This Morning

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mumber one, poetry

January 16, 2020

This Morning

by Rachel Zucker

This Morning just because you woke up thinking how (not) funny it would be to be hit by a buggy on the beach on Fire Island just like Frank O’Hara & die doesn’t mean you’re suicidal maybe you just want to be more like Frank O’Hara or visit Fire Island again after all these years or feel some unmistakable definitive clarifying event & doesn’t mean you need to tell the psych doc what you woke up thinking about when later today you go in with your symptoms & chart which let’s be honest you did a just-ok job filling out “time you got into bed” “time woke up” “mood 1-10” “meds” “exercise” “misc (alcohol/MJ etc)” sometimes you let’s just say estimated the times aren’t easy to remember especially if you have to get up & take your son’s temperature or make him breakfast or go to the airport or shower before office hours or lie in bed thinking about Frank O’Hara wondering why it’s so hard to get up & if you’re just lying there why not do something useful like try to affect American democracy or fill out the damn chart or write a poem instead of just lying there thinking about how shitty you feel & about American democracy & how (not) funny it would be if like Frank O’Hara you died on a beach on Fire Island but mostly about whether the unusually warm sweat-pants-covered penis-shape you felt against your thigh last Friday during your 60-min deep pressure remedy massage with Mason was Mason’s sweat-pants-covered penis which is waking up your libido (sorry/not sorry) but there’s no box on the chart for “sex with husband/self/other” or “Mason’s hands pressing you hard into the unforgiving table” or “number of times a day you wonder if that was Mason’s penis” because no one cares about middle-age post-fertility women’s libido especially if they’ve “had work done” which is a (not) funny way of referring to your months-long fainting-couch-anemia-crisis that “ended” in an emergency “elective” total hysterectomy which was the “choice” the doctors pushed on you so now hurrah you’ll never get cancer of these “lady parts” (you never had cancer of those “lady parts”) because now you don’t have “those lady parts” anymore “anyway” the doctors said “do you really need your uterus to make you feel like a woman?” “its only function is child bearing” & you’ve born more than your share & despite the many online testimonials “there’s no evidence” they said that laparoscopic in & out one day surgery “causes depression” especially for women with prior history of depression & even when you leave a woman’s ovaries “intact” by which apparently they meant floating stupidly in the body unattached to their primary blood supply severed from their sister organs from the glorious understudied uterus now expected to carry on as usual releasing eggs to nowhere regulating the whole shebang with protective & stimulating androgens until they “dry up” they said “naturally” they said which “could be any day anyway” then everyone will become even less interested in your body which has already born children & carried your brain from place to place including years ago to Fire Island where no one hit on you & nothing ran into you & you didn’t die & all the other places & times you stayed alive & made it to this season your incisions entirely unremarkable almost invisible anyway no one’s getting close enough to see your body that’s already born children so who cares about it just maybe Mason & just once you’d like the courage to open your eyes & look at him looking at your body just once see a man really looking at your body but not like Konstantin Zakashansky MD associate professor of obstetrics gynecology & reproductive science accepting new patients at Mount Sinai Hospital or “Dr. Z” as he told you to call him must have looked at your unconscious body as he inserted the laparoscopic camera through the incision in your belly button which 47 years+ a few months earlier had been clamped & cut to separate you from your mother who had just born the only child she’d ever have & who managed to keep her uterus for 41 years+ one month despite its irrelevancy & not the way the doctors looked at your mother’s breasts during surgery as they cut open her chest or afterwards removed the electrodes & tubes of the heart lung machine & not the way the crematorium attendant looked at her body & undressed her stitched up wounds her uterus & other organs still intact (though all irrelevant) & not the way Dr. Z likely looked at you when he pulled your irrelevant-according-to-him uterus & cervix & tubes out through your irrelevant vagina & not like how the pre-op nurse looked at you when you said “my youngest is 12 so my top priority is not dying in surgery & then in order of importance I’d like to avoid antibiotic resistant infections so please wash your hands & I’d like a future sex life you know I’m only 47 & continence would be great” & not like how Dr. Z looked at you when you asked about libido & asked about depression & not like how the psych doc didn’t even look up when you asked about sexual side effects of SSRIs while she drew a chart (at $600/hr) that you could later xerox on your own time & dime & fill out each morning “it won’t take long anyway” she said “you told me you & your husband weren’t having sex so let’s not worry about that & just try to get you feeling better” but “what if” you asked “it’s not just regular depression but the surgery or perimenopause or menopause that’s making me feel like this what if” you asked “not having sex with anyone is what led to (‘use it or lose it’) the bleeding & bleeding & eventually emergency ‘elective’ hysterectomy” what if it’s too many mornings just like this one of waking up alone no one there to say “oh Lana Turner we love you get up” too many mornings wondering how you got to this point this what is the point of anything point of life of American democracy now that you’re finally “free” of the male gaze your irrelevant celibate living female body your unlaid lying-in-bed body so full of emptiness of wondering would Mason push you out of harm’s way if a jeep or some unmistakable definitive clarifying event was suddenly bearing down on you wondering if in the early morning light Frank O’Hara saw it coming or if he wasn’t looking & if instead of dying from a ruptured liver at age 40+ a few months Frank O’Hara had survived as you have survived to make it to this season this morning this wondering whether this is the kind of poem he would have written

Tags: new poetry

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Rachel Zucker January 16, 2020

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