Aunt Rachel Goes to the clinic, Aunt Rachel pardons her wife's French

Lizzie derksen

Aunt Rachel goes to the clinic

Something exhausting is in the air.
I’ve started drinking coffee in the afternoon
and I can’t even seem to make myself come.

Everyone is allergic to everyone and no one knows what to do about it.

Today I got up at nine-thirty and my appointment is at three.
Susan says I have to go.
I am so tired I can’t really speak.

I am tired of pretending I’m afraid of germs.
I continue to blow my nose in the public washroom
and eat apples without washing them.

I am tired of pretending to fear for my life, to be polite.

At the women’s health centre they are so kind,
asking me if I have been accosted by protesters,
giving me a big fleece blanket instead of a papery hospital gown.
I may be too old to have an abortion, but
I appreciate their system of buzzers and door locks;
I buy two pints of ice cream in celebration of my cervix;
the gynecologist has told me I am not going to die.

I am not going to die!
Not of cancer, not of the plague,
in spite of what Google images suggests.
Do we even know how many times it’s possible for a woman to come?

Susan asks if I mind not
talking about orgasms on the bus.

What I mean is that mostly the question is life or life,
or slightly altered life.
What I mean is that we keep
coming around.

What I mean is that in this town
we cross the river on our way to the clinic almost every day,
and then cross it again on the way home.

Aunt Rachel pardons her wife’s French

What I mean is that the orgasm, for instance,
is not a little death,
but merely the sound of a jug filling up,
a cup unsmashing,
a magnet snapping together,
an individual lilac floret blooming,
a jug overflowing, the blue cup
or another jug appearing.

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Lizzie Derksen is a writer and filmmaker from Treaty 6 Territory. She writes poems about Aunt Rachel, Rachel’s wife Susan, and their niece Lucy. She writes prose about the priest class, the worker class, and her childhood spent in a religious community in southern Saskatchewan.

Lizzie has published poems in earlier issues of Funicular and you can read more ‘Aunt Rachel’ poems by her on the Funicular website all this week. You can purchase her chapbook Aunt Rachel Says 13 Poems here.

Read Lizzie’s Funicular Five where she talks with us more about her Aunt Rachel poems here.

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