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Other women bemoan
bodily imperfections,
hips that have swelled,
stretching tight the limits of
blue jeans kept for
far too long,
asses that have flattened,
middles that have fattened,
and barely perceptible lines
creeping across faces marked
by expression.
They cry the loss of youth,
the addition of an extra
chin or two,
the drooping of breasts
once firm and full,
bewail the locks of unruly hair
that hangs a little thinner,
a little duller,
a little less amenable
to styles long outdated
but still attempted.
They stare hungrily into mirrors
befogged by time,
starving for the womanhood
they once knew, the essence
of their very femininity.
I grow impatient with vanity,
the tiresome, ungrateful moanings,
the endless recountings of women
memorializing a beauty no doubt inflated with
the passing of the
years.
I grow weary of their loss.
There was one, though,
who sat before me unabashed,
her pale, thin gown hanging
around her waist,
the sharpness of her hipbones
shadowed beneath the folds of cloth.
How meticulously she applied
her rouge,
traced her pale lips with a pencil,
filled them in with scarlet lipstick
shockingly red against her milky skin.
The lines around her eyes
didn't bother her at all.
She painted those too, in emerald green to match
the shade of her
irises, outlined them in black like an Egyptian
queen, then powdered
her neck with perfumed talc, stroking her skin
slowly, almost
sensually, her slight fingers gently tracing down
to her chest.
Here she stopped, staring
into the vanity mirror, forgetting
that I was even there.
Her hand lay in her lap now.
She gazed at her reflection
as though she was meeting someone
for the very first time,
sizing it up, a thousand judgments
flickering across her perfectly
made-up face.
She wasn't afraid of what she saw.
She drew her small shoulders back,
sat up a little straighter,
ran her free hand across the smoothness of her
head, down her
impossibly fragile neck. She paused for a moment
only at the pulsing
of her throat where the life-blood ran, then followed
it down across
her chest to the place where her breasts used
to be.
Her fingertips lightly played
across the matching scars.
I felt the touch as though
it was my own hand,
felt the warm skin thinly covering
the hard, bony plates of her upper torso.
I knew the smooth rippling
of pale scars that puckered
amidst radiation burns,
contrasted sharply beside the blue markings placed
for future
reference.
She tilted her head this way,
then that way,
her eyes luminous as she challenged
her own reflection.
She made a moue of her mouth
in the mirror, grasped the folds
of her fallen gown, and pulled it back around
her shoulders.
She tilted her chin in defiance of fate, smiled
up at my uncomfortable
silence, and knew that she was lovely. 
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