Aubade for a Gallbladder

Bex hainsworth

Our parting was genetically predestined.
Two grandparents, my mother; my uncle’s
turned itself inside out at twenty-seven.
It took five years of GP appointments
and physio and scans to determine
that you were the reason I would wake
in the night with a wing of pain
burning over one shoulder blade.
Grains of bile hardened, did not become
pearls. You tended to them anyway,
your stony garden, your unwanted gifts.
The surgery left four small scars
scattered across my stomach:
a cornered constellation of loss.
I don’t know where they buried you.
It was a curious grief, being gallbladderless,
my body lighter, free of fire, but somehow
haunted by your sudden disappearance.
They gave me a plastic pot of twenty-four
stones, tank gravel, mossy moon rocks.
It sat on my windowsill like an urn,
the sunlight bleaching it gold, shining, shrine.
Some thought it morbid, a memento mori
unworthy of display. I couldn’t explain how
it eased the ache as the wounds healed, pulling
on the other side of my navel like a cord.
I remember the rattle and clack when wind
knocked it to the floor and it rolled under the bed.
I lost all I had left of you in the move. Strange
how connected we are to the things which cause
us pain, how reluctant we are to accept relief.  

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Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Atrium, The McNeese Review, Sonora Review, Nimrod, and trampset. Walrussey, her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry, is published by The Black Cat Poetry Press.

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