The Smear

            after Elizabeth Bishop

 

I plant her sterile watch

within my womb, lock my looking

 

inside her, half

inside me, her fingers

 

an ambitious fasting, married

and a mother.

 

She doesn’t break for lunch.

She hasn’t sweated so hard, ever.

 

Humming like the ocean’s peeling

surface, a firecracker whiffing

 

human prey—she loves me.

Her job: to make me love her

 

too. She hangs

her pearl earrings

 

before my cervix

like an ancient offering, shaky

 

and confident and distracted,

her glove-covered lilac nails

 

like the cotton balls in the glass

jar, softness laughing

 

throughout the room.

While her dirty blond hair breathes—

 

sighs, like a spinal cord

after home birth—

 

I think of the lady who smears

her—my gyno—every year,

 

our lineage the real inside

scoop, each witness to a ribcage

 

of sky, legs open

like deer eyes before a car

 

crash. A word is pulp fiction

until there’s a watcher. Mine,

 

she knows what I smell like,

what color my skin is

 

in the tiniest

of light-hidden places.

 

I want her

beatboxing nose freckles,

 

the waiting

room fish tanks in her wide

 

ears, and then I see

a silver necklace peeking

 

from underneath her lab coat

—if you could call it silver—

 

a name engraved, turning air

like a greenish spoon—

 

Lily, she moans,

dismantling her daughter

 

inside me, or reaching, or rocking her

with the giant yellow swab.

 

She can swim again.

She can brush her snarly hair

 

before bedtime.

The only flower in the room

 

is the past—a fastening,

fastening, fastening.

 

And I close.