Hystera

My women friends are going half insane:
half from their men, half from their mothers.
I go insane being half a woman.

My mother at eighteen looked too much of me:
bony arms and Annie Lennox spikes,
a flashing hibiscus prom dress,
Half of me tucked in a closed fist
on one side of her ovaries, my sister in the other.
My mother at twenty-one:
in the flower-dotted maternity dress
that smells of warm, old cotton,
her hair ripe cords hung to dry.
My mother now: a void filled
with coffee cups and Bible verses and the urn
of my father’s ashes and baby shoes and empty
diaries and a nationalist’s maddening pique.

My mother wants grandchildren. She knows children
better than she knows herself.
My affliction has freed me of half a madness
and given a double-portion of another. My affliction is
a marriage of two gametes, a double-portion
that can never make a whole being.
Each useless period, I lose
an investment.
An inheritance from a disdained relative.
It is the stab wound of some man
who does not exist and will never empty me.

Myself at twenty-three: an old maid, halved,
insane and doubly insane,
clothed with a dress that cannot fit
my blighted body.

I am not the secret hopes she stored
in the left hand of her ovum, and poured
into the hollows of my milk teeth.
I will not know what it is to be emptied, and filled
and emptied again.