LITANY WHILE READING SCRIPTURE IN THE GYNECOLOGIC ONCOLOGY WAITING ROOM
And God said, let there be blood
And God said, flood
And God said, good
is a woman with fruit
in her womb and not
in her hand
And God said, sin
And God did not say, forgive
And God said, I will make a stormy wind
And God said, son, a breath
stirring
And God said, highly favored
And God said, condemned
And God said, I will blot out man
whom I have created, for I am sorry
that I have made them
And God said, listen
and sank a boy
in her like a stone
MENORRHAGIA
Christmas, flew home packaged like a gift. Beneath my jeans a childlike padding. Came to adore the wee god, his dolorous mother. All while bleeding like a can of cherries. Clots sluicing down my thighs. The storefront windows glaucous, spotted with ashen, ineffectual stars. From heaven dropped unrelenting sleet. The dawns all too bright and immaculate. Lit by snowlight, ached prostrate before a mirror, bare and quivering in its stare. The runnels running downward, red ribbons. Porcelain like a bank of snow. Each night a night silent and wholly unbearable. Stains blooming on sheets like poinsettias. Percocets tumbling like flurries on the tongue. Fall on your knees. Collapsed sudden in a vestibule. O hear the angel voices. Rose fevered, soaked with slush. Flew home for Christmas, plane niveous as a dove. The window’s bleed hole haloed, a nimbus of tinselly frost. Leaned feebly against the pane. The cities rutilant, scarred by streets. The lakes spattered black and viscous. The sky blushing as if shamed.
MOTHER
If you had asked me, thirteen, what I wanted
to be one day, I wouldn’t have said it.
I wanted, for a long time, to be anything
but myself, knew that a soon-to-be
woman was the second worst thing
in the world after a woman, full
stop, and I was heading there fast.
I could see it, my breasts rudely
nudging into view, their snug caps
like the knit caps of infants, rosy-
colored as a tongue. And how
terrifying, the thought of a mouth there,
rooting, and what could be drawn
from me that I didn’t need—what else
skulked in me unseen, stirring in secret
vats with milk yet untapped, and blood,
the strange, new wellspring? I was just beginning
to understand the possibilities, my body’s
elusive, independent workings, machineries
chugging away in dark chambers
not just left to but simply
their own devices, unknowable and sovereign.
What I wanted, always, to be:
in control. And I knew this was
impossible, just as I knew, even then, that
to be a mother was to be the only
permissible form of a woman, the begrudging
exception to the rule of our worth-
lessness.
So if you asked me again,
twenty-three, I’d tell you the worst thing
you could be is not a woman but
barren, the industry shut down and the parts
missing, malformed. And I’d tell you the shame of it:
the feminine failure, its ache
a reminder—at the center the tumor
ballooning, like hope.
TUMOR
PORTRAIT OF THE ILLNESS AS NIGHTMARE
No matter how many times you ring the bell in the bad dark,
no one will let you in. You face the fun
house with its mirrors on the outside
so everyone can see. And everyone looks. You are in your underwear
and the room is cold. The doctor’s stethoscope pressed to you
becomes suddenly a snake. Your heart hisses in its cage. Your heart sputters,
a doused flame. You are drowning in your blue paper gown, which recedes
in the back like an ocean, your skin a bank of hot sand.
The horizon bleeds and the days and you
wander lost in a city of scalpels where everything glitters
and pills fade like moons on your tongue. You sidle through
sterile labyrinths and piss in a cup. You wait in a room like a chapel
or the belly of a beast. Either way, you think
something will save you, you believe this the whole fearsome time.
Your god comes and he is ordinary and terrible. He confers
with the doctors at your kitchen table and tells you to eat
your clots, round as peas. You want dessert. You want to
deceive him, but he, like you, has eyes, and uses them.
You are grounded, in the ground. The pit is a tub
like a fever. You writhe on a bed on a stage, the strings reaching
toward heaven. There is a momentary break for everyone
else: intermission. They chatter in the lobby. You babble
symptoms in a white confessional. You fall from a great height and land
on a gurney. You are at the front of a classroom and you are stripped
to your bones. The doctor points to your pelvis. You model
the tumors—in this light they look pretty, like jewels.
