Aunt Rachel goes to the clinic

In which the saga continues.

Something exhausting is in the air.
I’ve started drinking coffee in the afternoon
and I can’t even seem to make myself come.

Everyone is allergic to everyone and know one knows what to do about it.

Today I got up at nine-thirty and my appointment is at three.
Susan says I have to go. 
I am so tired I can’t really speak.

I am tired of pretending I’m afraid of germs.
I continue to blow my nose in the public washroom
and eat apples without washing them.

I am tired of pretending to fear for my life, to be polite.

At the women’s health centre they are so kind,
asking me if I have been accosted by protesters, 
giving me a big fleece blanket instead of a papery hospital gown. 
I appreciate their system of buzzers and door locks;
I buy two pints of ice cream in celebration of my cervix;
the gynecologist has told me I am not going to die.

I am not going to die!
Not of cancer, not of the plague,
in spite of what Google images suggests.
Do we even know how many times it’s possible for a woman to come?

Susan asks if I mind not 
talking about orgasms on the bus.

What I mean is that mostly the question is life or life,
or slightly altered life. 
What I mean is that we keep
coming around. 

What I mean is that in this town
we cross the river on our way to the clinic almost every day,
and then cross it again on the way home.



Aunt Rachel pardons her wife’s French

What I mean is that the orgasm, for instance,
is not a little death,
but merely the sound of a jug filling up,
a cup unsmashing,
a magnet snapping together,
an individual lilac floret blooming,
a jug overflowing, the blue cup 
or another jug appearing.

These poems are part of a developing suite of poems written in the voices of Aunt Rachel, her wife Susan, and their niece Lucy. In these poems, Aunt Rachel, a working class woman in her fifties, directly addresses both her wife Susan and the reader in a series of ardent monologues. She applies a personal theology to questions of file transfer, domesticity, the environment, football, organized religion, bar culture, urbanism, composting, the pandemic, and the future. Susan responds. Lucy says her piece. As it turns out, all three of these women have a great deal to say.

I’ve published Aunt Rachel poems in Poetry is Dead, in the form of a chapbook you can buy here, and also by mail and video poem. (If you want to watch some Aunt Rachel live, you can do that here.)

There will be more coming out via Import Cookies over the next couple of months!

These two poems compliment next Thursday’s post for paid subscribers, the third installment (“hypochondria or “cancer pregnancy”) of an essay about the ways in which we went crazy during the pandemic.