On the dust of the street a crowd is conversing amiably and holding painstakingly handmade signs:
BABIES ARE MURDERED HERE
Slowing down to make the turn, I stick my tongue out at them like the child they so badly want to believe in, the womb-phantom they fervently want to be real. For a split second afterward there is a bright flash of sympathy, imagining how lost you must be to tether your hopes to unborn fetuses, to spend your few free hours after work beside the dusthot freeway, breathing in the honks and the misguided but self-righteous feeling of Doing the Right Thing.
The security guard hulks in a small, windowless room that is thick with his own cologne. He asks me if I have any firearms or knives. He asks me to open my backpack full of books for him. It feels as intimate as opening my stirruped thighs to the doctors, as inevitable and dreaded as going through security, the routinized intimacy of the x-ray’s sharpened eye, the movement of the mouse, the prying. All of it so sterile, even as my bright pink rubber dildo rides its merry way through the conveyer belt to the other side, waving hello to the technician who squints closely at it for a second, calls over his buddy, wants to make sure its not some kind of weapon. This search for violence turns up nothing but the most fine-haired grains of us. How the pendant hangs. The ring of metal on our hearts and knees.
Inside on the TV, midfielders are sprinting in slow motion through the rain. A jauntybright pamphlet sings out the hepatitis ABC’s. I clutch my backpack close, the zipper hanging half-open, already half-undone.
There is metal jaw prying open soft insides. Eager needle piercing my cervix in threes, the movement of waves through me. I learn my pain is a splash of electricity, a seizing, bright white. The color of aura. A blue stethoscope swings like a prophetic pendulum from the back of the door and I close my eyes against all the tender pink, the blue squirted jelly glistening on the ultrasound probe. Something alien and grotesque moving within.
Sorbet butterflies dance from gold wire to the rhythm of my rolling moans.
I am a baby in this bed, staring up at my useless fucking mobile. I have to let the grown-ups do what they will with tools and sharpness, narrowed eyes and metallic purpose. The doctor is unkind, he predicts the seizing clench and clamp of my body. he wields the needle and tells me when I’ll feel the lightning.
These screams are unsurprising to him, no matter how new they feel to me, how animal in my throat, and that is what scares me more than anything. The blinkblink of the technician who moves the probe and holds my hand but feels nothing of this wrenching.
He can see exactly what the inside of my body looks like but doesn’t know a thing of what it means to occupy it, to care for it every morning, to love it, to cry with it through the pain. I have never been more Alone, I think, never deeper in the ecosystem of my body and so far away from land. There is nothing inside me except metal and the fear of pain. I imagine my uterus, cervix, womb, they’re curling away from the probing tools like blind caterpillars in the soft squelch of their chrysalises.
I think about the time I watched a little girl dig her fingernails into a monarch’s dangling bead. She was desperate to find the butterfly, help it out of its sheath. I still remember the pulpy green all over her helpless toddler fingers as she cried with ugly, mottled cheeks.
In the waiting room after, I feel the gush and bloom of blood. I find two loose Advil in my wallet, their coatings crumbled off, tasting sourly of quarters and other people’s hands.
On the TV, I recognize the men from House Hunters, one of whom is earnestly selling the myth of Forever Homes. He says you’ll have two of everything and too much space to grow into. There are bedrooms for unborn children. I watch from faraway as people decimate their budgets just to prove something to themselves, believing, too, in phantoms, in tying their hopes to unborn things.
We live in the shadow of some unnamable promise, worshipping the space before beginnings, where there is nothing but light
Driving home I pass a turquoise pickup with its nose smashed in, lopsided and helplessly hobbled just over the yellow line. A couple stands beside it, looking bewildered and vacant.
and the loss always comes as a surprise. a startled catch in the throat is what strangles out the sound of birth.
Behind this scene the mountains are stoic as ever. The sky remains straight-faced, refusing its premonitions. My body bleeds in winces and starts and planetrails are ridging the sky like scar tissue, sewing up the wound. the scar as both forgetting and remembering
Probing the wound is both curiosity and tenderness. it is an act of coming to terms with the body. After all, how do you know you know you’ve lost a tooth until you feel the empty space with raw tongue?
Probing is asking: what hurts? Where exactly do these bruises lie?
how can I explain them?