Annual Checkup

This patient’s warm body under my hands
smells fragrant, womanly.
It’s my own perfume. This is like bathing myself
in scented bubbles.
Here’s another mother, another woman my age,
come to the doctor for a checkup.
She presents her body to me
knowing I’ve done the same things as her--
been pregnant three times and had Pap tests,
lain on couches to be examined,
to be touched, to be handled by workers
hired to take care of me.
This is like the horse standing patiently to be groomed,
the girl child waiting while mother braids her hair.

How different are the girls at the teen clinic;
resentfully submitting 
to the forms and stirrups
to get their birth control pills.
They wince and shudder,
they clamp their knees together, 
somehow they have made love with the boy,
it’s for him they are doing this,
but they can’t let a woman touch them,
they’re so tense that I hurt them,
much to my sorrow.
I want to tell them,
this is a mother’s care I give you.

Once you give yourself to men
you give yourself to nurses and doctors;
once you move into your woman body
you can’t move out again. Take a look around.
Look, your cervix is pretty and pink.
I’ll touch it with this little wooden stick.
That’s it. You see? Over in ten seconds.
The first of many.

Come forward into womanhood.
Put on perfume, come to the wise woman’s hut,
the midwife’s tent, the hairdresser’s little shop,
the doctor’s office.
We’ll gather around you, bring tea, braid your hair.

—Kirsten Emmott