Your displeasure encircled,

like descending mesh, that first occasion

we called a conversation.

Was I the blanched insect

and you the hunter,

with your barbed question-net?

The gendered metaphor

flutters weakly, but does not die
No feminist assertion

swoops down to devour it.

This is new territory.

There is no theory that can

rival this, me splintering

under your gaze

like last century’s woman
As if you had pinched the thorax

of a butterfly,

fastened me to a board

with each quick piercing

of disapproving thoughts,

like an entomologist’s

single-minded enamel pins
Pins in a woman’s dress,

pins in her hair,

pins, pins, to fix, to fix her –

with a needle and thread

she sits, sewing her silence,

an inheritance passed on
I hold her in contempt, but here I am

weaving quietude and guilt

while you tell me how you feel.

Still, it seems to me

your mouth is a wound

I want to stitch up

Your eyes, once seamless,

now full of gashes

that refuse my useless craft 
I wasn’t trying to convince you.

I just needed you to know

how it felt to cradle  this heavy speck,

the frightening consequences

of blood and semen.

To hear of hormones,

caressing me like warm heroin

or the voice of a hypnotist
I couldn’t describe it. I was slipping

from your downturned mouth,

like a stitch from a knitting needle

now futile and crooked.

I told you later that I would do it.

“Fuck the world” I said,

and we fucked,

and I pulled up the blanket

so you wouldn’t see the question mark

hovering like paused scissors

over my terrible belly
I unravelled.

The safety pin inside,

coming loose, lanced me.

And guilt formed, like a clot.

Guilt grew at a faster pace.

I cowered before guilt,

and its threat of emptiness

that gaped at me

like a hole in my stocking,

widening, widening. 
Grief-struck, I messaged you.

I don’t know what to do, I said.

You explained, over text,

the procedure to me,

gleaned from a doctor friend:

“The first pill detaches the embryo

from the uterus.

The second pill flushes it out.”
As if it needed explaining.

As if I had not thought about

running away with

the possibilities in my flesh.

As if I had not scrolled through

countless internet pages,

every medical point a pricking,

drawing blood in advance
When you sent me that text,

matter-of fact, cold, like a needle

through my frayed cloth-mind,

did you feel any sadness,

for the lump that was us, nascent,

for the girl who stroked your hair?

And so I bled, and bled,

and released the tiny burden.
You were sad, you did say,

after I lay in a hospital bed

empty of the loaded clot,

you were sad because of how I felt.

I know men don’t feel

the body’s cushioning response,

its demands, but you demanded too
All feminist affirmations

bounced off the glass or lightly stuck

and slid away.

No rally sign or slogan badge tells us this.

You’re either for, or against –

there is no messy space in between.

No one explains, and I tried to.
But when you explained

the procedure to me,

so calmly over text,

you dropped my heart, like a rag,

in a pool of dirty water.

I didn’t know

you were carrying it.