i had teeth before they interrupted
who clit
my mouth and
cut it
stitched it up
shut it
until i smiled
it didn’t hurt
dentata
The toothed vagina is no sexist hallucination: every penis is made less
in every vagina… ——Camille Paglia
Open our legs, we’ll cut you
in ha/lf, knowing you can’t stand
it. the iron phal/
lus that you think
wil/l break
our teeth only bree/ds
collapse.
rever/ses the birth
proces/s/
what use
immortal/ity if
death’s the only sp/oil?
we’ll sink
our te/eth into psycho/
lo/gies. to figure
out the fe/
ar that shriv/
els every tri/
umph.
the bit/ten
worm that wa/
nts the fish.
it’s not hal/lu/ci/nation.
sa/cred ocean mountain river
sacred icon. civil/
izations.
fighting tooth and nail for what exists
in ev/er/y vagina, The Ter/ri/
ble Moth/er
earth: the one blunt tooth
that thrills
when we have sex.
is it a boy or a girl?
For Herculine Barbin
First question, and sometimes she be mad.
who wouldn’t want to be a female? 9 times out of 10
the privileged sex (Tiresias said).
to which their nature bends.
10,000+ nerve endings
facilitating offspring.
a system of repression that defends
the short end of what happens in the bed.
She clowns like Nemo. dressed to cover legs.
arms. trims cheeks. upper lip. frequent use of scissors. ridiculously thin.
in her tiny Paris apartment. w/ a bed a chair a table. her memoir on a little desk.
the poverty of existence. double-sexed.
or take: the lowly seahorse.
highly evolved. who transfers to the male, her eggs.
take: power. a certain hardness. she said.
1 in every 2,000. same as redheads.
Note: Words in italics taken from Barbin’s memoir, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century Hermaphrodite (trans. Richard McDougall).
Kathleen Hellen is the author of three collections and three poetry chapbooks, most recently from Lily Poetry Review Books, young girl in the flower of time. Her debut collection Umberto’s Night won The Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Hellen’s work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, Gargoyle Magazine, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Four Way Review, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, The Sewanee Review, Sixth Finch, SmokeLong Quarterly, West Branch, and elsewhere. Her poetry has won prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. Her favorite revenge story is the 47 rōnin, about 47 masterless samurai who on January 31, 1703, avenge the death of their former master, Lord Akō. This vendetta is among the most famous episodes in Japanese history.
