Poetry
Designiments For Unsplash+
Synonyms for an IC3 Female
I am a catafalque
rising pretentiously
like the pie in Jason’s oven
out of a conflation of a changing self
& a pile of remnants of Nan’s DNA.
In the smoke-tinted glass
on Jason’s oven door I am a blur
of a bad girlfriend (in a row)
& a badmouthed migrant (on Twitter).
I add cayenne pepper, ground ginger,
cinnamon powder & garlic granules,
to his filet Mignon in his Mason Cash bowl.
Because I am a pastry crust
I can’t self-elevate to the level
of Jason’s Worcester sauce.
From behind me he says
My kitchen smells foreign.
Because I am a mixture of spices
I inhaled standing on a bier’s wheel
to peer inside a casket camouflaging as a corpse -
a mound-in-a-shroud smelt of a concoction
of peanut, garlic, cayenne pepper, Benin seeds, ginger.
From behind me dad said Pray for her.
I extended a cutlass-blade-of-a-finger
& poked the thing under a barrier of frilly lace
in Nan’s stomach that dad said Killed her.
But dad yelled Who are you?
A sinner who’ll burn in hell fire?
When I ignite a fire in Jason’s kitchen,
puffed up like dough, he yells,
What are you? I say,
I am a burnt dish, that fumigates
England, with Nan’s fumes.
I posed for Egon Schiele on a Gynaecological Ward
My skin is the sombre grey of a cadaver,
speckled with purple veins — a carbon copy
of Schiele’s emaciated mother,
Like a tipped palette cup, I spew green bile.
Mum’s baby-bump massages are synchronised
with the chorus of her song. Think of a name.
Spare me your dose of laughing gas, mum.
So, breaths laboured she soothes a patient
with frenzied prayers instead of analgesics.
Papa God, you glued Michal’s womb shut.
And blessed Hannah who fasted and prayed.
Bless my daughter with a son.
Schiele unmasks mum’s God — a habit’s hood falls off a face
God is colluding with a sinister monk,
stealthily waiting to snatch my foetus.
The truth is a long epidural needle entering my spine.
And I’m pregnant with Schiele’s fear of dying —
in the first trimester of a foetus’s life.
Mum says a childless Krio woman wears
that shame like a flamboyant head wrap.
And at my age, I am a brittle oil painting.
The impious monk’s prediction is inked
into the verso of Schiele’s canvas:
‘This sitter’s womb will be her baby’s coffin.’
Reference: Pregnant Woman and Death (1911), by Egon Schiele
Go Back to the Root Word
After Absence has a grammar, by Fiona Larkin – Poetry Society
I shudder when I hear the word endometriosis.
My GP says it means you bleed where you shouldn’t.
Because like a Black nightshade, I am gamopetalous.
Each month one of my diseased petals falls off.
But the other consanguineous petals bleed too.
And stolen from a Tiger lily, my pollen stains everything:
an ex-fiancé’s cheap duvet cover or his luxurious sheet.
Because my naughty petals are replicating as fast as yeast.
The GP says, uterine tissues were found in sites
outside your – metra – (...) where they don’t belong.
The mitochondria in my cells are programmed
to challenge a territorial body, demarcating boundaries.
If I dropped the suffix – osis, in endo-metri-osis
it shifts the focus off the anomaly all GPs accentuate.
I can celebrate the root: endo, meaning inside in Greek.
Endo is a synonym of in vitro and the antonym of:
dumped on a petri dish — like my shrivelled-up embryo.
Endo means what goes inside. In a Dilation and Curettage,
I am the curette the GP says goes in situ to clean a uterus
and make it nursery ready for a thriving foetus.