Port
Lisa Hardy


 
I used to drip sex and blood everywhere. All over blankets, rivulets down my leg. On my bed. On your bed. On my pants and my dress and my dress again. Blood angels dancing in the bath. Your bloody fingerprints all over the ice blue sheets. Sex seeping everywhere. Tampons so soaked they would slide like fish. Until fluid seeped droplets from a one-inch cut onto the bed. Into the bath. Sealed, healed, ripped again. Until my skin opened and anyone could see in. Infections of Pseudomonas, Staphylococcus, Enterococci. I sneezed and little goosebumps were the last. I wanted to keep the lymph nodes. Filter, filter. The Z11 clinical trial. Dissection. She drew a dotted line down my breast with a Sharpie. I washed it with pink soap. She drew a blade and extracted the two I could feel under my arm where it’s the warmest. Over-boiled lima-beans. Sent for inspection. Dissection. Axillary. Then the bio-specimens were lost. Burdens. A tube of replicating cells. The rest of the nodes stayed nestled and waiting, ready to clean. Clear liquid moved through a tube slid inside my artery, up my neck, delivering poison to a heart and pumped back out again. Until we did not need it anymore. Clips of snipping skin. Surgical scissors. The nurse and doctor joked. The doctor flirted with his own hands. Only a little blood on my clavicle. When it was done, I asked to keep it. Tubing gently rolled down from a plastic center like a mouse and tail in a jar in my underwear drawer.
 










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About the Author: LJ Hardy is a medical anthropologist living in northern Arizona with her daughter, three dogs, twelve chickens, and two ducks. Her creative writing appears or is forthcoming in Entropy, Bird’s Thumb, Riggwelter, Writer’s Resist and others. She edits the journal Practicing Anthropology.  

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