canonize ovenbird My fingers find a troubling patch of skin on my neck, right above my clavicle. Hardly wider than the nub of an eraser on the end of a pencil. It’s raised and dry and flaking just a little. Moisturizers don’t help. It persists. Something emergent. A tiny city with dreams of infrastructure. A “change” with enough red flags to prompt an appointment to have someone investigate its uneven edges, its slight deviation in colour. Such a small thing but sinister. I Google (against my better judgement) and come away with foul tasting words in my mouth: precancerous, actinic keratosis, carcinoma, melanoma. I begin to bargain with a non-existent god. Let this be benign. Let this be an overreaction. I’ve always been a dedicated user of sunscreen after all. I wear wide brim hats and sunglasses. I seek shade like leafy coleus. My skin stays pale as trillium’s three pointed face, even at the height of summer. My bathing suit has long sleeves. I’ve been so GOOD. A saint of sun exposure. I should at least be worthy of beatification on the grounds of a life of sun avoidant virtue. I concede that I occasionally reached the end of childhood summers with something approximating tan lines. And the skin that stretches across my chest is so thin and sensitive that even SPF 50 doesn’t always prevent a burn. But LOOK at me. I’m as translucent and ghostly as a glass squid, resident of the ocean’s twilight zone. When I’ve tired of bargaining and have moved on to denial I head outside with my dog. The sun touches me everywhere—warm, sustaining, deadly. 260415 what's it to you? who go blather from