Corie Feiner
FALLOPIAN TUBES
I remember the first time I felt an egg burst
through my ovary and move through my fallopian tubes,
the cilia like arms in a rave party celebrating
the movement of possibility over their heads, the music
pulsing and beating with rhythmic pain—
The ovaries shoot. They are catapult warriors throwing
our eggs into the trusting fingers of the fimbriae, catch me,
catch me if you can.
My fallopian tubes are transporting tunnels,
muscle and mucus, movement and magic.
They are a journey, the space between
my ancestor’s pain and healing.
They are more than birth, more than disease,
more than disorders, more than the Catholic doctor,
Fallopio, father of the condom, who saw
that the inside of us was a tube, a trumpet,
a calling, a song, he described it as a bent branch unraveling
like the seam of a worn piece of cloth, the fringes fibroid fleshy and red—
When opened, they are the mouth of a Theban trumpet blowing
with wind, they are our arms reaching to hold all that we are,
all that begins, all that dies.
The history that lives within us, waiting
to burst through its walls every damn day—