Poem 4, Week 13

When the doctor asked me if I wanted to see the inside
of my cervix I couldn’t resist. I thought it would be bad,
like seeing a cut you made on your hand and trying not to
retch as the moist, white flaps of skin begin to bleed
or like watching a pre-med student extract a needle
from your arm after deciding it was time to “give back”
at the town blood drive. No, the causal turn of my head
to the monitor at my left proved that looking at my cervix
was no more nauseating than staring at a wad of saliva
soaked pink gum or observing what I imagine
the inside of an octopus would look like if sliced opened
and the interior of it’s slick flesh were left on a table--
as if it were a book the owner set down to answer the phone.

In 1956 William Masters and Virginia Johnson invented a sex
machine that filmed a woman from the inside, a hobby horse
with a penis endowed to record. They wanted to see a woman’s
full cycle, comparable, at the time, to her intimate relationship
with the washing machine. It was all to find penile traction
on the labia minora, to find how a woman orgasms, constantly
Asking how does that feel, miss? So when the doctor asks me
If I can feel camera as it searches for cancer, I tell him, no,
it’s about as exciting as doing the laundry. I watch
as it plunges further in the folds of pink valleys searching
For that bit of white flesh hiding from removal.
There is nothing sexy about this,
said 99% of the woman that subjected themselves to Masters
and Johnson’s spin cycle--it was all for science, for the future
benefit of others. That’s what my doctor tells me anyway
when he zones in on a patch of white tissue and claps his hands
in victory. I take a good, hard look at the screen and determine
this is the last time I ever want to see myself from the inside.

Poem 3, Week 12

When she was a girl she hated everything
except girls, except her schoolmate, Sarah.
nothing good can come from kissing
something like a boy, so even Lola with feet

like a boy’s, she hated too. Sarah tied yarn
the color of toasted almonds in her hair

and worn holey knee highs that stopped
just under her thighs. Her thighs so pale
they yelled for eyes to drift from blackboard

to their brightness, so delicious, like a sugared pear.
In college the touching began, first hands, then lips,

then Joan was her first lover. They told jokes
about the girls in their hall, smoked joints
in the closet often after hours of sex on Joan’s bed.

She never wiped her mouth after it grazed over Joan’s
body, just above her knees, but cried for days when her lover

took a boyfriend, and stopped coming to her dorm.
next semester she met Joan in the courtyard

next to the main gate. Joan was two months pregnant
and wanted to have sex with her one more time.
She slapped Joan in the face and said, Yes…please,

one more time.