Expelling Venus

When the doctor says he’ll need to remove my ovaries, I consider performing a farewell ritual— hippy shindig with altar, candle, and two stones plucked from the river. Instead, I sign in for surgery and awake to a stomach pocked with cuts, skillful breaking and entering, ovaries gone like two thieves stealing away in the night. Nurses roll me into a recovery room. In morphine half-dreams I recall the nude pantyhose my grandmother used for Christmas stockings. They lined her hearth, an eerie cabaret of thrombotic legs into which my brothers and I thrust our hands each year, tearing out what didn’t belong: gift boxes, shiny lengths of ribbon, twenty-dollar bill pinned to each toe like a callus. That night, I sleep fitfully on spartan sheets, and in the morning, a young orderly helps me from my cot to a wheelchair, smiling—beautiful little boy—all the way to the lobby. I can have no more children. I clutch my stomach and grieve, remembering the doctor’s sketches— how my tubes resembled horns, my uterus a skull my brother once kicked over in a field. It was flocked with lichen, lower jaw missing, as if the earth had begun dismantling it bottom up, leaving the antelope mouthing the ground like a bit, so accustomed she’d once been to carrying life inside her.