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Poetry | October 2016

Piñata Uterus

By Talya Jankovits

It sways before me in a weak wind.
Shredded, gutted, hanging by the thinnest string:
my piñata uterus. I look upon it the way one stumbles
upon natural disaster, fatal crash, mangled destiny.

I have been here before, bat in hand, ready to play.
Intimate with the routine, bloody mess trickling down my legs
like dripping candle wax. Hot. Burning.
Vulva vulnerable to biological fate,

biological bust. I strike hard.
Force drives it backwards, away from me;
a bit falls to the floor, pooling.
I strike again, so hard a hole appears.

I want confetti, blue or pink, or daisy yellow, little ducks or
elephants with long, lacing noses. Musical rattles, lullabies,
soft, suckling lips, and milk, warm and rushing. I do not want
a bloody rain of sanitary napkins. I do not want this cramping,
bloating, ugly mâché uterus.

This round I do not fill my piñata
with needles, pills, petri dishes. Only with hope.
Hope exploding right out of the thin membrane
as it breaks. I know how it ends, the fragments:

red ribbons of uterine residue, cutting me:
bright shards of menstrual glass, scintillas of the sacred
cascading down, growing everything around me,
nothing inside me.

The shadow of a spouse stretches across my field,
fertilizing it with his touch, his smell, his taste on my lips.
Together we take a small hand each, our daughters,
lead them from spliced defeat hanging from a limb.

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