PRICK
I found a place that will do it, Manhattan Beach Nails on Artesia.
We drive our son in South Bay traffic, a four-wheeled needle passing like thread through two-lane fabric. He’s thirteen and wearing a thousand microscopic glochid spines—fine hair-like spikes embedded in his arms. One of Westport Heights’ shirtless skaters, the youngest disciple of the Westchester Skatepark’s stair-sets and hubbas, Mikey lost sight of the prickly pear cactus by our front curb and found himself in its arms.
Nature’s acupuncture, my husband tries to lighten the mood.
The women at the shop will know how to wax them out, I reassure him. The concept of hot wax being torn from his body intrigues his inner thrill seeker, and he quiets while repositioning in the rear seat of our Kia. I turn and mime a kiss to his forehead. My husband navigates the road with speed and skill like the night our son was born, the sunset Sig-alert on the 405 Freeway as we willed ourselves to Cedars-Sinai Hospital.
It’s a boy, the nurse announced, offering my husband the honor of cutting the cord. Two clamps and a swath of gauze awaited his grip on the sterile scissors, but he refused, shaking his head without speaking. The nurse cut the cord. My husband bristled like she had removed his foreskin, or like he was forced to read a pamphlet on vasectomies. It will be okay, dad, the nurse reassured.
Scissored, and just like that something existential, even holy had happened to us—my body, my son—we were separated for the first time. He now took oxygen from the world instead of me. Moments later, I birthed the deflated disc of dying tissue and watched its lifeless tail wag in umbilical triumph. Dr. B. held it up, ran a rubbered finger inside the wet membrane like a dentist examining gums. Such a fine line between intimate and clinical.
Someone got dad a cup of water. I get my baby.
The weight of the bundle, the first kiss on his head before my husband accompanied him to the scale. Wrapped in blue and topped with his first beanie, my son left the breast, entered life’s symphony of leaving.
The women at MB Nails place my son in an elevated massage chair, the only boy in the salon, the only shirtless client. Perched on the edge of his seat, feet straddling the pedicure basin, avoiding eye contact, he appears helpless, uncomfortable among walls of glossy cosmetic posters, kaleidoscope shelves rainbowed with polish, women whose toes are woven with paper towels, spread unnatural and open. I see his father in him, want my son to skate above the separation of men and women—past the sharpness between what women find beautiful, transcendent, but men view as hideous, repulsive.
His father waits in the car until we emerge successful, my son throwing a thumb up in one hand and waving the wax removal tape in his other, needles now fossilized in pale green like memory. Like a badge of masculinity. Theseus with the head of a Gorgon. His aesthetician waves her purple-gloved hand, laughing.
Dr. B. laughed, his warm hand on my stirruped thigh, I’ve made you a virgin again. Stirrup is a funny word, one that conjures a sense of power, a hot-breathed steed controlled by a rhythmic kick. Stirrup also rhymes with kick flip, the trick my son was attempting when he landed in the cactus. But I was not some lady in a legend riding from responsibility, alone on the moors, hair pirouetting in North Sea mist. I was prostrate on a table under medical-grade lighting with an oversized mirror trained between my legs.
I’ve made you a virgin again. As if that prick were God and had just rewound two thousand years of Eve. Without my consent, he had stitched my vagina extra tight. Because he could. Couldn’t you just make me a good mom, I want to ask him now.
Those were the days when obstetricians considered episiotomies necessary. The days when male doctors could say whatever the hell they wanted to female patients, women whose bodies were fatigued, numbed from the waist down, riddled with IVs. Stone-eyed mothers whose legs trembled from hours of being forced open by cold metal and latexed hands. Women whose husbands refused to watch the miracle of life emerge from the geography they desire to enter. Women who nonetheless know birthing a child is an act of power, even resistance, the stirrups a symbol of control, the labor a Pegasus freshly dappled with the Gorgon’s blood.
It’s called the husband stitch, Dr. B. laughed again as he cut the thread. A man’s pleasure is always at the forefront. Like the introduction to one of those popular guides for new mothers, the irreverent edition, when the author describes giving her husband oral sex in their hospital room moments before being wheeled into delivery. Or like how the word Gorgon auto-corrects to virgin, a word that confounds me, a word that has shamed women for centuries and empowered men as champions for stealing it. Like that.
Like that send-off as I began learning how to raise a boy. Teach him to be comfortable in his skin, watch out for life’s glochid spikes, and not become a prick.
After Dr. B.’s hands had passed the needle through, repairing my two-lane flesh, it fell to the floor, spun in a splash of my—of all women’s, even Eve’s, Medusa’s—blood before quieting. As if in shock that this is how it goes.
Leaving the nail shop, I wave my husband out of the driver's seat. I drive now. Mikey tumbles into the front of the Kia a little more confident and a lot smoother. The traffic has cleared. The marine layer is setting in—softening the sharpness of the city.
