Four poems by Vancouver Poet Laureate Evelyn Lau on aging, aching and orthotics. Read more of Evelyn Lau's Geist work here.

GALLBLADDER

Who knew you were even there?

Tucked under the liver, a shrivelled

and sunken pear, small sac, treasure bag

of stones, a stitch in my side—

you are chewing me up from the inside,

your constant gnawing, your spastic contortions

bruising the liver, sending its gamma readings soaring.

When you attack, women say

it’s like childbirth, without the happy ending.

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You wake me in the night, announce yourself

just under the ribcage, to the right,

you who slept so soundly for decades,

pink and plump, now fiercely awake

and complaining, mottled black

and diseased. I’ve fed you a rich diet

of sugar and fat, groomed myself into

alliteration, the typical gallbladder patient—

a fat, fertile, forty-year-old female.

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The surgeon wants to snatch you,

wiggle you out from the nest of innards

and extract you through a slit in my side,

but I want you to stay a while longer—

your little screeching voice,

your bilious mouth pushing out and pushing out

its stuck stones, wedged in your neck

like olive pits. You keep me in thrall

with your appetite for pain,

your possibility of rupture.

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VAGINA

The indignity of seeing you change,

even you. Your lips used to be springy

to the touch, a miniature trampoline,

a little fat cushion of flesh. It seems someone

let all the stuffing out. Now the inner labia,

once so tidy and trim, are stretched

and distended, and sometimes poke out

like the tip of a tongue in a cruel tease.

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That’s all you want me to say about you.

Lately you’ve grown reticent as a maiden aunt

in your middle age, desiring flannel nightgowns

and ten o’clock bedtimes. So open to proposition

in your prime, it won’t be long before

you grow a white fur, prepare for hibernation.

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FEET

A doctor once exclaimed, Those are some ugly feet!

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These days you don’t even look human—

nothing like a model’s feet in a magazine,

slim and straight as kayaks,

squelching in the sparkly sand.

You resemble the plaster model

in the podiatrist’s office, the one he uses

to demonstrate deformities.

Your bunions, knobs of throbbing bone

at the base of the big toe, have given birth

to bunionettes. Your hammer toes

are scrunched into claws, as if forever

trying to grasp at something not there.

Plantar fasciitis renders the morning’s first steps

like those of the mermaid’s on land,

a dance on knife points.

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Still, I feel a motherly affection for you,

the runt of the litter, take you into my hands

on winter nights and rub. Caked with calluses,

studded with seed corns, you are like the old woman

on the bus who wears a purple hat

strung with birds and fruit and jingly bells—

a dropout in the race for beauty,

conformity. The years I stuffed you into stilettos

long gone, now I coddle you

with custom orthotics, sensible shoes

cozy as moccasins. Soon you’ll be granted

your lifelong wish and live out the rest

of your days in Birkenstocks—

you’ll be walking on air!

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LOST AND FOUND

Somehow the custom orthotic, a slip of plastic

worth hundreds of dollars, worked its way out

of my sandal in the rough landscape

of the lunar beach and hid

amidst sandcastles and firepits,

chips of charcoal and tangles of kelp.

We combed and combed the shore,

the waning light against us. Watermelon moon

in the cotton candy sky. It seemed then

that this life was a collection of losses,

a slipping down an ever steeper slope,

shedding possessions and loved ones until,

at the last, we shed our own mottled coat of flesh,

this ragged lumpy lived-in self.

Where had the California beauty gone,

though the sun was setting

behind the lifeguard’s blue hut,

the surf drumming? All we found

was what others had lost—

a sneaker, two battered cellphones,

a guitar pick wedged into the sand

like a tiny surfboard. Row of burnt palms

behind the lighthouse, decomposing sea lion

in the rank breeze.

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The next morning we returned to the beach,

holding out hope like metal detectors, and there,

in front of me, gleaming like the foot-bone

of an exotic animal, the orthotic!

To find something, after so many losses!

The photograph of that moment shows me

with arms raised in religious ecstasy,

eyes closed and mouth open in a half-mad

silent song of hallelujah. You would have thought

I was calling down the spirits from the next world.

That someone I loved had come back to me

from the place where no one returns. Here in Santa Cruz,

where a man in rags shakes his finger

at the heavenly blue sky, shouting,

Your mother was a hamster,

and your father smelled of elderberry!

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