by Kira Coleman
I wish I’d broken up with you on the day
you said on the phone that there must be
something wrong with my body if I
couldn’t insert a tampon. You weren’t
listening to the way that my mother said
tampons were better for married women,
or the way the one female teacher on my
eighth grade canyoneering trip said it
might feel weird because I wasn’t used to
having anything in there when I wanted
to go swimming with my friends.
You were just thinking of how vaginas are
made to take and take and take, assuming
that the natural order of things is pliant,
but just tight enough to cradle your dick
—and I cried but I wish I’d realized what it
meant: that you would also assume my
sleeping vagina was meant for you to insert
your fingers, that my body would remember
that night and my mind would play back
calling you crying from the toilet because
I couldn’t get the tampon you’d told me to
shove in there out —
And years later I would find myself
hyperventilating in public bathrooms all over
Spain when I could only find the scented pads
I was allergic to, left with the option of this or
wadding up some one-ply toilet paper and
crossing my fingers, trying not to picture a
dick, whispering to myself, “come on, it’s
okay it’s okay, it’s just a tampon — it’s not a
trojan horse.”
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