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I. THE WANDERING

I was born with a life that bled—
a seafloor womb
dragging tides of fern
and marigold char

The priests brought saffron
and fear

crowning me with diagnosis

They said: She is too empty
They said: Fill her with figs
with seed
with stillness
They said: Her belly speaks too loud
Mute her

O Plato
old patriarch of phantoms
my body was no beast—
just prophecy you never learned to read

"The uterus is sad..." you wrote
but it was your mind that roamed
chasing shadows through a woman’s anatomy
it was your thought
that needed cauterizing.

II. INCANTATIONS IN LATIN

A midwife kissed my knees
with vinegar.
Galen’s ghost pressed salt…
into my tongue.

They labeled me:
widow's throb
seed-sick
womb-wept.

Symptomology—paroxysm
trembling
visions of color.

A bishop
marked my temple in salt
called the brand heresy.

I howled once
That was enough

When I bled
they baptized it "fit!"

Diagnosis: Uterine Fury
Treatment: Submission

O Saint Hysteria
patron of the misunderstood
deliver us from knowing.

III. THE YELLOW ROOM

Charlotte peels wallpaper
with the tip of her soul

Her husband counts the tendrils

Prognosis: Nervous Prostration
Prescription: Silence
sunlight
sweet compliance

The rest cure is no rest
It is a crypt
where nouns born before verbs
can be reborn

She climbs the wallpaper’s fabric
fingers quill-stained with meaning

They say: Her nerves speak rebellion
They say: Her ink is impudent
They say: Her mind mimics sanity

But her mind is architectural neuron
built to collapse into freedom

IV. THE CURE

Enter the doctor
iron hands—
his stethoscope tuned
to disobedience

Patient exhibits:
chronic resistance to role
acute melancholia
womb misbehavior

He prescribes
the bed
the child
the marriage that baits like a trap

He prescribes
the little engine of God—
a steel vibrator
brass-coiled
buzzing
administered with averted eyes

He says: You will thank me after
I say: The after is what I fear

Outcome: Managed symptoms
quiet mouth
Case closed
Symptoms abated
Creativity subdued
Marriage intact

He wandered my diagnosis
But it was you who wandered

V. BERTHA BURNS THE HOUSE

At Thornfield
I am attic-bound
kneeling among cracked porcelain gods

My name Misremember
written in attic dust

My hair
a fire escape—
braided exit
scorched prayer

I speak in tongues
of splinter and soot

I bite the pages
they wrote me into

Diagnosis: Madwoman
Prognosis: Containment

I am not lunatic—
I am ledger
I am not danger—
I am mirror
I am not wife—
I am wound

When I leap
I drag patriarchy
by the fringe

Let Rochester
cough in the smoke

The “madwoman” was not broken—
she was a prophet
censored for knowing too much

VI. POST-MORTEM

Sylvia slumbers
The bell jar was culture-blown
Virginia leaves stones in her pockets
not in protest
but to anchor centuries

Emily dashes
her poems into locked drawers—
dashes not periods
no diagnosis can follow—

“He hurts a little though”
she wrote
and that was enough

to stain a century

Syndrome: Excess of Feeling
Remedy: Erasure

Wordsworth sketches paralysis:
“She has no motion
no force...”

But we moved
even in stillness

We seethed beneath the bonnet

A woman on the subway
grips her throat—
panic coded as inconvenience

The doctor says
Yoga
Breathe
Smile more

VII. EPILOGUE: THE WOMB RETURNS

And now
unshackled
the womb returns home—
not to pelvis
but to page

A pen bleeds
where scalpels once threatened

In the margin:
We birth ourselves
We name the madness
We reclaim the scream

“There is no female mind…
Might as well speak of a female liver”

But behold
our minds—
volcanoes with velvet tongues
not organs
oracles

We are not hysterical—
we are historical thunder

We are her
We are howl

We are what survives the diagnosis—
naming not home
but heaven

Let them call it storm
Let them label it loss
We will write it as rebirth

In the silence
after diagnosis
listen—

that is the sound
of a thousand pens unsheathed.
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