Deluge

by Leila Chatti

  LITANY WHILE READING SCRIPTURE IN THE GYNECOLOGIC ONCOLOGY WAITING ROOM

  And God said, let there be blood

  And God said, flood

  And God said, good

  is a woman with fruit

  in her womb and not

  in her hand

  And God said, sin

  And God did not say, forgive

  And God said, I will make a stormy wind

  And God said, son, a breath

  stirring

  And God said, highly favored

  And God said, condemned

  And God said, I will blot out man

  whom I have created, for I am sorry

  that I have made them

  And God said, listen

  and sank a boy

  in her like a stone

  MENORRHAGIA

  Christmas, flew home packaged like a gift. Beneath my jeans a childlike padding. Came to adore the wee god, his dolorous mother. All while bleeding like a can of cherries. Clots sluicing down my thighs. The storefront windows glaucous, spotted with ashen, ineffectual stars. From heaven dropped unrelenting sleet. The dawns all too bright and immaculate. Lit by snowlight, ached prostrate before a mirror, bare and quivering in its stare. The runnels running downward, red ribbons. Porcelain like a bank of snow. Each night a night silent and wholly unbearable. Stains blooming on sheets like poinsettias. Percocets tumbling like flurries on the tongue. Fall on your knees. Collapsed sudden in a vestibule. O hear the angel voices. Rose fevered, soaked with slush. Flew home for Christmas, plane niveous as a dove. The window’s bleed hole haloed, a nimbus of tinselly frost. Leaned feebly against the pane. The cities rutilant, scarred by streets. The lakes spattered black and viscous. The sky blushing as if shamed.

  MOTHER

  If you had asked me, thirteen, what I wanted

  to be one day, I wouldn’t have said it.

  I wanted, for a long time, to be anything

  but myself, knew that a soon-to-be

  woman was the second worst thing

  in the world after a woman, full

  stop, and I was heading there fast.

  I could see it, my breasts rudely

  nudging into view, their snug caps

  like the knit caps of infants, rosy-

  colored as a tongue. And how

  terrifying, the thought of a mouth there,

  rooting, and what could be drawn

  from me that I didn’t need—what else

  skulked in me unseen, stirring in secret

  vats with milk yet untapped, and blood,

  the strange, new wellspring? I was just beginning

  to understand the possibilities, my body’s

  elusive, independent workings, machineries

  chugging away in dark chambers

  not just left to but simply

  their own devices, unknowable and sovereign.

  What I wanted, always, to be:

  in control. And I knew this was

  impossible, just as I knew, even then, that

  to be a mother was to be the only

  permissible form of a woman, the begrudging

  exception to the rule of our worth-

  lessness.

  So if you asked me again,

  twenty-three, I’d tell you the worst thing

  you could be is not a woman but

  barren, the industry shut down and the parts

  missing, malformed. And I’d tell you the shame of it:

  the feminine failure, its ache

  a reminder—at the center the tumor

  ballooning, like hope.

  TUMOR

  PORTRAIT OF THE ILLNESS AS NIGHTMARE

  No matter how many times you ring the bell in the bad dark,

  no one will let you in. You face the fun

  house with its mirrors on the outside

  so everyone can see. And everyone looks. You are in your underwear

  and the room is cold. The doctor’s stethoscope pressed to you

  becomes suddenly a snake. Your heart hisses in its cage. Your heart sputters,

  a doused flame. You are drowning in your blue paper gown, which recedes

  in the back like an ocean, your skin a bank of hot sand.

  The horizon bleeds and the days and you

  wander lost in a city of scalpels where everything glitters

  and pills fade like moons on your tongue. You sidle through

  sterile labyrinths and piss in a cup. You wait in a room like a chapel

  or the belly of a beast. Either way, you think

  something will save you, you believe this the whole fearsome time.

  Your god comes and he is ordinary and terrible. He confers

  with the doctors at your kitchen table and tells you to eat

  your clots, round as peas. You want dessert. You want to

  deceive him, but he, like you, has eyes, and uses them.

  You are grounded, in the ground. The pit is a tub

  and you are washing in your body’s black water. You rise

  like a fever. You writhe on a bed on a stage, the strings reaching

  toward heaven. There is a momentary break for everyone

  else: intermission. They chatter in the lobby. You babble

  symptoms in a white confessional. You fall from a great height and land

  on a gurney. You are at the front of a classroom and you are stripped

  to your bones. The doctor points to your pelvis. You model

  the tumors—in this light they look pretty, like jewels.

