If I were to show Sapana Adhikari’s painting “What Lies Beneath” to my four-year old niece, she might point at the women’s bulging blue ovary on the left and say, grapes! She might point at the breast of the woman on the right and say, octopus! She might look at the woman in the center, with the pink ribbons of muscle exposed, and exclaim, in that high-pitched glee of hers: strawberry ice cream! My niece can name things now, and isn’t naming everything to a four-year-old?

Adhikari notes that we live in a constant state of anguish and anxiety over what lies beneath in our bodies. Every headache is a tumor. Every cough, a new disease. Every lump a death sentence.

That inclination is, in fact, what galvanized me into seeking a breast biopsy at the age of 30. I had discovered a lump and, due to a family history of breast cancer, acted swiftly. As I lay on the table while the doctor poked and prodded inside my breast, clipping the lump inside me like flower stems, I imagined what the thing might look—what, exactly, lay beneath, and if it had a name.

Out of that experience emerged my poem, “Breast Lump” (Fall 2020 Intima). It explores the hidden parts of us and how, precisely because they are unseen, we imagine them to be more than they are: circus shows, constellations, caricatures of creatures that do not belong in the light.

What is one woman’s childish fantasy during a biopsy is another woman’s pill bottle, as Adhikari’s painting depicts. These are coping mechanisms, ways to avoid or arguably somehow deal with the monsters inside the closets of our bodies, if they are even monsters at all. Adhikari’s “What Lies Beneath” represents these tensions of (un)knowing, the fears we don’t know we need to be afraid of yet, the ease that comes with naming. The woman in the center of the painting? She’s anxious or she’s stoic in the face of this great unknown, and I’d like to believe she is somehow, paradoxically, both.

Michelle Dyer is a teacher and poet in Phoenix, Arizona. She earned a Bachelor’s in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico and a Master’s in English Education from Arizona State University. A lifelong poet and writer, she was recently published in Snapdragon: A Journal for Art and Healing. Her enduring interests include psychology, therapy, spirituality, memory, learning, and how poetry informs, intersects with, and expands these disciplines. Her poem “Breast Lump” appears in the Fall 2020 Intima.