Chinese ring intrauterine device (IUD), early 2000s, New Zealand, by Dame Margaret Sparrow. Gift of Dame Margaret Sparrow, 2011. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Te Papa (GH022299)
During the procedure of putting a new IUD in the nurse stuck her fingers inside me. It was a cold and mechanical action, standard routine for healthcare. But it is intimate, don’t deny it is, to have someone’s hands inside you. To choose, willingly, to have objects inserted and placed into bumpy canals. I hate and love the feeling of not knowing where my body meets another. How much of sex is just the breath, oxygen circling around twin engines?
You shouldn’t put love stories in a museum. They fester with so much inaccuracy. All my citations might be reduced to rubble by worn out exes, but the feeling remains, an inexplicable attraction that crests through apathy and repulsion. My cervix right now is hormonally induced, coaxed into nonreproduction by a shallow T-shape with a five-year visa. I imagine this strange woman who had a buried circle taken out of her. A whole nation who have kept an infinity symbol in their abdomen, a snake eating its tail. It makes me think that all facts are emotions. I think of the IUD like a dormant cicada buried deep in soil, a piece of history that spends almost its entire life span waiting for a single moment to burst from its territory. I wonder of this mystery woman’s encounters, during those four years that ring remained lodged. If she had any stories she chose to tell or hide.
Vanessa Mei Crofskey is a writer and artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau, interested in violence and intimacy. She is a staff writer at The Pantograph Punch and has a collection of poetry out with AUP New Poets 6.
Lauren Lysaght’s mixed media work Hidden Agender is inspired by the life of Eugenia Falleni (about 1875–1938), a woman who presented herself as man in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and whose life was placed under the microscope in 1920 when she was charged with murder and ‘sex fraud’.