"There Is A Rainbow on the Stove"

By Claudia Ricci

So just now, I sat down to write this poem
about a rainbow.

I wrote it because I had to.

I wrote it because I had
cancer four years ago
and today when I woke up my chest felt tight (allergies? bronchitis? OR?)

I’m squeezed.
Sometimes
By body memories.

Twinges of this or that
Muscle
Pulling me back
To that dreadful time.

Pulling me to worry
about what
could be
could be
could be.

Inside me
THERE ARE MEMORIES I CANNOT ERASE.

But I have to face them today.

I was doing yoga and started to feel the tightness the squeeze I had to burp I couldn’t I was bending over, this thought erupted,
“What if I were to have
Something horrific
say,
esophageal cancer,
something deadly deadly deadly
caused by all that radiation
all those rays
I had
all those weeks
all those years ago.

I froze, I panicked
I took a break from yoga,
I went to the kitchen, I started to think about a rainbow
why?
I don't know
I just started to write
this:

“Rainbow,
be a laser for me, let the photons
sink layer by layer through
my skin
RELAXING>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>ME

Behind my eyes, I see
a curve of redorangeyellowgreenblueindigoviolet
magic light
Let it soothe me, remove
the terrorist memories of four years ago.

In order to
go
forward, to HEAL

I must go
Back to FEEL
that
BLACK
RUBBER BAG
that foul swill of CHEMICALS at my throat

I must not hide
I must not stare
I must not be scared

by these
memories
lingering there in the interstices
of my chest

I must reach delicately inside
And hold each of them up
to the sun
cup them in my hands
offer them up one by one to the rainbow for
cleansing, soothing, scouring…”

And this is as far as I got writing my poem
because
at that very moment my husband fixing his breakfast called to me in my study:

“Ooooh there is rainbow on the stove.”

I stopped typing. My stomach kind of dropped to the floor.

I called back,

“What did you say?”

“I said, ‘there is a rainbow on the stove.’”

I got up from the computer and heart pumping I walked into the kitchen and there
was indeed a thick little
rainbow
glowing
on the stove.

Claudia Ricci is on the faculty at the University at Albany, SUNY, where she teaches English and journalism. She has been a fiction writer and a journalist for many years and published her first novel, Dreaming Maples, in 2002.