“2.8 x 2.9 x 2.0 cm” by Meha Srivastav
‘2.8 x 2.9 x 2.0 cm’
CLINICAL INDICATIONS
Remember when we first found you?
You were just 2.3 x 1.9 x 2.2 cm
It wasn’t me -
it was the man I fell in love with in two weeks
- no, in one day -
Who touched my breasts like they really existed
for the first time
on my body
for me, for my pleasure!
Had my mother fed me lies all this time?
told me breasts were for hiding
were for item dancing girls stained black were for desecrating feminism
And I had believed that the nipples played no role in seismic orgasms
that touch nowhere near my vulva had no true meaning
Until him, or until me.
Yet I swallow all I know -
For when he found you, was his role not - in some twisted way - that of the
cold gloved physician, fingertips calculating?
For touch is just cell meeting cell
causing dendritic tingling
and I know that there is more than one way of touch,
more than one sensory neuron -
axons stretch and cell bodies swallow and
sodium and potassium travel across currents so I can feel the graze of
Tadpole tails rippling ponds
The nightingale’s wings batting soft like warm eyelids
And the same squeeze of my breast
that can be as quenching as a bruised peach bursting
Or
as cruel as liquid pesticide invading my veins
like the Bhopal gas leak,
making generations of women before me heave
————
COMPARISON STUDY
I wonder why you appeared
in a guilty, corny daughter-of-immigrant way
whose mother consulted her father
if she should wear an undershirt beneath the particular t-shirt that revealed 1.3 cm too much of her almost
flat, teenaged chest
Is it because my necklines started plunging?
Or because I started watching other girl’s necklines and
the things they covered or left bare
You know, sometimes, I couldn’t help but feeling
like I was no different than a hungry, pimply adolescent boy
hastily, desperately ramming penis in palm in the five seconds before his mom
yells ‘Breakfast!’
to the bouncing flesh on the voluptuous blonde’s body
But I couldn’t tell if I liked them on them or I liked them on me
so I kept my gaze but my breasts farther and farther from cloth
and people - friends - told me my boobs were big
that there was no way I was wearing the right sized bra
that they were big on my small body
that they were nice, so nice
Yet if I’m telling you the truth
something always felt a little off, thora kadva in my throat
- coated with bitter mustard oil like my nani’s iron tava -
when I saw pictures of me with those waning gibbous moons
not peeking, but perched
on the fence of my collarbone
Those grinning little fools!
Were they pushed up by my pricey black Savage X Fenty bra
or a large man’s dismembered, pallid hands?
That left ash on the downward parabola of my breast
Oh Ma, she would have screeched in terror
had she seen my body falling out of the pockets she stitched for me
Her face contorted with a filial pain
that can only be passed down from birth giver to birth giver
through maternal isodisomy -
Tell me how both my X chromosomes come from her, from
our Bihari ancestors in breast-snagging blouses
That I see in the mirror, their faces lit by a spitting fire, flaming brown spots onto round rotis
Is it an earthen stove or a funeral pyre that they squat their shriveled bodies over?
- It is a curse
an unending obligation that stops me short of orgasm
my nerve endings forget pleasure and I think of my mother, even my father
TECHNIQUE
She walks in, small brown lady
Is she my savior? Or just an accomplice
White woman walks in with her
- She is nameless, blonde, the apprentice of cold fingers
They are here to see you, the inculpable little lump
You have rested in my body
embedded yourself in my flesh
Your weight carries no gravity to make my back bend
And you are as smooth and whole as a large pearl unearthed from my palm
The only pain I thought you’d caused
Was phantom - those strange streaks in my breast like a short-circuited wire
And sometimes I groped you, played with you, fiddled with you
And then was seized by how perhaps I was,
Like the surrogate doll mother of Harlow’s monkeys,
Encouraging you to grow
“Name?”
Meha Srivastav
“Date of Birth”
August 10, 1999
And this is all that they know of me,
more than I know of them,
the South Asian Defector and the Snow White Apprentice,
before they proceed to grope and watch me
Am I allowed to say that this is not my first time,
either sensually or scientifically
lying half naked on a bed,
having my breast squeezed?
Yet it’s the first time I think I have lost a part of my body
for a wrenching, sinking moment in time
as the stranger massages and kneads and rubs and erodes
till I feel like there must be no more flesh on my breast that is mine
And they watch you on the nocturnal screen in the dark,
not a word whispered to me
as Defector instructs Apprentice
on how to read you -
Oh, Devil’s shit, bobbing on the waves of the black river Styx
This is how you reduce person to patient to body:
1) Have anxious woman lay on the bed
With ipsilateral arm abducted, her hand beneath head
In a ruse of lounging
So she is at her most vulnerable,
Breast spread out like butter melting on bread
Little lump bulging to her side
2) With nipple pointed to ceiling
Your radial motions should make a clock
Her breast tells time,
Her pinched eyelids tell time
Her racing heart tells time
But tell her that Time is subjective, and not hers to tell
3) If you care to make her any smaller,
Any less visible
Stop in the middle to tell her it’s ‘almost done’, rather saccharinely
And then after your glance at the screen (which of course, you have given her no privy to)
Come back, keep going, and start probing her armpit
Hard enough so she remembers the next day when she showers
4) Do it so vigorously her anxiety becomes dread
becomes paranoia turns to resignation
Do it so brazenly she suspects
you mine in her because you’ve found jewels
5) (Bonus) But the key to making her feel like body and not patient nor person -
Is to ensure the other stranger in the room, your White Apprentice,
is entitled to every detail
while this breast-burdened body has no clue
So your goal should be that when you leave
body believes cancer is the only reality
That when you leave
her breast is left hanging from that blue dishwater gown
because you don’t instruct her to cover up
Leave your messy leftovers,
Lubricating gel, now sticky like semen, lingering on her boob
As her eyes glaze over the black grated ceiling
As methyl isocyanate seeps into her wet rag heart
~
She comes all over me and walks out the door
FINDINGS
You are 2.8 x 2.9 x 2.0 cm,
with ‘minimal internal vascularity
Borders are well-circumscribed without shadowing’
You sound like a careful artist’s sketch
But they say you must go
leave my left breast limp
And I know touch is just cell meeting cell
causing dendritic tingling
Means nothing
Makes everything
But I can barely see, feel, hear, taste, smell my breasts on my body
can barely stand my lover touching them
can barely stand a shirt existing in their shape
I scroll past girls whose pictures I’d normally admire
whose breasts, yes, I’d find sumptuous.
But I’m no longer a pervert
no longer - no, never - a girl who can push up her boobs with ease.
FINAL INTERJECTION TO THE DOCTOR’S REPORT
Ma, do you think if the chicken came before the egg,
breasts came before milk
and Y chromosomed-men?
Maybe then you could let me keep mine.