ESC #3

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Untitled You said no words to me over hours I knew my place

you knew yours together

we rowed in silence with our invisible oars

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Life Below the Silo

There’s a silo near the barn.

My Dad had to climb it.

It’s blue and the sky behind it is blue and the metal rivets sometimes tear the clouds.

If you look up it’s thinner on top, but that’s a trick of the eye, marring a perfect industrial shape.

If you look up you don’t see spilled buckets and rotting hay and sick calves, but that’s a trick of the eye.

There’s a metal cage around the ladder so if you fall you only fall straight down to exactly where you started, or float straight up, through the jet haze, and beyond the silo.

Once the bankman came and said he’d take the house if we didn’t have a clear balance.

Perhaps only this should be said: There’s a silo near the barn.

My Dad had to climb it.

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After

every word had been said I touched the place where last she slept and lay down in a snow

back into oblivion I went, further and further wearing only a thin coat, the skin of me numb white as a thousand other daughters

gone now the chopping of basil, the sweet washing of fruit, the food we put to our mouths for pleasure more than hunger

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the thing about smear tests is that

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For a nine year old girl to go and pee and find a brown splotch in her underpants, there’s nothing really else to say to explain that. The cry from the bathroom – Mommeeee – and the girl’s mother’s intake of breath.

She knows now that a passage of time in the life of her child has ended.

That a passage of time in her own life has ended. She fleetingly thinks of pregnant nine year olds, child brides, cleaning her daughter up.

She takes her into the sitting room. The girl lies on the couch, attacked suddenly by something that feels like it’s trying to claw its way out of her belly. The mother gives her daughter a book on reproduction. The girl reads, inwardly horrified. The mother insists she tell her father about What Happened Today. The girl mumbles, red faced, leaves. * There’s no sitting in the doctor’s waiting room.

There’s nobody else in the clinic at all, no receptionist even, just you and this doctor who talks a mile a minute. You like her, find her easy to talk to. In hindsight, the doctor probably adopted this manner because of the situation & doesn’t connect with you at all.

You outline your medical history, hands jerking minutely on the sides of the chair.

There’s a lull. You both seize the moment to jump to business.

You get up on the table.

The last time you lay on a table, the doctor was going to finger your anus – the snap of the plastic glove, the utter clinicality of it, the smell of shit.

This time, though, you both continue talking as though this is normal.

For the doctor, it is. Perhaps it’s because you’re both female. You’re familiar with the vagina, with bleeding, with knowing that you can talk to each other about things that are taboo in the presence of men. Bleeding, heavy flow, cramps, sickness.

You slide out of your panties. They’re old, the elastic loose. You lie down on your back, and open your legs. *

“It’s called ‘discharge.’”

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“So like gloop that comes out?”

“Yeah, like that.”

“Like puke?”

“No, not like that, this is different. This is a girl thing.”

“Okay.”

“So it happens to everyone.”

“Okay.” You don’t tell her how you scraped some of it off your underpants with your fingernail and smeared it onto a glass slide, how you studied it with your male friend with the microscope that Santie had brought for Christmas. What’s this, he said. You were seasoned scientists at this stage.

Something I found in the bathroom, you tell him. * You’d been reared on tales of smear tests were embarrassing or humiliating. That everyone had to do it, it was just something that was done, and that’s it. You didn’t tell anyone you were going. You felt braver going without them knowing. You sat in the chair with your hands now like frigid mice, and explained to this nice doctor about how your discharge was a strange colour and that you felt sick all the time.

And now you’re on your back with your legs wide open, this lady in-between your legs. You imagine her close to your labia. You picture the shape of the instrument she slides into you by the feel of it inside you. She keeps pushing and it feels like it’s opening and then when she stops, there’s a burning feeling deep inside you but you don’t say anything because you’re macho. You’re not afraid like you were when the other doctor fingered your anus. It’s just that it hurts.

The doctor keeps talking while she works. You banter about World of Warcraft and how her husband plays too much, that in reality she’s his second wife, with the game being the first. In your head the phrase spins round and round – while you’re down there, sweetheart – but you can’t bring yourself to say it, even though you will tell people you did.

“Hm,” the doctor says, withdrawing the instrument from within you as she steps back from between your thighs, “I don’t like the look at that, to be honest with you.”

She holds up a tiny forceps, pincering a blackish gloopy lump. You contemplate it and shrug because that’s the kind of thing the person who said while you’re down there, sweetheart, would do.

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I come back to it again, and again. Again. Just me and this gloomy room, the blink of my monitor on idle. Me on the bed dancing in a ripped t-shirt, me pasting pictures of anything on the walls, me walking, naked, fabulous.

It is a rare and beautiful thing, you know.

You should be honoured.

I know that I wrote about the prostitute but I promise: I was making it up. There’s never been so much as a stiletto heel in this house. I know I said that I made her tea but I swear that it was tea for you that I was wanting.

Your love for me is written all over your body.

I lick your love nightly, my tongue soft to fit into the seams and curvatures of your spine, the slight hills of your shoulder blades, but it’s your wrists I want.

I write about love all day long.

I’d write about love and you forever. At night I careen around the bedroom, the stairwell, deep in the special mindfuck that night and gin brings me, the clusterfuck of dreams and sex and things I can’t have without illegal activity.

It’s the small things I need from you. I said your wrists. I mean your petite bones. Your wrists and feet - those carpals and metacarpals, hinges I could pick my teeth with.

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I want you to leave marks of your adoration on my back, and when your hands are gone, you will need your teeth to love me.

I will build a holy mountain of your bones, those infinitesimal and therefore most beautiful and glistening things.

They’d dry up.

Over time they’d dry up but I would polish them with Vaseline daily, lubing them together for future uses. No shoeboxes for your small parts, no, no.

You’d never be like the others, those wardrobed fossils. Your body needs to be and living for my love to shine upon it. ering person. m m i l g ill be a You w

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