share


Belly

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 me that I’m not fifteen any more.
My daughter has only once asked me about my
numerous scars, about the little black rose tattoo on my back
that scabbed and skewed. Her belly is small and smooth like a chalice.
White, like mine, but pure, hollow, unpunctured.
One day she will go to the tattoo parlour
just to have something done to her. Just to see if it hurts.
Just to feel something healing over.

 


ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR

’s first collection is A Body Made of You (2011). She writes reviews for The Short Review and has recently been commissioned to write a story for Radio Four. She has contributed to The Silent History: a digital novel. Her second collection will be published by Penned in the Margins in November.

READ NEXT

poetry

May 2014

Rain on the Roof (to James Schuyler)

David Andrew

poetry

May 2014

Degrees of distance Who all died at different dates, known to each other: not just in the human race...

poetry

January 2016

Three Honey Protocols

Monika Rinck

TR. Nicholas Grindell

poetry

January 2016

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE PONDERS LOVE   Honey protocols, hear how they mock, snow white and super blue: On the footpaths,...

feature

March 2014

Burroughs in London

Heathcote Williams

feature

March 2014

I first met William Burroughs in 1963. I was working for a now defunct literary magazine called Transatlantic Review...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required