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Poem
The slabbed ceiling tiles are becoming the patio slabs of my childhood home.
I'm highly strung in more ways than one, trying to send my mind elsewhere,
but half-buried memories insert themselves, sliding in with the speculum.
Five years old, the too-close cuddling, pressing and rubbing
his p***s playing peek-a-boo through dressing gown folds,
making it into a giggle-game, little girl's soft p**n soft play.
Just relax and think of your happy place...
The farm across from my childhood home, down a flower-filled lane,
where the only cock was the one that crowed, heralding dawn's rising gold.
A female private place has always been a male happy space.
So many times screwed, my eyes screwed shut.
Society closing a collective eye to penetrations of private pain
while the shy cervical eye is being forever forced open.
So much of female is invasion. The probing beak of a speculum,
a metallic bird of prey unfolding coldly inside me;
my stirruped legs pale as pork fat and stormclouded with bruising.
Clinical cold insertions, grainy snow on a sonograph screen,
transvagin*l transducers, my womb a hollow tomb, a teardrop
shed for what has always bled and what has always been.
Wondering if I can ever be whole in a fragmented world
where wherever there's a hole it has to be filled.
The medical talking down as if to a child: your fibroid's got a little friend.
All the talking and focusing down, spiralling downwards, always downwards,
pushing down, bearing down, everything focused down there.
So much of female is invasion, suffering and pain.
Sharp, penetrative words like polyps, precancerous cells.
Internal weather changes, temperatures rising and dipping.
Scarlet menstrual storms, cruel crimsons of cramps and contractions,
all the stretching and tearing and stitching,
the endless tampons, pads and swabs -
female is unsanitary is what they proclaim.
Society wants female sweet-scented, smooth, above all clean.
Sonograph gel seeps between my legs, sticky as seminal fluid.
The sonographer is brusque, bored, has seen and done it all before,
and is too jaded and weary to offer me a paper towel.
Fifteen minutes in/inside and the slabbed-patio ceiling is disappearing.
Half-buried memories slide out again with the speculum.
I'm in a safer space, a natural, fuzzy, unfilled place, where nothing invades,
and everything and everyone comes softly, gently, like a poem at 3 a.m.
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