︎︎︎
KAY ARE
Neurowomb
And finally one day it slipped out, twin
and compass rose to my brain – the womb
mind’s rhyme but also seasonal respite
from its reason. Once departed I missed less
the blind old lady’s upturned scales of justice,
ovarian weighing pans after delicate suspense
stabbing me in the lumbago with their immense
grinding fervour, stubby fists on my eggs
in sharp collision with every bloody thing
they touched as they fled. Missed more
her coiled idea: precise reproduction
inside my body of the shelter (that mirrors still
my sleeping shape; that I did and did not
escape) that my body once found inside
my mother. No sum of rationality delivers
that kind of poetry. And yet the red brain’s symmetry
now motors all my reproductive labour:
feebler sibling, it tenders mere document of
wombs, of which mine is the only pretty one
that every woman has, or had.
And finally one day it slipped out, twin
and compass rose to my brain – the womb
mind’s rhyme but also seasonal respite
from its reason. Once departed I missed less
the blind old lady’s upturned scales of justice,
ovarian weighing pans after delicate suspense
stabbing me in the lumbago with their immense
grinding fervour, stubby fists on my eggs
in sharp collision with every bloody thing
they touched as they fled. Missed more
her coiled idea: precise reproduction
inside my body of the shelter (that mirrors still
my sleeping shape; that I did and did not
escape) that my body once found inside
my mother. No sum of rationality delivers
that kind of poetry. And yet the red brain’s symmetry
now motors all my reproductive labour:
feebler sibling, it tenders mere document of
wombs, of which mine is the only pretty one
that every woman has, or had.