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When I was fifteen I took my two little cousins into town and had them wait outside the tattoo parlour while a woman with blue hair pierced my belly button with a big red ruby that pooled inside like a roving eye They were crying when I emerged I was hardly able to breathe for fear of the pain On the way home on the bus, Amy sang Karma Chameleon and Simone looked out of the window at time passing as though watching life being silently obliterated I remember my belly looked so white and soft lying down with the jewellery like a well of fresh blood collecting I thought it quite beautiful though it often snagged on my jeans My girlfriend had once rooted the ruby out with her tongue; the next morning had stung When we found a baby kicking in there I had to take the jewellery out as my teenage belly stretched Having that metal inside my body had been as good as a wound My girlfriend and I had wounds to nurse, they comforted, they reassured; while they healed there was a warm place inside devoted to new cells and plasma After the birth, my belly was  a waste of space, a forlorn temple with no jewel or way in I couldn’t accept the tender map of pain left imprinted on my belly when my baby was born I would trace the stubborn, soft pulse of a network of trails in my deep skin with my fingers, willing and willing them to recede Nobody touched my belly then, not for a decade My belly was women’s business My belly was the place a baby once lived If I was carrion my belly would be the first flesh to peck and rip– my most vulnerable part– silvery white in sunlight, nobody’s prize The little nick of a piercing scar reminds