It starts with a quick shedding of clothes,
urgent as undressing a lover. The nurse pulls
the door closed. Any moment the doctor
will knock—the wait suspenseful, caught
breath before a jump scare. I lie, supine,
on butcher paper—imagine the doctor
folding it around my meat body. At the shop,
Allen & I choose anniversary filets
with the gravity of a ring. The butcher wraps
the cuts tightly; still, myoglobin bleeds in the folds.
Dr. K says this may be uncomfortable between my splayed
Legs, an uncanny intimacy. The thin hospital sheet
covers her head. We could be Magritte’s lovers
husked over in fabric, but her invisible face,
the bottle of KY, requires my exposure. Dr. K explains
I will now spread the labia. I am inserting the speculum
into the vagina. Here, the body is constituent parts—at best,
a living copy of a textbook diagram. Our bodies studied, still
in context of the man. Claudius Galen’s therapies
for hysteria persisted seventeen centuries, Aquinas
asserts the woman is a failed man. Butter runs circles
in the skillet—the hiss of a good sear. The chunks
of meat could be from any cow. How easy
to reduce a body to a single piece—a sum
to be paired. Each filet the model of bos taurus,
each vulva, sapian. Dr. K asks my vagina,
Are you sexually active? Such focus on the parts.
Does a doctor see the speculum as the artist
sees the brush? An artist sees the forest as space
between the leaves. A flower becomes a vulva.
A speculum becomes a gavel. I long to yell
at everyone: Don’t look at me! Instead, I beg
my lover to rebuild me. Mere, her fierce aphrodisia,
reunites me and my body. Mere never says labia,
says pussy with an epicurean devotion
I yearn to feel. I think of reduction, slicing
the filet, the impossible repair I expect from lovers
who I imagine live only when inside my body—who exist
suspended in the form where Dr. K clicks their sexes
into a neat dichotomy. Dr. K asks Do you use protection?
Mostly, I think, we use each other.
Liz Harms is a poet and feminist originally from Arkansas, and she serves as the editor of Ninth Letter. Liz’s work was chosen by Juan Felipe Herrara as a finalist for the 2022 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and was awarded an Honorable Mention for Nimrod’s 2023 Pablo Neruda Prize. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, The Journal, Arkansas International, Nimrod, Michigan Quarterly Review, Crab Creek Review, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter at @Liz_Harms and on Instagram at @lizharms.
Photo credit: Parentingupstream