Hot Air Balloon

Slivering ghost girl slants sideways,
feet firmed to avoid going backwards.

Ghost girl, you are made of feathers
and phantoms, but still bleed when pricked.

You are also still beautiful, though almost
never feel such an outlandish thing.

Beautiful goes backwards sometimes:
scars healing, skin knitting back together.

Backwards goes beautiful sometimes:
raised white moons kissed across breasts.

Sometimes, at night, she still hears the specters
of uterus, tubes, gallbladder, appendix, tonsils.

Hears them howl, their bent claws beneath
her skin, aiming to drag her inside out.

Drag her inside out, take her ovaries too
if you must. Slivering ghost girl slants

sideways, learns to blow her pain into
a hot air balloon that floats up, up, and up.

She’ll ride so high, the clouds become dinosaurs,
and the pain just part of the atmosphere. She’ll move

through each twist or stab as if it’s mere mist.
She’ll toss each pain pill into the air one by one.

Tiny narcotic circles, a shade bluer than the sky.
Handfuls of them, plunging to the corn fields below.

Self Portrait as My Own Thighs

Two year-old thighs: A ring toss
of flesh, a bubbling-over of pale.
Altogether too many knee pinches
from an aunt I see just once a year.

Ten years old, I teach myself to roller skate,
thighs arcing above sidewalk blur, so stem thin
I’m called Skinny Bones at school. (Until I
develop breasts. This changes the conversation.)

Sixteen years old, my thighs and calves turn
suddenly, undeniably blue. The hematologist
makes me circle eighty bruises with a black Sharpie,
insists that someone must be beating me.

Eighteen years old, almost exclusively
torn fishnet thighs. Paired perfectly
with a black corset, cinching small waist
smaller. The bruises, still a mystery.

Twenty-six years old. Two years into
a decade in bed, pudding thighs, muscle
disintegrated. I tire just walking to the kitchen,
manage mango smoothies two meals a day.

Thirty-four years old, and my medicine
causes a manic episode that jolts me out
of bed. I dance eight hours a day, winnowing
my thighs down to ferocious ballerina slices.

But next the psychiatric hospital, where there
is just airlessness. Anti-psychotics bloat my
abdomen. To walk, I lean on my roommate’s
dandruffed shoulder. Thighs flop like frantic fish.

Thirty-six, no time to think about thighs, it is only
uterus now. Time to finally remove it, and yank
out blackened appendix to boot. I dream
of tap shoes as I slog awake from anesthesia.

I’m forty-one when I finally begin to recognize
my own body again. I stand on the tips of my toes
until my thick thighs burn, go liquid. In winter,
friction rubs my inner thighs red, and I celebrate.

Twenty-five years later, eighty blue bruises: Gone.

Just as the body keeps score, the body is able
to flush clean the scoreboard, leaving skin as pale
as two year-old ring toss flesh. I rub fortunate palms
over my thighs. Tiny, tickled hairs leap to attention.

Hummingbird Wing-Whir

I like to think of the uterus as a lighthouse
says the sonographer, gently pushing
the plastic wand deeper into my vagina.
I flinch at the pain, bite my chapped lips.

The ovaries can float loose from their lighthouse,
she continues, when you no longer have a uterus.
It makes them harder to find. Her metaphor
is not perfect, but is far more poetic
than what I expected from an E.R. visit.

She says she can’t tell me what she sees,
but the wand, like a vibrator with none
of the fun, digs harder and harder into
my left side. She’s giving herself away.

Then, a steady whirring sound. The tiny
roar of blood rushing around my eggs.
This is the closest I will ever come to listening
to a child’s pulse within my own body.

Earlier, the doctor, cherub-cheeked and kind,
said if the CAT scan revealed nothing,
it would be reasonable to determine
the endometriosis is back.

He did not see me go bloodless.
I think I even managed a small smile,
no product of pleasure or glimmer,
just an automatic, polite knee jolt.

The endometriosis is not back.

The fatty lining of my abdomen
is inflamed. Rare, says the doctor.
Mysterious. Then: Mesenteric panniculitis.
There’s a bloody hitchhiker on my left
ovary to boot, a complex hemorrhagic cyst.

My face crumbles as I ask for something
for the pain. The doctor smiles. Tells me
to take Advil. Tylenol. I gather my paperwork,
the books I brought but was in too much pain
to read. Limp my way back to the parking lot.

Later, I will sob, because I now have another
rare disease, not understood, possibly autoimmune.
Because I may need surgery number nine, to peel loose
the cyst I can picture only as jellyfish. Because even
with Percocet, it hurts to stand for three seconds straight.

Later, I will sob, but all the way back to the car,
the hummingbird wing-whir of the ultrasound
machine rushes in my ears. Such a beautiful
sound, but all I can make out is hope in reverse.

I’m a woman without children.
I’m a queer who’s too sick to adopt.
I have three cats, which is enough because it has to be.
I’m an optimist without a lighthouse.