Every month you screamed, by Leslie Roberts starting at age thirteen, sloughing off unused lining for two weeks at a time turned my attention inward, downward. My friend’s mom celebrated hers with cake, but your anger arrived in me the night before a swim meet and a week away at camp—unapologetic from the beginning, you reached through my veins, drained them of iron, made me dizzy, made me faint, blacked out on the kitchen floor, head smacked on the tile. Eventually I gave you what You squeezed my muscles, doubled me I thought you wanted: conception, over, heaving, incapacitated, rearranged implantation, zygote, embryo, me, pushed me, forced me to be heartbeat—unceasing, you brave like nothing happened. built another organ, another life— swelled, expanded, shoved aside whatever They said it was normal, said your mood was in your way, claimed the entirety would even out, you’d calm down, quit of my abdomen, and in the process made me protesting, that this was just how it is sick, averse to everything except sleep, to be a teenage girl. I tried sometimes incapable of even breathing. to medicate you away, but You spent months practicing contractions unlocked a door to the darkness without pattern or trigger, prevented me deep and heavy over me from peace, inhabited my mind, demanded suffocated my tired lungs. my entire being conform to your needs There is no counter-protest and your timing, when at last, one week early that can match your passion for taking me those waters surged, but then for an entire day away from everything else, you merely pretended to labor, waited taking me into myself. until the middle of the night to seize and squeeze and force open my bones so the bones of another could distort through your narrow exit.
Fist-sized
For weeks you screeched as you shrank back into my pelvis, cursed at having to once again share the cavity of my body with pancreas and liver wailed with grief that your reign of glory and terror was over. Six weeks you bled, but on the seventh week you would not rest: without hesitation you started back determined, renewed, ready, like a raised fist. 14