Mandy May: On My Uterus
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
On My Uterus
I.
She likes ginger lemon tea and baths the temperature of hell fire.
She is empty and swollen. She is bitter and resentful.
She has been burned and scarred like the witch that she is.
Maybe the pulling pain is just her stretch back to the earth.
To be rubbed into the dirt. To harvest her own home.
To find that cradle knowing she will never hold.
II.
She sips her tea. She resigns to disbelief.
She takes a pounding she didn’t ask for.
She bleeds and bleeds and bleeds and smells like rusted copper.
I soothe her, spread tincture soft across the underbelly.
She moans sweet and reminds me that somewhere
I am soft, somewhere I am warm, somewhere we wait for extraction.
Mandy May is a Baltimore MD based writer and designer. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts from the University of Baltimore in and is currently working toward her Doctorate in Interaction and Information Design. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Magic: Moon Tides Sing Violet Petals (Babe Press) and co-curated Nasty: an anthology celebrating dark spirits (Babe Press). She believes in ghosts, magic, and the splendor of a body failing. She has three cats.
