After ‘I Woke Up’ by Jameson Fitzpatrick

 

I lay with my full bladder feeling the pulsing pain

from my one bleeding ovary

and it was intimate, though not quite as intimate

 

as the nurse squirting lubricant

onto a probe, pointing to the screen’s grey blur

and translating it as

 

haemorrhagic cyst. I felt her cold syllables

wriggling into my ear canals and it was intimate.

Sometimes intimacy takes the form

 

of sitting indoors with a hot water bottle,

spraying my succulents and watching their soil dampen

while picking intimate skin off my intimate running blisters

 

just as I know other people’s intimate habits

include smelling their own fingers

and smoothing their greasy bedsheets

 

after an intimate night of intimate sleep.

Looking out of the window at someone across

the street looking out of their window

 

used to be an intimate act of theft,

an infinitesimal scandal of glimpsing each other

in the intimate home, but in 2020

 

this is how we define human intimacy,

as separated by an intimate street,

and by intimate glass, twice.

 

 

JENNY DANES

 

Also by Jenny,

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