I smell her cigarette-coffee breath,
my mother’s face is so close to mine.
She slaps Gentian Violet
on the rash and welts in the swollen folds
of my vagina, erupting with angry splotches.
I’ve never seen my mother so angry.
Violet stains her fingers.
Her cheeks are red. The Gentian brush
has little bristles that wound my
already sore skin.
“It stings,” I cry. Legs open,
I sit on the toilet seat.
My sucked in breath sings through
my teeth. I don’t know the cause
of the rash making my vagina sore,
think it’s just another new plague,
like my wheeze from asthma
that she says sounds like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir,
my constantly running nose, hives
that appear for no reason
except that I’m allergic to poison oak,
ivy, sumac, and 36 native grasses.
Before I remember, she
changed my diapers. Now
a high school freshman,
I haven’t even been nude
in front of my formal mother
in years.
“You did this to yourself.”
Her voice is a hiss.
My mother, who makes cauldrons
of chicken soup when I have the smallest sniffle,
dips the spiky Gentian Violet brush,
re-loading.
Years later, I will learn
that when she was 13, she had a 21 year old lover.
My new boyfriend is 14 like me. Chaste,
we only hold hands when we ice skate.
Usually so quick to blame myself, I look
at her blotched face, shaking hand.
I’ve done nothing wrong.
“Stop,” I tell her.
She has gone crazy, gone loco
like men or dogs who chew
the poisonous white Jimson weed.
“It hurts.” My cheeks are wet.
She dips the brush again.
My mother is treating my vagina like some
old chair she no longer cares for,
but is willing to repair with a spatter
of color. The hot August wind
blows in from the bathroom window.
Penny Perry been nominated for a Pushcart Prize six times, by six different publishers. Garden Oak Press has published two of her poetry books, Santa Monica Disposal and Salvage and Woman with Newspaper Shoes. Her poetry has appeared in many publications, including Lilith, Poetry International, San Diego Poetry Annual, Paterson Literary Review, and Limestone Circle. Her novel Selling Pencils and Charlie was a finalist in the San Diego Book Awards. She was the prose editor at Knot Literary Magazine for ten years. In the early 1970’s, she was one of the first female screenwriting fellows at the American Film Institute; a screenplay she wrote there became a film on PBS.
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