Almost snapped my neck

Molly Twomey

eye-fucking a bag of Hot Cheetos in M&S.

Wish I could stab my ovaries.

My science teacher says

ovulation pain doesn’t exist.

This is worse than sepsis,

a root canal or when I t-boned

my starlet. If the guards ever

luminol my bathroom,

they’ll excavate my yard.

Ah, the old ‘knife

in the butthole’ effect. It’s all peaks,

no valleys. I asked for a hysterectomy

at 11 years old. I microwave a sock

filled with rice, source a bag

of blue dream, cross my fingers

I don’t faint, my skull walloping the tiles,

a bucket of wet clay. I’d take

an amputated stomach over this throbbing.

MOLLY TWOMEY grew up in Lismore, Co Waterford. Her debut collection, Raised Among Vultures, was published in 2022 by The Gallery Press. It won the Southword Debut Collection Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for Best First Collection.