by Amy Seife
The teacher tells us to point our vagina flashlights
toward the door. My mother would have said
down there or your you know what, in the same
whisper she used for the word cancer.
Aunt Grace is under the weather, Aunt Grace
is seeing the lady doctor, Aunt Grace is dead
— she’d unspool the news during a single
phonecall, hinting that somehow Grace was
to blame. I too was at the mercy of my unruly body.
No blood, too much blood, blood at the wrong time.
My body was a bomb wired to explode and I
was a hostage shackled to it. Vagina flashlights
up and down, the teacher sings. I tilt my pelvis,
I arch my back, I clench my muscles, I shine.
Amy Ralston Seife splits her time between New York and Martha’s Vineyard. She is the publisher and editor-in-chief of The Westchester Review. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Ekphrastic Review, Literary Mama, MER Online Quarterly, Quartet, Indelible, Lumina, Inkwell, Right Hand Pointing and has been nominated for the Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes. Despite the title of this poem, she’s not a huge fan of physical exercise, preferring more sedentary activities such as playing word games, making up puns with her grandchildren, and correcting other people’s grammar.
Emerge Literary Journal 