Pain knots my stomach, doubles me over, retching, at the toilet bowl. Bedraggled and wet, my face is pale and distorted. Tiny hands twist my insides, wringing them out like wet washing. The hands relax and I sink to lie on the cool tiles, whimpering. I wonder if this is what contractions will feel like.
I haul my wet washing body from place to place, every step a promise, reluctantly given. My mind is a sand bag, absorbing nothing. It leaks. Drip, drip, drip the steady drops dry as if they were never there at all. My inner heat lives close to the surface in this weather, sapping and oozing. It radiates; it seeks to escape. It warms unpleasantly on the way out. Deliberate breaths catch in the throat and lungs and I struggle, smothered by another’s rhythms.
Sunlight reflected atop buildings, a bejeweled woman’s hand waving her fingers goodbye, and it was just for me. Winking at me. The city’s buildings all of the same level look like a carved frieze, with slow moving snakes oozing through it, across it, through the deep, straight, thick perpendicular lines of the rues. Past the city lay farm land: fertile patches of land like dark green scabs.
Beneath the moonlight your pale knee -
The moon, so large and yellow,
Lopsided, bitten.
I want to climb inside;
Your mind unfurls beside me.
