Fear food #1

to relish you (as I did) I must: step out naked into daylight: lie, confront the mirror with the apex of my pelvis. Take each hipbone to the crescent of my palm and know—know they are stronger than sabre, stronger than whale bone, mammoth tusk bellowing inside of me. Look each limb in the eye. Hold my gaze; drink, drink deeply from the collarbone goblets from the water at bay in the wink of my arm gulping the droplets that quiver in transparent moons like a child at the drinking fountain. Lick my body like a thirsty plant. Like a molly cat bathing her babies. Lick my nose because I can. Suck on my arm jam ‘til love bites bloom, skin red and pulsing with the ability to kiss back; kiss each finger as I lick food from her; kiss each plump tip as though it is topped with a raspberry. Delicious! Kiss the prickled peaks of my knees; I might let me sprout into a great forest—taiga, boreal, garden orchard—and kiss that too, drawing suns in all the corners I once begged not to fold like a child crayoning every corner of a page yellow. Nimbuses of holy gratitude. Kiss only those who make my body feel like a body— who speak with eyes of desire and see me living, flushing between the lip of being real (no more than a body) and a body, hailed godly: the weight of a flesh that moves creases, pulses, swells, foams, storms with the gravity of solar, with cosmos. The celestial warmth of a back dimple. Gaia, Terra, Jörd, Orion’s belt: the Three Sisters found in every trinity of cellulite Libra’s suns and stars shining in arcs through the chiffon veils of each stretch mark. and the rest is drag digital photography

Copper

Is it proper etiquette to shave for your gyno?

—I ask myself too late. Three strangers huddle together in a cramped, frigid examining room, eye level with my perineum’s knotted whorl. There’s one more standing at my head. Surrendering her bony fingers to my pained grasp.

Diplomatically, she looks everywhere but below the thin blue crepe paper draped over my waist. The wall of blue makes abstract the gynecologist’s narration: words like “speculum” and “tenaculum” and “intrauterine device” float up from behind it and dissolve before they reach me in a cloud of disinfectant and nerves.

I try to focus on the ceiling. Technicolor blue and fuchsia dots bloom, starbursts exploding in and out of my vision as she inserts an impossibly tiny, T-shaped piece of copper up into the plum’s pit that, if you sliced me open and peeled the softness back, sits just beneath my navel.

The copper, so that any sperm who dare to invade are poisoned. A drop of arsenic in the ambrosia.

Copper: one of the seven metals of alchemy, associated with Venus, Goddess of Love. Desire, sex, creativity. Also, fertility—ha.

Copper: electrical wiring. The coating of a penny. Circuit boards. Vacuum tubes. Valuable, useful things. They must’ve thought, might as well weave it into this kind of tubing, too.

Copper: the ancient Egyptians used it to disinfect wounds, to clean tools before sugery.

Copper: seven years wed, copper: bringer of good luck. Opener of root and sacral chakras.

My root and sacral chakras convulse and wail as the gynecologist and her assistants ratchet the speculum’s duckbill even wider. To distract myself, I train my eyes on the poster on the wall that proposes, as size comparisons for the IUD: a strawberry, three almonds nestled one on top of the other.

A sugar packet. A strawberry, the poster sneers, is something that you can easily visualize, that you might slide through your howling red causeways up into your uterus out of sheer curiosity. Or a slow Tuesday night. It feels impossible that a strawberry might trigger the ricocheting spasms so violent that my eyes roll, turning the volume up on the fluorescence so high that it turns black. This is what I signed a consent form for. It was a choice: the violent insertion I’ll accept now to avoid an extraction later.

They say Roe will be completely dismantled within the year.

“Big breath in,” the gynecologist instructs.

They say this is the first step to Gilead. I’m tired of the Atwood quotes. “And out.”

They say this is the first generation of women that will have less rights than their mothers and grandmothers.

“In…”

No one says, “I’m planning my life around where abortion might be safe and legal.”

No one says, “Even a 99% effectiveness rate feels tenuous, the only thing that stands between me and a clandestine extraction.”

“…and out.”

The IUD is insurance. It is exculpation, proof of due diligence, in case of emergency. As if they care. As if that would redeem me. My logic is Catholic, though I no longer am: suffering in exchange for salvation.

The gynecologist continues to rummage around, clanging her tools like tuneless wind chimes, cranking and dilating and plunging what feels like an invisible hand seizing at that plum’s pit, twisting and now meaning to drag it out of my body the way it came.

And then, relief.

“All done,” she chirps. One of her assistants busies herself with cleaning the tools. More antiseptic. Gauze. They seem so innocuous now.

I sit up. There is blood on the blue crepe paper.

The gynecologist shuffles through the after-visit papers, staples, signs, and dates on the dotted line next to my nervous scrawl. Dense paragraphs list all the possible complications and side effects I’ve apparently agreed to. Or at least acknowledged: “… may attach or go through your uterus…may cause anemia, pain during sex, spotting, heavier bleeding, and backaches…has been associated with increased risk of Pelvic Inflammatory Disease.” clean acrylic paint

I study my signature, doubled over. I signed on the dotted line for this, all the things that could go wrong. I signed for the promise of total protection for ten years. So I wouldn’t have to sign over the deed to my body before then. Fingers crossed, will that be enough?

But I also signed on the dotted line to adorn my insides in copper wiring, to alchemize fear into pleasure. To carry with me always a totem of desire and luck, a talisman of circuit boards and pennies.

To be reborn a Venus from the inside out.

1 “Copper Symbolism: Meanings, Rituals - The Lucky Antler.” Accessed January 21, 2022. https://theluckyantler.com/copper-symbolism/.

2 Miracle Aerospace. “Why Is Copper Used In Printed Circuit Boards?,” November 27, 2018. https://www.miracleaerospace.com/blog/copper-used-printed-circuit-boards/.

3 ebay. “Vacuum Mechanical Gauge Copper Tubing Line Kit 1/8” OD x 12’ Foot.” Accessed March 10, 2022. https://www.ebay.com/itm/222113072704.