“PENISGATE” AT THE OLYMPICS

by Diane Kendig

 

Illustration from Journal of Astrological Big Data Ecology: Premium source for made up science

The Guardian begins with the obvious question:
“Why inject acid into your penis, and what are the health risks?”

If ever there were a serious misuse of the second person,
here you go. I won’t inject anything into myself, or,

as my sister said, when doctors ordered her to give herself
her own shots, “This is why I went into Speech, and you into Medicine.”

And actually, the athletes aren’t injecting their own, uh, organ,
because they are into Skiing and their doctors into Medicine.

Even for the men among us, though, says my husband, it's unimaginable.
Still ski jumpers go to great lengths and with hyaluronic acid, even further.

That is, they want their crotch at greater lengths for suit measurement—
which happens nine months before the games, so they get like a little

maternity ski suit, a tad larger, getting a slight lift, just 5% more surface,
but this is the Milano Cortino 2026. Competition amounts to centimeters.

The World Anti-Doping Agency is investigating. One urologist says,
the rarest case would be gangrene and loss of the penis.

No athlete has been willing to comment on that.

Diane Kendig  is the author of five poetry collections. Her latest is Woman with a Fan. Her writing has appeared in Cider Press Review, Comstock Review, Valparaiso Review, and other journals. She ran a prison writing workshop in Ohio for 18 years, and now curates the Cuyahoga County Public Library weblog, Read + Write. 

THE WATERMELONS OF KHERSON

by Diane Kendig

When President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the newly liberated city of Kherson he joked that he was there because he "wanted a watermelon".

It was important to support people there despite the continuing risk, he added. But why a watermelon?

The president was referencing the fruit that has become an internet meme in the last few days - a fruit that is a symbol of the southern Ukrainian region. —BBC,  November 15, 2022

Pablo Neruda called it “the green whale of summer,”
but this is November and these whales,
beached all autumn on the shores of the Duipro,
could not swim up river to Kyiv
from the rich farmlands of Kherson, under siege.

And since the fruit has always been a sign
for the region, with its statue of this “moon on earth”
floating, cut open, its ruby slice bearing “black stars”
on a brick platform over everyone’s head, a flag
“green, white, red, /that dissolves into/
wild rivers, sweet as sugar,” when news came
of a counteroffensive to retake the city,
watermelon memes bobbed up on its Twitter account,
not yet freed but amassing like pods.

And when
their liberators arrived, the people surrounded them
and embraced them as people once did in Paris,
and the soldiers embraced the people. One soldier,
running to an old woman, on her knees
in front of her house, lifted her up and held her,
his grandmother.

The citizens greeted them with armloads
of flowers, mostly chrysanthemums,
because this was not the season of the sunflower
but of the fall, with yellow, orange, and russet mums.

And too, the watermelon rose up on the streets
in drawings and in all their real roundness,
this “mine or mountain of fantastic food,”
sustenance floating buoyantly in the hands
of the rescued and rescuers, sustaining them.

Diane Kendig is the author of five poetry collections. Her latest is Woman with a Fan. Her writing has ppeared in J Journal, Wordgathering, The New Verse News, Valparaiso Review, and other journals. She ran a prison writing workshop in Ohio for 18 years, and now curates the Cuyahoga County Public Library weblog, Read + Write.

WHY DO DOCTORS IGNORE THE CLITORIS?

a found poem by Diane Kendig

derived from the article “Half the World Has a Clitoris: Why Don’t Doctors Study It?” by Rachel E. Gross, The New York Times, October 17, 2022

Anatomy of the Clitoris and Penis—3D Model available from Etsy.

Compare the vulva

to a small town in the Midwest.

Doctors tend to pass through it

barely looking up

on their way to their destination,

the cervix and uterus.

If the vulva…is

an underappreciated city

the clitoris is

a local roadside bar

…a deep structure,

made up largely

of erectile tissue

reaching into the pelvis

encircling the vagina.

Documented injuries to the clitoris

could be prevented…

if doctors just spent more time

getting to know the clitoris,

…intimately bound up

in female pleasure and orgasm,

not high on medicine’s priority list.

[One urologist] recalled that

in medical training

the clitoris barely made

a cameo.

The medical textbook

Last’s Anatomy omitted

the clitoris entirely.

Descriptions of the penis went on for pages.

Diane Kendig is the author of five poetry collections. Her latest is Woman with a Fan. Her writing has appeared in J Journal, Wordgathering, The New Verse News, Valparaiso Review, and other journals. She ran a prison writing workshop in Ohio for 18 years, and now curates the Cuyahoga County Public Library weblog, Read + Write. 

ST. AGNES EVE ARRIVES IN STEUBENVILLE, OHIO

by Diane Kendig

Protesters return to Steubenville voicing concerns about rape case --Steubenville Herald-Star, February 3, 2013

The Lessons of Steubenville --The New Yorker, January 11, 2013

Rape Case Unfolds on Web and Splits City--The New York Times, December 16, 2012

From outside Harding Field
I think of the legal brief,
and of the freshman girl
who has had no relief
though surely she has dreams.

The coaches played their teams
for pics and Tweets don’t count
at least not to any amount.

Therefore,
a motion gets filed mid-December
asking the court please remember
she may not be victim, but whore.


Diane Kendig, who has worked as a poet, writer, translator and teacher for over 40 years, is the author of four poetry collections, most recently The Places We Find Ourselves (fall 2009). A recipient of two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships in Poetry and a Fulbright lectureship in translation, she has published widely in literary journals, including J Journal, Wordgathering, About Places, and qarrtsiluni.