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My Ear Does Not Want to Be a Nose 

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The cancer chewed into lower layers & the surgeon 

cut a crater to clear it. There was no stitching that.

There was living with a hole in my nose 

 

or borrowing other flesh. The surgeon sliced 

a triangle from the left ear, set it into the gap 

in the lateral crus. It seemed that would patch it,

 

& the body would do as it was told, fuse 

one pinch of organic matter to another.

Instead, it’s planting cherries in a desert—

 

the graft will not weld. It sprouts a frill

like fungus on a tree. My ear does not want 

to be a nose, just as I did not want to be

 

my parents’ daughter. It’s a foreigner forced 

to flee its village but unable to relocate.

If it can’t go home, it will be nowhere. It will die 

 

in this sun-eroded country. It misses being sentry, 

funneling sound down canal to cochlea, thrilling 

all the cilia. Valiant servant that once dispatched 

 

gossip to my every eavesdrop, so that I knew 

I wasn’t my father’s only victim & my mother

thought of leaving him but never did.

 

It’s scary to abandon what one does so well.

The surgeon sends new bandages, 

white steroid pastes in silver tubes. 

 

The wound, scarlet, gelatinous, refuses 

each, keeps on weeping, weeping.

 

 

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Get Back 

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My sisters and I, always trying to get back to our father, 

though we’d never want our father back. One sister does this 

by the men she marries. The other, by her love of money.

 

Me, I stay open to the other side, a cross under my pillow 

& a pentagram on my desk, a miniature Ouija board 

pinned to my jacket. I hold the line in case he wants to call,

 

then we could talk honest. My dead are not allowed to lie, 

even when there’s every incentive. In death, my spirits 

are stripped of both flesh & guile. Once, my father asked, 

 

Would you like to come back? Back meaning to the family 

I exiled you from. Back meaning lie for me, then I will 

love you again. It was a bargain I could not strike.

 

If he tries to come through the conduit, I’ll catch him 

in a bottle, the way I have his voice locked up in his letters, 

which are kept in a red box shut with a rubber band,

 

his presence elastic. My father died with his two blue eyes, 

the one that could see & the one that went blind. 

If we speak, I will ask him many questions:

 

How did you really want to live? What was it we discussed
on that drive through Indiana? What was your last thought 

before you first touched your daughter?

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Morrow Dowdle is the author of the chapbook Hardly (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and the forthcoming chapbook Missing Woman. Their poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Rattle, New York Quarterly, Southeast Review, Stonecoast Review, and The Baltimore Review. They have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the 2024 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. They run a monthly performance series which features historically marginalized voices. A former physician assistant in mental healthcare, they are now pursuing their creative writing MFA at Spalding University. They live in Durham, NC.

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