You Should Know Better

Nobody, no matter how starved
for touch, looks forward
to a pelvic
exam. Nobody sings
zippedy-do-dah
with her feet in stirrups,
even stirrups
cozied up in oven mitts.

She warms the speculum,
my good doctor, warns me
before each touch.
And still I jump
a little, push back
from the edge
a little, close my eyes
to interrogation,
no parts private
under probing lights.

I try to see this
as routine. Spritz
fixes cells
swabbed from my cervix
onto glass slides,
their testimonies invisible
to the naked eye.

One gloved hand inside
she slides the warm other
skin to skin over my abdomen.
This year she stops. Checks again.

Waits till I dress
to say to my face
Tumor.
I stutter,
What b-brings them on?
and she says, professional
as ever, Dirty thoughts,
usually.
Well, no wonder.

This weird cellular stuff's
passed down and down,
generations.
Nobody in my family
ever breathed a word.
I call my grandmother,
blurt, What do you know
about hysterectomies?
and she says, I only had
one. One's all you get,
you know.

What's the etiquette?
I ask to see it,
whatever they take out,
curious about
what has come to live in me,
curious too to see in person
what I've known
mostly from sketches-
instructions tucked inside
the Tampax box,
The Visible Woman, her layers
peeled back, Our Bodies,
Ourselves, and once
in the 70s a practitioner's
purple hand mirror
held so I could see.

Groggy after surgery
thumbing the pain button
like a contestant on Jeopardy
What is morphine?
I imagine never moving again.
Each swell of pain
crests, rolls on.
The thread
stitching me together
dissolves.
Of course they found things
they hadn't counted on.
Of course my beloved
kissed the scar.

And because I asked,
they showed me
my Fallopian tubes
sturdy as heater hoses.
My cervix knobby as a punched
nose. Slashed tire
womb. The tumor
that grew inside
heavy, a shot put,
but marbled, muscular,
my secret unscathed heart.
And the bonus tumor
growing on a stalk,
odd yellow,
yolk of all my eggs
never ripened into children,
renegade ovary,
releasing all through me
fugitive colors.