As a girl, I fingered the penises
in Momma’s copy of The Doctor’s Book of Home Remedies,
a habit, dragging my finger while I studied
blister and boil, admiring the penis’s profile
glossed in primary colors, or the uterus, a red yawn
widening, those doodles, my most detailed lesson
of the bellow below my belt, the grammarless
clamor of sex, of blood, of a mother
who I would one day see in this exhibit,
her belly a cabinet shelving the striations of her bell-
shaped uterus. In a month’s time, I will be slit
sinew from skin, doctors clefting the webbed
fat wickering my womb, then snip
my fibrous knots, I must admit then
it will be the only way my uterus is worthy
of exhibition, my muscular cauliflower
so unlike the drawings thumbed
on my childhood floor, my uterus lumped, bruised.
When the anesthetic quilts over me
I will dream, as I witnessed, what could be:
ovaries polished as jade stone, the glossy bauble
of my fundus, wonder clutched in a perfect wound.
