We meet for lunch,
sound off about our husbands,
government corruption,
our various ailments.
We let loose over our sandwiches,
open doors crusted with rust,
wedged with torn and tired rags,
or newly lubricated with yesterday’s irritations.
We tell ourselves better to vent than to stuff.
Midmorning in summer the hen next door
intrudes with her Chinese water-torture call:
bawk, bawk, bawk, bawk, bawk—starts slow,
gets faster, louder—she’s venting too.
Her egg, wrapped in the tissue of her uterus,
moves through her vent, (yes, that’s what it’s called)
until she pushes it out of her body,
a kind of inside-out trick.
My egg attached to the wall of my uterus,
clung there for nine months,
zygote to egg to fetus to child.
I labored fourteen hours to shunt my son
down the birth canal, ten fingers, ten toes,
nearly turning myself inside out.
My child was twisted, shoulder first,
jammed against my backbone.
He needed freedom,
we both wanted release.
This baby—shrouded
in his torn blue caul
pulled through the cut across my body
mouth open, gulps new air.
Venting
Lisa Ashley, MDiv, is a Pushcart Prize nominee and descends from survivors of the Armenian genocide. She has spent eight years companioning and providing safe space for incarcerated youth. Lisa navigates her garden with physical limitations and unlimited imagination. Her poems have appeared in Amsterdam Quarterly, Blue Heron Review, The Healing Muse, Gyroscope, and Last Leaves Literary Review. She writes in her log home among the firs on Bainbridge Island, WA, having found her way there from rural New York by way of Montana and Seattle.