in such obeisance
as you have twisted mine to show. My neck,
when I was alive, bent naturally—
whether to look after our young
or scout for shrimp. You’re as bad
as Lewis Carroll, fancying me
a croquet mallet, stiff as a baton.
And making the hedgehog, curled up in fear,
stand in for a wooden ball. We were real
and wondrous enough before you wanted more.

 

LaWanda Walters

 

ReLeaf, Relief first appeared in Poetry and The Flamingo’s Instruction to John James Audubon first appeared in The Southern Review.

LaWanda Walters was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1949 and earned her MFA from Indiana University, where she won the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her first book of poems, Light Is the Odalisque, was published in 2016 by Press 53 in its Silver Concho Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, Nine Mile, Laurel Review, Live Encounters Poetry & Writing, and other literary magazines, as well as in Best American Poetry 2015 and Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century. She received Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in 2020 and 2024. She lives in Cincinnati with her husband, fellow poet John Philip Drury.