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.
2 comments:
Trista,
I think of Sharon Olds, of course, when I read this. I bet you're a fan, or have at least read a lot of her stuff.
You might try playing around with the sequence here, to start. The washing machine references in the second paragraph seem to offer plenty of opportunity, and I think you could connect them, more easily, to the events in the first paragraph if you started the piece that way. Maybe, too, you could tie the octopus from the first paragraph to the Masters and Johnson device.
You might take another look at "The Glass" and study how Olds compares that glass of sputum to the sun, her father's ebbing life, and a new center of a solar system.
This one is much more discursive than you usually are. I've seen that in a few of the later pieces you've turned in. Seems an interesting move for you, as it's much easier now to pare down, compress. I might suggest now to return and try to cut away some of less energetic language, try to highlight the more startling passages by taking out the extraneous.
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