GloPoWriMo 2020 Day 2: A Geography of the Interior

Prompt: Our (optional) prompt for the day takes a leaf from Schuyler’s book, as it were, and asks you to write a poem about a specific place —  a particular house or store or school or office. Try to incorporate concrete details, like street names, distances (“three and a half blocks from the post office”), the types of trees or flowers, the color of the shirts on the people you remember there. Little details like this can really help the reader imagine not only the place, but its mood – and can take your poem to weird and wild places.

Today was a bad, bad pain day. This is all I could come up with for place before I gave it up, and now I'm going to bed in hopes that tomorrow will be better.


A Geography of the Interior

"It's only two small fibroids. They shouldn't cause this amount of pain. There's really no pathology to explain it."

After countless scans, more scans and ultrasounds

I should be intimately familiar with this space

but I’m not. Its geographical details elude me still:

grainy dots and nebulous lines delineating ovary walls

two small fibroids – closely-observed old friends

agglutinated amorphous clumps pale against a blurred

grey-black panorama, an arrested starfield in warp speed.

Decades of scientific advances, yet they still can’t explain why

these smooth blubber-pale egg-sacs, a delicate lace

of membrane, blood vessels and capillaries

a placid monochrome fishbowl curve on ultrasound

turns into a battlefield of morning stars each month

sharp spikes endlessly lacerating soft tissue

this space that should birth new life

but instead births infinite permutations of pain:

a penance (so they say) for unmarried, childless singlehood.