by Jade Gibson

In the pre World War One medical textbook
on women’s bodies, it warns
against going out too often
in the first year of marriage,
and too much fun, God forbid,
it can lead infertility,

and the best way to have lots of babies
is to abstain from good living, rich foods,
excessive meat, and instead,
eat bread, potato, simple foods, no alcohol,
and stay indoors.

The book is aimed at nurses,
who wear long skirts in the photographs
and short bobbed hair.

The speculum hasn’t changed much,
still the cold metal object
plunged into orifice,
not much concern for comfort.

The person who wrote this book
was a man
with curled whiskers,
a thick tweed coat,
holding a cane,
and sitting upright in a chair,
a foreboding figure
in the large faded photograph,
displayed before
the anatomical section,
where one
can slowly peel the colourful, illustrated,
cut out layers of a woman’s body away;
skin, omentum, viscera,
heart, lungs, liver,
uterus, bladder, kidneys,
spine, anus,
in a careful striptease of flesh,
subject to the gaze of the reader.

The man’s whiskers seem longer
when I go back to them,
having enlightened me as to the content
of women’s bodies, and how they function.

I feel myself being peeled away,
in layers, like being undressed,
over and over again,
unsure which part is me,
and what is not.