Menopause is God’s Black Ops project to keep us down.
I’m as drained as the pronouns in a null-subject language
Pulled in so many microclimatological directions my subjectival north has dissolved
Wake me up in a decade when this is over

But I’m already awake, yanked from sleep by antediluvian showers that do not cool
I am a thermodynamic juggler, misting my labia with one hand, toweling my neck with the other
I have finally turned into the pillar of salt that preachers harangue us gays about

The heavenly host squeezes the īchōr from my every orifice
This is a sexual supply chain disaster of Vitruvian proportions
My own body is hate criming me and I am the one doing the time

I am slamming pine bark extract and asking everyone in my surrounds if they have a cheese cave
they wouldn’t mind storing me in
Rereading Wuthering Heights for the wind-heavy scenes
And fantasizing about the kind of breeze that rolls off a moor
I have unveiled various genres of breeze fantasy in middle age
I have also discovered that Cathy’s fairy cliff is called “Penistone Crags”
Victorian hot flashes, like my own, less than subtle1

Specialists meet each plaint with injunctions to exercise
I exercise daily, you degenerate swan-coated patriarchs
You probably would have told mid-career Dvořák to check out this doodad called the organ
You probably would have told Marx that commodity fetishism is a species of kink
You probably would have told Jesus to consider using more metaphors

O, how my extremities berate me
This is the theodicy problem in sharp relief
This is the prolegomenon to a domestic black swan event
This is my body’s gentle “fuck you” to Cyborg Feminism

Yet I am a field ripe for resignification
The dry-mouthed apostasy of shame
My heat blooms, I will be visible
I will birth the world’s first heliocentric mythology2
I will be my own infant
I am the body and I will not stand down for God country or capital

1 Frame-narrator Mr. Lockwood’s words, for your inspection: “It struck me directly she must have started for Penistone Crags. ‘What will become of her?’ I ejaculated, pushing through a gap which the man was repairing….” Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2012):142.

2 According to Joseph Campbell, no religious cosmology has yet morphed to adjust for the Copernican revolution. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2012 [1986]): 17.

Wendy Tooth is an unregenerate recluse. She is independently indigent and probably the ghost of I.A. Richards, just a poem in a bottle washing up on shore. She exists at the intersection of occultism and tax fraud, and is gay, gay, gay. You can find more of her work at https://opensea.io/wendytooth.

Image by Joanna Kosinska @joannakosinska