  ANGEL

  After a month of asking, suddenly, a voice. It says you deserve that which has happened to you. It says I see what you do with your long, terrene hands. Maundering through the banalities of my life, it follows, speaking, as if from a frosty bag of peas in the freezer aisle, speaking, while I am on my knees, scrubbing the bathroom floor, trying to love a man. Its speech is disquieting company, but company nonetheless—a TV left on and turned low. It desperately wants my attention but is polite, which is its defining weakness. Sometimes I catch it stirring out of the corner of my eye—a glint at the end of my cat’s whiskers, a spangle on the ceiling of indiscernible source. More often, though, it looks like me, only a little off, like my reflection in the pregnant belly of a spoon. In fact, when I speak to it, I use my own name. I’m not sure if it minds. It repeats instead its refrain. It says God has plans for you. It says I didn’t say they were good.

  HAEMORRHOISSA’S MENARCHE

  I wanted to be a woman

  until I was. What opened

  in me brought such pain

  I believed finally

  one day I would die. But it subsided—

  for a while. I remember thinking

  I was cured, I could go back

  to being a child.

  Then the next month: red

  seed in the morning’s bowl

  unfurling as it touched the water.

  ETIOLOGY

  EYES OPENED, AS GODS

  and ye shall be as gods, knowing

  Like suns I could not lower

  my gaze from.

  I admit I liked

  the warmth of them—tongues

  in the dark

  of my ears like secrets,

  palms

  splayed upon

  my thighs like stars.

  God, I felt you

  had designed them purposefully

  for me,

  as you had once forged

  my foremother.

  Felt a tug

  of primordial

  hunger. Dreamt of snakes

  that let me

  hold them. All day eyed

  the shiny apples

  of their throats—

  14, SUNDAY SCHOOL, 3 DAYS LATE

  I’m not stupid—

  I know how it works.

  But there was a time when

  she was just some virgin nobody, too,

  small purse of
her womb

  and her ordinary eggs

  waiting like loose pearls.

  THE SCARE

  One year before I knew

  I was sick, I was twenty-one

  and one week late, I squatted over

  a stick bought down the street

  from my first apartment, my first

  live-in boyfriend stationed in the doorway

  gnawing at his cuticles, both of us

  nodding, dazed, as I wiped away

  piss from my shaking hands, saying

  if yes, then yes, meaning okay and being okay

  with it, waiting and waiting and only realizing after

  the apparition—no—we might have been

  half hoping for it,

  and so,

  a year later, when I am sick and squatting and feel

  something slip from me

  so big, I scream—(I am sure I have lost

  an unbearable thing)—

  but when he runs in to find me

  howling, hysterical,

  in the bowl there is nothing

  but blood, a gelatinous clot

  enormous enough to fill it, my body

  throbbing, me wailing Oh God, Oh

  God, I thought it was—

  my face in my hands as the hour

  passed slowly and I

  waited, emptying, still something

  like empty.

  NIGHT GHAZAL

  I boil night on the stove; soak it until it’s thoroughly done, black.

  We drink it like tea, unspeaking—swallow its moths, distant suns, black.

  Through the telescope’s silver barrel, litter of white stars

  already dead. They glitter like shrapnel. The sky, gun black.

  The blood comes and comes; I spend all night in the tub,

  water running. It pours from me: gush of child undone. Black.

  I tell him, fill my darkest places. My fingers grip too hard,

  leave small moons along his back. The bruises come, black.

  Dream, small death. I become a phantom above the bed.

  Sleep, the simpler twin. The same eyes closing. The same gone black.

  HYMEN

  Second blood—I never knew you.

  After the first, scoured the bed

  for your blazoned blot, and came up

  empty. Perhaps I was born without

  you—a box with no prize

  inside, a sundae

  with no cherry on top. God of good

  girls, god of matrimony, mother-

  state, which I consider

  a distant country with a discordant

  tongue, did you speak

  with God and conclude I hadn’t

  use for you? Once I was small

  as your kin, so small

  and for such a long time, longer than

  I’ve lived, I fit inside my mother

  when she fit inside her mother, and so on and so

  forth, and further, a nest of matrons, mise en

  abyme in which to be female is to be something

  like infinity, and was it determined then

  what kind of woman I would be?

  It seems I’ve always been frightened,

  little veil, of wedlock’s

  lock clicking shut. The heritable procession

  of women whispering in the aisle

  of my pulse don’t do, don’t do, don’t.

  And I haven’t done, this

  the gravamen, the grave

  I’ve dug with the spade of pleasure.

