Endometriosis

A poem

The painter is Elle Kammer. I believe Kammer changed their name a few years ago but I can’t find anything with a google search. I followed Kammer’s work for years after being struck still seeing one of their portraits. It’s exactly what I wanted to see and didn’t know I wanted it. To show endometriosis on the outside. To reveal what is happening to our body, to confront with the pain and blood and lesions. This is what art is for. Amazing.

It’s startling to me that I started a post about a week ago on my endometriosis experience and within days of beginning that work, was hit with a horrible flare. I haven’t had a flare like this in years. I’ve been extremely lucky that the surgeries with a specialist ( which bankrupted me, you can read my piece about that in The Guardian) , and the large lifestyle changes I made, allowed my body to heal to some degree. But for four or five days I’ve been in pain from the moment I wake till the moment I sleep. My vagina is burning inside. My abdomen is swollen and taut from the top of my stomach to the bottom of my belly button, and the entire area hurts, hurts, a pain that moves and shapeshifts but never relents. My stomach hurts too much to eat much. My bowel movements are not good. My arms and legs hurt. I have a constant headache, sore throat, and my ears hurt. I have symptoms of a UTI that will not, as they usually do, go away with D-Mannose. My face is puffy, my fingers. I feel in a daze, have brain fog, can’t concentrate, feel anxious and depressed. I am utterly exhausted. My back hurts and my ribs hurt- shooting pains. These symptoms are almost exactly what I have experienced since my teen years whenever in an endometriosis flare. I also have Hashimoto, and am in perimenopause, and am under a tremendous amount of financial stress ( who isn’t here ) and I’m sure all three of those are contributing factors. I’m scared at the intensity and duration of this flare. In my 20’s, flares were my life. I rarely had days without flares. But now in my 40’s, that has not been true. Flares are rare, and usually just a handful of days. So now I take my many supplements, drink my digestive tea, kefir, my green smoothie, I rub castor oil over my abdomen and sit with a red light, soothe my nervous system with nature and music and reading and snuggles, use boric acid and garlic, drink aloe, and a hundred other habits I’ve learned along the way, and wait for my body to tell me her secrets.

Without further ado, my poem ( which was published years ago when I was a wee babe, in Toasted Cheese Journal ):

endometriosis


swamp agony, slip coil
gut juice hisses bright-hot, furious.
a wounding brand on the tissues,
tamped in black and what they call
'chocolate cysts'. so bizarre, the name
conjured for blood boils:
like a Halloween candy.

i am dropped into chuckling oil
slapping hot against my thighs,
abdominal cavity, the slow dip
where my Doctor Sir took me with
his long tapered fingers and shook!
shook me until the bungles fell out,
each one dried and warped like a dead
worm in the sun.

after the closing knit, small spiders began
their work. sewing, sewing me shut.
gaping mouth, sewn shut.
folliculating ovary, sewn shut.
the small sweet water chute of impregnation-
oh of course sewn shut. how tiresome, all this
false work, this dark stewing.

i am stuffed with enclosures and pins.
a hex doll, my smile tapers to the back
of my head, where you cannot see me crying.

dame spider, i would put your black nodding
head between my forefinger and thumb if i could,
and squeeze pop you open. all my unused disease
running out of your fangy mouth, your twiny barbed
feet, snagging like thorns against the linen pillows
of my intestines. they run for miles in loops,
the size of a small stadium floor, or the ice rink
gouged with pick axe blades and merry white skates.

small wars i lose in the am. rivulets of agony
make their impassive way up the stair of spine.
sleep, sleep...calls from it's downy bed, mouth
full of cotton, eyes dreamed full, loose red mouth
slightly agape in releases. i refuse to long for
what i cannot have.
my whole life can be turned inside out, the

guts, ovary, vaginal lining, making clear the vicious
nature of life= the smile, grin, joking head, nodding
breasts, easy hands all tucked inside, hidden in
their generosity and stubborn optimism, stupid
functionality: work, mommy, work, study, think,
think, think.