Eloisa Amezcua

CANDIDA

I consider putting cold yogurt
in my second mouth.
a website called home remedies for life
says this can help with a yeast infection
but the uneaten tub of chobani
in the fridge expired yesterday.
I read a woman made sourdough bread
using yeast from her vagina & the loaf rose
but wasn’t tangy the way sourdough
is supposed to be. I’d like to swallow
a part of my body, to cannibalize myself
into myself—maybe I’d have thicker hair
and thin wrists, delicate. I say delicate
but I mean unblemished, mean clean.
a cigarette burn on the right, scar faded
on the left. as a child, I learned to bathe myself
in my parent’s shower. I stepped onto the ledge
meant for propping one’s foot to shave or for sex,
reached for the soap & slipped, my wrist gashed
open from my father’s razor. I yelled
for my mother who thought it was shampoo in my eyes
again. she told me to rinse it out with water. I yelled
blood. kept yelling & she came to put me back together.
she put me back together. my lover asks
if I want to sit on his face, if I want his mouth to
eat my mouth that doesn’t eat & I tell him no.
tell him I can feel my vulva pulsing with heat
but not in the way he wishes. I reach my hand
into black cotton panties, the lace collecting dust
in a drawer because everyone knows
you’re supposed to wear cotton—
it breathes. I’m swollen. I don’t have to look
to know it’s red. & again I blame my mother
because she’s an exit wound & I’m the bullet,
or the gun, or the bullet & the gun.

Eloisa Amezcua is an Arizona native. Her debut collection, From the Inside Quietly, is the inaugural winner of the Shelterbelt Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón. A MacDowell fellow, she is the author of three chapbooks and founder/editor-in-chief of The Shallow Ends: A Journal of Poetry. Her poems and translations are published or forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and others.

*This poem also appeared in Gigantic Sequins, Issue 9.1