Blood and Guts Were Our First Language

Blood and Guts Were Our First Language

what i can teach you

for dr. amy

in grade school we dissect, this time 
store-bought chicken wings, uncooked pounds   
our teacher brought in for science. 
boys grimace. we girls peel skin back, seeking
sleek, slim bones inside. laughter, none of us phased—deeper and deeper 
we go into slimy flesh though no one has given us the talk yet,
about getting used to insides coming out each month, 
sometimes in clots. 

twenty-two years later, a therapist proclaims 
don’t let it define you. about my illness. as if it does not already,
as if it would not, even if i tried listening to her. she is chicken,
it turns out, afraid of the word sick. but open a dictionary, 
and words have many definitions. the best trick: hold onto them all 
in the same sentence. the confusion of that, an MRI, the reading 
of a body flooded blue with contrast, when not all organs are shaped 
the way of textbook drawings. 

there is more to you, therapist says,  
than sick, as if sick—my blood leaving 
a pretty pink oval in a toilet seat, my hair dropping from my scalp 
in fistfuls of question marks, my skin stretching into long fissure-like striae, 
a record of what has been—is not reverence in the worst of it. 
as if sick—my husband offering to sink needles into my skin
if need be, my doctor tender behind the stethoscope,  
my vegetarian mother serving chicken from her own stove 
if it’s all i can eat—is not love, more forgiving 
than anyone imagines it to be. 

in grade school, we learn how best 
to shed medical gloves. one off, inside out, 
the other, tucked into that one. the pull of it, 
skin slipping off wing meat. simple, clean. a method
i will use, after finishing a stool test at home. but we girls can’t foretell
the use of such skills. giggles echo in a taupe bathroom. 
we wash our hands of stray chicken fat. the boys
threw out their raw experiments early but we sank 
our fingers in, begging for more time. if only 
because we sensed we were understanding something. 
on our way, unafraid to see it all.