My sister Annick fixed me, locked me in, with cold, blue eyes as she sat down slowly next to me at the table. “I’m a surgeon,” she said, not quite casually, “a board certified surgeon.”

I give her a questioning look.

“I could take your steak knife,” she says, eyeing it, “plunge it into your neck - and oh, sure, there’d be a question or two but in the end - I’d walk away clean.”

“I don’t think,” I start saying…

Tears well to near overflowing in her turquoise eyes. “I came in - officer” she says, sounding stunned and surreal. “She was having a convulsion, she exhibited severe cyanosis, I couldn’t clear her airway, it was a classic tonic-clonic seizure.” she goes on, her voice rising to near panic with the diagnosis.

“You’d never…” I start to interrupt but she gently covers my mouth with her left hand while gathering the handle of the serrated silver steak knife, expertly, into her right hand.

“I attempted to perform a tracheostomy,” she continues in a traumatized but professional voice. “but as I began a transverse incision above the sternal notch,” a tear rolls down her cheek, “Anais suffered a severe generalized-onset seizure and convulsed, forcefully into the knife”

“IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!” I confess suddenly, as if under oath, in court.

There’s a moment of still silence.

“And WHEN,” she asked, wiping away the tear and turning the knife for a downward ******. “Were you going to MENTION IT?!”

“NOW! - before dinner!” I look around the empty room - for help - for a sympathetic jury. “It was an ACCIDENT! - I’m SORRRRYYYY!” I plead.

My sister slowly sets down the knife and says deliberately, purposefully - like a death sentence: “My Valentino sheer floral-lace top is STAINED.”

”I can FIX it!” I insist in a rush.

“Keep OUT of my room - and my stuff.” she grumbles, “And REMEMBER what I said,” she adds as she pats the knife before getting up and leaving the room.

“I WILL’” I promise to her back.

A second later, my mom sweeps in from the opposite direction.
“What’s up” she asks.

“Nothing” I almost whisper, head down.

A vial of shadows, languid
Rests upon an outstretched hand
A viscous and vaporous oil
Accompanied by a stretching smile

Or a sneer?
Smothered by slick veneer
Fingers clink on the tonic, and
Colours spring to life
Vivacious and clonic

"Drink deep of this truth, my child
receive strength, wisdom and guile!
For this great gift, I ask only your time
                                                            ­          and a dime
                                                                         (or two dozen)     
                                                     ­        
One hundred percent success
A modern panacea, no less
It only fails, you see, if
You fail to believe"

It was when my waking eyes
shank into the dent in the bed
                                that I knew.

Torpid, little tense in the neck
the phone dead,
my hand snaking through
       a mesh of wires
to get to the muzzy
                  crux of it,
it was yourself
I turned up tangled in,
found ensnared, redrawn,
in throws, and throngs
            of a clonic cupidity.

That was us
who mangled in the night
like cobras with empty stomachs
Churning round
small nocturnal animals
         in the dark,
even in the dark,
I swore your skin was pellucid.

Sleepy-headed still,
I skedaddled outside
to swallow the rain,
and slumbery remember summer,
when I hopped as light
as bird from brier,
up rises my spirit,
down falls the foot
caked in muck,
schlepping slowly
through the mire.

You've slept in my bed
it seems, for as long
as memory serves,
just one of the many things on Earth
I've noticed and subsequently
           can't unnotice,
like the way in one hears a clock
tick.....tick.......tock......
only when one is listening.

I have noticed
that dent in my bed
grow into a dozing silhouette,
noticed the garden-gate
creek in F minor,
silver cobwebs in the loft,
               distant dogbarks
and a pomegranate stain
on your mother's blouse.

Once, so thickly laden
with expectancy,
                     now I know
that I am
                        no longer
                           Waiting.

We want freedom
We want equality
Equality to work! Equality to rock!
Equality to be -you dread it- ******! If you like the word
It's my pride - to be what you deny

Give me my feminism
But don't take the fun from me
Give me all that feminism
but don't take the spark from me
If it doesn't make me high, it's not it

Don't get inside my bed
and tell me to be a good girl!
Burn all your Gods
Heaven or earthly bound
No one ever tells me who to ****!

You all think you know much! But you don't know at all
Freedom is the aim! Freed from everything
We want men to be our friends, in and outside our bed
We don't need you, righteous people!
We don't need you, voice of reason!

Freedom to show my body, freedom to decide
Give us those rights, give us life
To fully explore and become people not stuff
Don't ever let us fall
down the rabbit hole
of their clonic boring mores

Right to get respect
for all we are, "no more sectioning of the self"
choosing between my two halves and picking the wildest one
What if I like to be a little naughty imp
when I am with him?

Right to be ourselves
not less
We are for real, we are here
So swallow back all that ****
I want my rights
Not laws about my lower parts