D. Gilson: My Mother’s Breasts

In an informal poll of two friends and riders of the Pittsburgh Port Authority Transit, I have recently found that few men feel comfortable talking about their mother’s breasts.

That is not to say men are uncomfortable talking about breasts in general. Or further, very specific breasts—those of that woman who works in the coffee shop on Murray Avenue; those of the First Lady of the United States; those of any actress or musician; or those of an icon like Pamela Anderson, whose breasts are their very own narrative arc. Indeed, many men can talk at great lengths about breasts. Just not those that belong to their mothers.

According to the 2010 Census, when a man talks about breasts in America, 52.6% of the time those breasts will belong to a mother. But this is not science. No. I want to talk about my mother’s breasts. According to those same statistics, my mother is only one of 157 some million women in these fifty sundry but united states and territories. I do not know how many of these women have breasts, and cannot account for such tissues within the male population, either. But it doesn’t matter. I want to talk about my mother’s breasts.

They are large. The youngest of her six children, I have never known my mother with anything smaller than what can be colloquially referred to as D-cups. For a good deal of my life, they have been larger. What wonder! Disclaimer: I have no stake in breasts, my mother’s or otherwise. I was not breast-fed, and am still not. I am gay. The 2010 Census also reveals that three in every five gay men in America has an obsession with breasts. Of these obsessions, one in every three is toxic. I have beaten the odds!

And so have my mother’s breasts. They may kill her now. Cancer. One in 35 cases results in death, both of breast and of woman. My mother tells the doctor—cut them off—and the doctor complies. The world continues to spin, neither faster nor slower, but with some adjustment.

D. Gilson’s poetry appears in LAR 9.