Heather Kirn Lanier

Jun 18, 2024 | hub.jhu.edu | Heather Kirn Lanier

My daughter was born with a hole in her heart. It's a sentence that reads like poetry but is purely medical. This hole created an unwanted door between her left and right atria, those upper rooms of the heart, letting oxygenated and deoxygenated blood mix. When she was a baby, the cardiologist said the hole had three potential destinies: become larger, stay the same, or shrink to nothing. We were told to wait a few years and let her grow. The prescription was patience.

Mar 21, 2024 | theoffingmag.com | Heather Kirn Lanier |Beina Xu |Grace Loh Prasad |Emily Siner

When the tech brings me back, an image already waits on the monitor: a white boob against the blackest black. The boob is filled with white lace, white ribbons, white strips of silk, like my breast is a diva primping herself in a pitch-black dressing room. Or maybe she’s filled with white swirls of smoke that her sultry self would have puffed in the previous century, lipstick staining her cigarette holder.