Elizabeth
Loudon

Except in a film where a lovely woman

romps with teenagers on a beach,

does any woman say let me straddle

the hips of men, blaze and burn

when I’ve six weeks left?

Nobody touched my friend

during the pandemic years,

and then as they ended

she felt a knife-stab, unbearable.

A crab had chewed through her ovaries.

The revenge of the children I never had,

she said – her one drop of acid, allowable.

Some people don’t make love for years,

or not with the beloved.

Or the beloved makes love with others.

Let’s tell them about the celibates,

holy, sporadic, or involuntary:

Yeats, in thrall to imperious Maud

and crazy for tinderbox symbols,

Hildegard, for whom the devil appeared

as a giant Cheshire cat, next to a man

 with a furry sporran,

 a gaggle of louts agape with wonder.

Let’s say, what a foolish film,

what wishful ignorance,

believing that a woman in peril

will snatch at a handful of boy

on a cheap sheet in a seaside motel,

the mouth of her body stretched wide

as the sprawl that isn’t yet hungry

again. My friend left me earrings,

amber tears. She made sure

never to see me wear them.

From the heart of the tree they came,

from what breaks through bark under duress,

and bleeds, and forms.