finale: adenomyosis

i.

My vagina sits in an upholstered chair in a dark corner of her dressing room, legs crossed, remembering days as a red carpet.  She invites us to slip into her memories. She spreads her legs and speaks. A story unrolls before us.

ii.

Here I am, within her hallway.  Her voice is charming, loud, as if calling riders to a carousel. 

Everything beautiful happens in the uterus. And everything glamorous comes out! 

She opens the door to parties more grand than Gatsby himself. Charleston and tango and salsa and bachata.  Everything is dripping sequins. We sleep. We visit the kitchen of her bed and breakfast. She serves orange juice and swollen summer fruit. She wipes her forehead in sweat, towels her hands in her apron, and breathes out deeply.

iii.

A crowd gathers outside ready to snip a red ribbon. Tuba players in seersucker and straw hats. It’s a grand opening. She shoots confetti poppers of mucus plugs and umbilical cords and placentas.

Now, it’s an awards show. The cervix wears the gown of the evening, a ten out of ten. She pulls back a curtain for celebrities, some cone-headed, some kicking, some plump, some peanuts. 

My vagina pulsates, champagne spraying, cheering, Life. Life. Life.

iv.Music ceases. She clenches as if bumped unexpectedly, then looks at me blankly. Her lips open again.  

It’s not pretty.

We begin a metamorphosis from modernism to new gothic. Inside the performance hall, the decor is left dangling. It transforms to a house decomposing, a stabilized ruin. Straggling guests become murderous clumps plotting hemorrhage. I hear rumors of a tragic revolution, a mercy killing. Everything seems supernatural.

Foreign voices are calling, The only way out is to demolish the dance floor and execute our hosts. 

v.

Swift surgical measures ensue. I look up in disbelief to an alien abduction styled as Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. My vagina stands numb as a torture scene unfolds. Our darling uterus is burned and severed, our cervix transformed from starlet to body bag. Sterilized and silent, my vagina stretches for the flesh caisson proceeding in slow trot, a dimly lit funeral within this birth canal.

vi.

Quiet. She tears up, then dries her eyes with a handkerchief, pulling down a cascading black veil to cover a misplaced, impish smirk. 

She whispers, now devilish, before hurrying to shadow, 
Is the cauterizing and expulsion of the womb a loss or a freedom?

She leaps behind a room divider, removing her garments slinky as a snake. Lamp light highlighting her figure, she bends. She balances her leg on a chair, toe-pointed, rolling up elastic stockings.  She glides her hands along her shins to smooth them, massaging from ankle up to knee.

vii.

Her hand emerges.  Then her arm, satin gloves up to her elbows. She peeks out to speak, now in bandeau with pin curls… 

The pain is over now, baby. Maybe the party is just beginning.

Erin Bernard is a mom, educator, writer, artist, and curator.  She teaches English and advises overage, under-credited youth at a project-based accelerated high school in Philadelphia.  Her retired project, the Philadelphia Public History Truck, won the National Council on Public History’s Outstanding Project of the Year in 2016. Her academic writing and poetry have been featured in a myriad of publications including Art and the Public Sphere, Exhibitionist, and Whirlwind magazine. She is currently developing her first chapbook as a meditation on the power we hold in our bodies even when things are kept from us. Erin is currently working on her Ed.D. in Executive Educational Leadership at Temple University. Erin can be reached via e-mail at ecb.litishistory@gmail.com and on instagram @erin_elcentro.