An Inessential System

I was idle one summer's day
sweating in the heat of the afternoon
on sheets already sticky with sweat
and the tang of too-long-till-washday
rising in my nostrils. I was nineteen.

My fingers running down my stomach –
still flat then and downy like a peach
under my fingers and I imagined
what it would be like to have a boy
touch me there, or a girl. I was nineteen.

Under questing fingers, as long nails
probed the surface of milk-white flesh a lump
the size of a marble rolled beneath the
skin and I thought of a cat's eye in red
and yellow spinning inside muscle. I was nineteen.

I reached across to the dresser where, on a plate
I'd left my penknife and excised
a lump of bone, round and smooth but for
a single tooth embedded, left over
from the twin who died before birth.

I put it on the mantlepiece and lay back down
exploring the hole and the pain
with a finger slick with blood and thought
about my mother looking down on me
from Heaven and wondering.

It was, after all, an inessential system.
I was nineteen.