In Which They Find Something in my Ovaries, and I am in Love with an Entomologist

The nurse leads me up a flight
of stairs,                and briefly,       a window pane to the waiting
room, the top of my

mother’s head below                     and an electric

thread of recognition as though I’d left my
body in its seat, as though I’d slipped through the

silk of myself in the antiseptic light                      and into a place beyond
tenderness or touch.                  In my boyfriend’s garden shed that
summer: Our school year done, June’s ribboning heat

sinking its brilliant barb into new flesh.
The cicada nymphs taste
best, pearly in the furred underbrush, more supple.
Any boy-entomologist worth
his salt knows this. A taste like a mouthful of
dark soil after hot rain, like thirteen years
of burrowing: All the small new
darknesses I’ve yet to learn, tight as my
pupil strained to watch him chew and

swallow, thinking how easily the body conceals
what it will, how tracing the path of his
fingers to his mouth I’m coming
to suspect its ulterior functions.

Somewhere in this building, an organ clangs
into a kidney bowl.                          My ovaries gleam white
inside of me like a second pair of eyes, low and
deep, each silently planting its hook
in my mind. The diagnosis is genetic: Blood in
the blood. I think of that Adrienne Rich line about wanting
to know where mother ends and daughter

begins, about performing, she calls it, radical surgery,
and my life pulls itself between us like a
ten-blade. How she’d slapped me hard in the kitchen. How
my blood unlatched from itself and
pooled softly at the site. From here, she is so
close to negligible. In the exam room
I bundled my underwear into a fist

and the speculum slid
in, cold and clean as a
pin through a thorax.

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Ana Paneque (she/her) is a Mexican-American writer working towards an MFA in creative writing at Texas State University, where she plans to complete a short story collection. She’s interested in childhood, memory, and queerness. Her work is forthcoming in The Shore Poetry. She lives in San Marcos with her cat, Milo.