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      August 10, 2016Ruth MadievskyParagard

      I was in a lecture hall, explaining how the copper IUD works,
      talking about how metal ions
      change the intrauterine environment, making sperm
      swim all gimpy like they’ve had
      too many drinks. I was trying not to notice
      the dark shoving my head
      in a toilet, the way three months earlier
      it cannonballed into my grandmother’s CT scan.
      It hid within her kidney like the plastic
      baby inside a King Cake,
      and then it was nothing like a King Cake
      once we found it in her lungs, liver, and bones.
      I was using words
      like cervical mucus and nulliparous.
      I was thinking about the body
      and its mousetraps.
      How the copper IUD
      does to fertilized eggs what the body should
      but doesn’t do to tumors,
      which is to say, prevents them,
      either from forming or implanting—no one knows exactly
      how it works, but it does. I want to
      believe in the elegance
      of chemicals
      and the elegance of the person
      mixing the chemicals,
      but I know there’s only so much dark
      you can pass
      like a kidney stone. Medicine
      can’t promise us anything, can only
      paddle from one buoy
      to another, maybe
      harpooning the shark or being eaten by the shark
      or shooting cannons at swimmers
      and becoming a bigger problem
      than the shark.

      from #52 - Summer 2016

      Ruth Madievsky

      “Though I was born outside the U.S., in Moldova, I’ve lived in Los Angeles for most of my life. To be a Los Angeles poet is to negotiate the city’s many contradictions: the lively literary scene and the flawed public transit system that makes it difficult to access; the glamour and extreme poverty that are often just around the corner from each other; the lights and skyscrapers, their beauty and ugliness. The particular imagery of Los Angeles is always making its way into my poems. I love living in this city and being a poet in it.”

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