Black Women Don’t Experience Pain Tolerance

by Monica Prince

Vaginismus Mag

for J. Marion Sims

Here—take it back with you. The scalpel. The sutures. The bill of sale. Don’t wash anything. Leave us  on the table, in the bedroom, out back,  in the bathtub. We know our way home.

Take your white coat, and your glasses. Yes, your notebooks, too. Especially those.

We will close up for you, the jagged stitches  spelling our own names. Do you remember them?

Don’t wipe us down, or rinse us off. The rags stay, too. Shine your shoes,  fill your pockets with gauze, and get out.

In your absence, we consider  the repetition of dying, how being  a body opened doesn’t equate  to a body unlocked.

Once you’re gone, the silence rushes in. You might say there was always silence—  you might publish it, even indoctrinate  generations to believe it as law.

We know better.

We are not the creators of our legacy, no.  We cannot even afford the linens  needed to wet and cool our aching chests, lungs  heavy, weary, each breath a gift, a gravestone.

Don’t return. But you will. The research demands your supply. We don’t say please when we ask you to stop. You take note, cut anyway,  mistake our screams for melodrama,  our blood for gratitude.

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Monica Prince teaches activist and performance writing at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. She is the author of How to Exterminate the Black Woman: A Choreopoem (PANK, 2020), Instructions for Temporary Survival (Red Mountain Press, 2019), and Letters from the Other Woman (Grey Book Press, 2018). She is the managing editor of the Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, and the co-author of the suffrage play, Pageant of Agitating Women, with Anna Andes. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Texas Review, The Rumpus, MadCap Review, American Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.