NaPoMo16: Sarah Blake & Monica Ong’s “Etymology of an Untranslated Cervix” |

When asked about her favorite poem, Sarah Blake replied with “Etymology of an Untranslated Cervix” by Monica Ong from Silent Anatomies.

ETYMOLOGY of an UNTRANSLATED CERVIX

In Rufumbira, the local language here in Kisoro, there is no word for cervix,
and the word vagina is a shameful, dirt word, rarely uttered. -Erin Cox, MD

This space between two entries
I claim it.

When it (she) is blotted out with black marker
I say it, I name it.

But under these volcano peaks, I am locked out in English.

Cells rupture. Quietly.
A carcinoma colony creeping in her blank space. Spreads.

What if dysplasia simply meant
to displease?

The interpreter asks

Why do they want to go down there,
to that dirty, shameful place?

What is the point of wailing horns, of fighting
a fire with no address?

This dialect was not designed for her.

On the Western shore, I can spell it out, letter by letter
print a scan and map every tumor’s point of entry,

conduct daily surveillance on each tendril
until it is white with radioactive surge.

But what about her tongue?

Absent, unable to make real
her body, written in silence.

Danger: ( ) is waiting in red,
The monster’s shadow, taller and hungrier than the monster itself.

Ink spilled. Bleeding.

I chose “Etymology of an Untranslated Cervix” because I love the intersection of the body and language, multiple languages, the failure of language. Recently I’ve been focused on threats that bodies face, sometimes women’s bodies especially, and this struck me as a strange threat–not causing harm and yet fundamentally an attack on women’s bodies, even if in avoidance, in denial. I’m usually thinking about the faulty space between signifier and signified, but here, a situation where there is actually no signifier. What becomes of the signified then? This a part of my body I am supposed to reach up and touch once a month to check that my IUD strings are in place. I feel a sudden emptiness there without language. I love this poem that reclaims it so forcefully and beautifully.
–Sarah Blake

Silent Anatomies
96 pp. 7.5 x 10″
$19.95 paper
978-1-888553-69-7
Kore Press
February 2015

Sarah Blake is the founder of the online writing tool Submittrs, an editor at Saturnalia Books, and a recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in Boston Review, Drunken Boat, FIELD, and The Threepenny Review. She lives outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is the author of Mr. West, published in 2015 by Wesleyan University Press. You can visit her website here.