MEDITATION WHERE MALE INTRUSION MEETS FEMALE EMBODIMENT
The neck is a tender destination on the map of our bodies, a geographical vulnerability, like a floodplain or low-lying coast. The collar bone a sigmoid set of wings.
The other night I read about the collared flycatcher, how the males are evolving to be less ornamented in response to rising temperatures. The large white forehead patch that once secured a robust mating schedule has declined in size, says climate change ecologists. I read a flycatcher poem once, which I subsequently shared with my twelfth grade women’s literature students. It was Claire Wahmanholm’s “O.” As they were journaling, I told them to consider her reliance on sonic play—rhyme, meter, alliteration, assonance: From ornateness came the ornate flycatcher and ornate / fruit dove. From oil, the oilbird.
Funny epithet for a bird, collared. A wingbeat of a word.
It’s a term TV detectives use. Stemming from the 17th Century, meaning to grab someone by the neck. Not just someone, the perp who has been caught, yoked finally, and no longer able to harm society. In police procedural fashion, metonymy apprehends its meaning. Not unlike kill, collar is noun, verb, adjective, and adverb. A sort of feline word, its hard c a voiceless velar stop followed by a lax mid-back rounded o, double alveolar lateral ll, and murmur diphthong ar. It stretches and purrs, a two-syllable pounce.
2018 saw the posthumous publication of Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark—outpacing the cops in tracking Joseph “Golden State Killer” DeAngelo, McNamara died in the process of writing. How strange death’s timing, its pounce hard, voiceless, and rounded. Dead in her sleep at forty-six, a life startlingly incomplete. The manuscript like its author’s life was only two-thirds finished. HarperCollins and her husband brought it to light, and two months after McNamara’s magnum opus released, detectives finally caught DeAngelo. Handcuffed at his Sacramento home with a boat in the driveway and a roast in the oven. Collared like the Elizabethan nobility in their late Tudor ruffs. He was responsible for thirteen murders and fifty-one rapes across California. The country watched as news of his capture spread. Watching has become the rhyme and meter of our lives.
Last summer, like most Americans I watched the January 6 Special Committee hearings and was tickled by a resurgence of the word clavicle. As in, he reached for his clavicle in the Secret Service SUV because he was the effing president. Cassidy Hutchinson wore a fitted white blazer with classic notch lapel. Ornate and robust, she was a black-and-white Shrike flycatcher perched in the silence of an important room. She testified.
DeAngelo’s victims—Charlene Smith, Cheri Domingo, and many others—would never get to testify. He restrained, raped, and murdered them in the middle of the night. A former police officer, he used a blinding flash of light to the face. Asleep one moment, in the spotlight the next, as jarring a change in climate as I could imagine. The scenario unwings me, the sudden white patch on their foreheads, the sound of sheets plucked like feathers.
I sleep with a knife under my pillow now, bone-handled, small as the basal joint of a bird’s wing. The hardness beneath the plush and push of foam, parallel to my collarbone like a cat’s buried kill. I grip it. I fool myself into believing I’m ready.
Lately I also find myself researching women’s 70s and 80s fashion. An attempt to connect with DeAngelo’s victims perhaps or maybe a distraction to refocus my fear. 70s collars were nearly twice the size of today’s; large, floppy, and pointy was the look. The 80s saw more bows or ties at the neck. As if even then we were preparing to defend ourselves.
I pay more attention to how I dress now that I teach English at an Orthodox Jewish girls’ school. Tznios requires I wear a skirt, cover my knees, elbows, even my clavicle. I find a glimmer of freedom in this new dress code and embrace the mandated modesty less from novelty and more from a reverence for centuries of tradition. If simply avoiding a V-neck permits my temporary membership in this sacred community, who am I to take issue? The Hebrew tickles my tongue as I remind my students to button up while they kiss the mezuzah at the door to our classroom. I cannot help a tenderness in these moments. Lord protect this flock of dark-skirted fledglings. They entertain my attempts at offering up poems like Wahmanholm’s but openly prioritize their more sensible coursework, like AP Biology. How we tend to sort and sequence our lives in order to survive what is required of us.
The collared flycatcher was one of the first birds to have its full genome sequenced. An ornithological profiling to help geneticists understand things like pluming reflectance and hatching success. The undeniable breadcrumbs of DNA, like how the police finally collared the Golden State Killer.
Yesterday my cat left his kill by our front bench, under the desert globemallow. It’s not a collared flycatcher—I’ve learned they don’t live in California. This poor dead thing could be a Pacific-slope or buff-breasted flycatcher according to the Audubon bird app. No matter. Its neck had been snapped in the quiet of pre-dawn Los Angeles, where death lingers, an eye on all low-lying coasts of tender destination. Caught in the spine of our cholla cactus, the cat’s collar catches my eye.
CANDICE M. KELSEY [she/her] is a poet, educator, and activist living bicoastally in L.A. and Georgia. A finalist for a Best Microfiction 2022, she is the author of six books. Candice also serves as a poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review. https://www.candicemkelseypoet.com/