ANGEL
After a month of asking, suddenly, a voice. It says you deserve that which has happened to you. It says I see what you do with your long, terrene hands. Maundering through the banalities of my life, it follows, speaking, as if from a frosty bag of peas in the freezer aisle, speaking, while I am on my knees, scrubbing the bathroom floor, trying to love a man. Its speech is disquieting company, but company nonetheless—a TV left on and turned low. It desperately wants my attention but is polite, which is its defining weakness. Sometimes I catch it stirring out of the corner of my eye—a glint at the end of my cat’s whiskers, a spangle on the ceiling of indiscernible source. More often, though, it looks like me, only a little off, like my reflection in the pregnant belly of a spoon. In fact, when I speak to it, I use my own name. I’m not sure if it minds. It repeats instead its refrain. It says God has plans for you. It says I didn’t say they were good.
HAEMORRHOISSA’S MENARCHE
I wanted to be a woman
until I was. What opened
in me brought such pain
I believed finally
one day I would die. But it subsided—
for a while. I remember thinking
I was cured, I could go back
to being a child.
Then the next month: red
seed in the morning’s bowl
unfurling as it touched the water.
ETIOLOGY
EYES OPENED, AS GODS
and ye shall be as gods, knowing
Like suns I could not lower
my gaze from.
I admit I liked
the warmth of them—tongues
in the dark
of my ears like secrets,
palms
splayed upon
my thighs like stars.
God, I felt you
had designed them purposefully
for me,
as you had once forged
my foremother.
Felt a tug
of primordial
hunger. Dreamt of snakes
that let me
hold them. All day eyed
the shiny apples
of their throats—
14, SUNDAY SCHOOL, 3 DAYS LATE
I’m not stupid—
I know how it works.
But there was a time when
she was just some virgin nobody, too,
small purse of
her womb
and her ordinary eggs
waiting like loose pearls.
THE SCARE
One year before I knew
I was sick, I was twenty-one
and one week late, I squatted over
a stick bought down the street
from my first apartment, my first
live-in boyfriend stationed in the doorway
gnawing at his cuticles, both of us
nodding, dazed, as I wiped away
piss from my shaking hands, saying
if yes, then yes, meaning okay and being okay
with it, waiting and waiting and only realizing after
the apparition—no—we might have been
half hoping for it,
and so,
a year later, when I am sick and squatting and feel
something slip from me
so big, I scream—(I am sure I have lost
an unbearable thing)—
but when he runs in to find me
howling, hysterical,
in the bowl there is nothing
but blood, a gelatinous clot
enormous enough to fill it, my body
throbbing, me wailing Oh God, Oh
God, I thought it was—
my face in my hands as the hour
passed slowly and I
waited, emptying, still something
like empty.
NIGHT GHAZAL
I boil night on the stove; soak it until it’s thoroughly done, black.
We drink it like tea, unspeaking—swallow its moths, distant suns, black.
Through the telescope’s silver barrel, litter of white stars
already dead. They glitter like shrapnel. The sky, gun black.
The blood comes and comes; I spend all night in the tub,
water running. It pours from me: gush of child undone. Black.
I tell him, fill my darkest places. My fingers grip too hard,
leave small moons along his back. The bruises come, black.
Dream, small death. I become a phantom above the bed.
Sleep, the simpler twin. The same eyes closing. The same gone black.
HYMEN
Second blood—I never knew you.
After the first, scoured the bed
for your blazoned blot, and came up
empty. Perhaps I was born without
you—a box with no prize
inside, a sundae
with no cherry on top. God of good
girls, god of matrimony, mother-
state, which I consider
a distant country with a discordant
tongue, did you speak
with God and conclude I hadn’t
use for you? Once I was small
as your kin, so small
and for such a long time, longer than
I’ve lived, I fit inside my mother
when she fit inside her mother, and so on and so
forth, and further, a nest of matrons, mise en
abyme in which to be female is to be something
like infinity, and was it determined then
what kind of woman I would be?
It seems I’ve always been frightened,
little veil, of wedlock’s
lock clicking shut. The heritable procession
of women whispering in the aisle
of my pulse don’t do, don’t do, don’t.
And I haven’t done, this
the gravamen, the grave
I’ve dug with the spade of pleasure.