  But, wanting

  seal of want, I did

  want it, did choose to commit

  my life’s greatest transgression

  with a benevolent accomplice, and so,

  in the herebefore, you could say I am among

  the spared. What a mess this messlessness

  of you could have been in any

  number of lives my size, billowing specters

  of dresses on a line

  of possibility, lives in which I am the brides-

  maid, and you, maidenhead, the bride

  given away, where I am the acquired

  property and you the red ribbon

  severed in the threshold, I

  the purse and you the coin

  tendered. Perhaps no one

  ever told you, precious emblem

  of innocence, simulacrum for

  honor, that some believe

  you the most important part of me, vital, like a heart

  a man gets the thrill of bursting

  where he can see it, that blood

  is owed to him—and that’s the heart

  of it, isn’t it? Of a woman, you

  the only blood worth anything.

  THE BLOOD

  She had the blood, too. Bathtubs filled

  to enameled lip and her body

  pouring. As a girl, I thought being

  a woman meant your life spilling from you

  like a cup of juice you kept knocking over.

  I was young enough to think anything

  that bled was a wound. The moon

  waited like a round-faced witness

  in the window each month, steam

  erasing the mirrors and the walls

  weeping. All night the tap running

  and running. I wanted to know

  how pain made a woman

  curl like a pill bug poked with a stick.

  I wanted to know everything about suffering

  so I could avoid it. I was young enough

  to think things like that, seven years

  small, when calamity was skinned knees and little

  brothers and an upturned sundae

  crashing to the floor like a chandelier.

  All I knew of disaster was Hollywood

  movies where houses were swallowed

  easy as bubblegum and spaceships

  hovered like gnats out of reach—ruin always

  at a distance—and you could press your face into

  your mother and everything would be all right

  once you turned on the lights.

  Sometimes, now, when the ache comes

  and I am coiled in dark water, I remember

  that distant self like a daughter

  I gave up or lost in a bustling

  food court and never saw again,

  the remembering painful.

  And sometimes I wonder if she knew

  why her blood came angrier

  than any other’s, blood like my blood,

  which now seethes and conspires and appears

  on MRI scans like a black eye or a crop circle

  or the earth’s eager void.

  METRORRHAGIA

  Clouds purpling, clotted near heaven. Henrik says

  the sky will burst, will be good for the seeds. Henrik

  on his knees, planting, thumb turning in black

  soil. Birds scattering, spotting the dark. My hands

  at the faucet’s mouth. Summer blackberries bleed

  a strong stain. My black thumbs, turning.

  Henrik on his knees, good to me. Plants

  kisses on my cheek, holds my waist. My hands

  turning a bowl clean. Purpling at the window,

  clouds like blackberries, clots. Rain spotting

  black soil like a stain, good for the seeds.

  Cloudbursts sudden as a faucet. The sky’s mouth

  full with blackbirds like seeds. My body

  stained, high above the knee. Dark spots

  at the bottom of a bowl. Henrik planting blackberries

  on my tongue, leaning into me. My hands

  at my body’s mouth, sudden. Heaven bleeds

  brief rain. Clouds scattering, like seeds. Henrik’s

  mouth purpled with sweet. Sky darkening,

  turning. My body floating, cloud-like, adrift

  in clean water. A black stain spreading, like wings.

&nbs
p; STILL LIFE WITH HEMORRHAGE

  A wine crate for a nightstand, and on it, a rose

  gone bad in a cup. Its water

  a swallow of shadow, murk of rot

  and sugar. Clothes sloughed, bodiless, and half-

  eaten on a plate,

  a plum in its juice. At the center

  of the scene: a woman on a mattress

  on the floor. Her arms cast out

  as if preparing to fly

  or as if pinned, savior

  or specimen. Still asleep.

  Day breaking through the window

  a warm leak.

  The woman in its spotlight

  like a halo. As if something holy,

  or at least chosen.

  HAEMORRHOISSA

  Did she, like me, lose years of nights,

  up at an ungodly hour, washing the sheets? She must have been

  very tired. She must have been ashamed, waking again

  to a stain in the bed, still warm like a lover just risen, dayspring

  seeping over the weedy yard outside. She likely had once

  a husband, but not long, not after. Because no one touched her

  she must have touched herself, she must have known a woman could

  die from living untouched and preferred to be satisfied. Her red hands

  turning slowly and brightly like fish under a faucet

  in the back of the quiet, lonesome house. Sometimes, I’m sure, she thought