But, wanting
seal of want, I did
want it, did choose to commit
my life’s greatest transgression
with a benevolent accomplice, and so,
in the herebefore, you could say I am among
the spared. What a mess this messlessness
of you could have been in any
number of lives my size, billowing specters
of dresses on a line
of possibility, lives in which I am the brides-
maid, and you, maidenhead, the bride
given away, where I am the acquired
property and you the red ribbon
severed in the threshold, I
the purse and you the coin
tendered. Perhaps no one
ever told you, precious emblem
of innocence, simulacrum for
honor, that some believe
you the most important part of me, vital, like a heart
a man gets the thrill of bursting
where he can see it, that blood
is owed to him—and that’s the heart
of it, isn’t it? Of a woman, you
the only blood worth anything.
THE BLOOD
She had the blood, too. Bathtubs filled
to enameled lip and her body
pouring. As a girl, I thought being
a woman meant your life spilling from you
like a cup of juice you kept knocking over.
I was young enough to think anything
that bled was a wound. The moon
waited like a round-faced witness
in the window each month, steam
erasing the mirrors and the walls
weeping. All night the tap running
and running. I wanted to know
how pain made a woman
curl like a pill bug poked with a stick.
I wanted to know everything about suffering
so I could avoid it. I was young enough
to think things like that, seven years
small, when calamity was skinned knees and little
brothers and an upturned sundae
crashing to the floor like a chandelier.
All I knew of disaster was Hollywood
movies where houses were swallowed
easy as bubblegum and spaceships
hovered like gnats out of reach—ruin always
at a distance—and you could press your face into
your mother and everything would be all right
once you turned on the lights.
Sometimes, now, when the ache comes
and I am coiled in dark water, I remember
that distant self like a daughter
I gave up or lost in a bustling
food court and never saw again,
the remembering painful.
And sometimes I wonder if she knew
why her blood came angrier
than any other’s, blood like my blood,
which now seethes and conspires and appears
on MRI scans like a black eye or a crop circle
or the earth’s eager void.
METRORRHAGIA
Clouds purpling, clotted near heaven. Henrik says
the sky will burst, will be good for the seeds. Henrik
on his knees, planting, thumb turning in black
soil. Birds scattering, spotting the dark. My hands
at the faucet’s mouth. Summer blackberries bleed
a strong stain. My black thumbs, turning.
Henrik on his knees, good to me. Plants
kisses on my cheek, holds my waist. My hands
turning a bowl clean. Purpling at the window,
clouds like blackberries, clots. Rain spotting
black soil like a stain, good for the seeds.
Cloudbursts sudden as a faucet. The sky’s mouth
full with blackbirds like seeds. My body
stained, high above the knee. Dark spots
at the bottom of a bowl. Henrik planting blackberries
on my tongue, leaning into me. My hands
at my body’s mouth, sudden. Heaven bleeds
brief rain. Clouds scattering, like seeds. Henrik’s
mouth purpled with sweet. Sky darkening,
turning. My body floating, cloud-like, adrift
in clean water. A black stain spreading, like wings.
&nbs
p; STILL LIFE WITH HEMORRHAGE
A wine crate for a nightstand, and on it, a rose
gone bad in a cup. Its water
a swallow of shadow, murk of rot
and sugar. Clothes sloughed, bodiless, and half-
eaten on a plate,
a plum in its juice. At the center
of the scene: a woman on a mattress
on the floor. Her arms cast out
as if preparing to fly
or as if pinned, savior
or specimen. Still asleep.
Day breaking through the window
a warm leak.
The woman in its spotlight
like a halo. As if something holy,
or at least chosen.
HAEMORRHOISSA
Did she, like me, lose years of nights,
up at an ungodly hour, washing the sheets? She must have been
very tired. She must have been ashamed, waking again
to a stain in the bed, still warm like a lover just risen, dayspring
seeping over the weedy yard outside. She likely had once
a husband, but not long, not after. Because no one touched her
she must have touched herself, she must have known a woman could
die from living untouched and preferred to be satisfied. Her red hands
turning slowly and brightly like fish under a faucet
in the back of the quiet, lonesome house. Sometimes, I’m sure, she thought