(Poem) Sleeping Lady Has an MRI Scan by Abigail Ardelle Zammit

Photo by Abigail Ardelle Zammit

These perfectly poised atoms do not

require your artificial excitation.

Not when my temple is breathless

with homo erectus quivering to test his quill.

Too late to channel myself for the play

of magnetic fields. My womb glows

like the night sky. These waning moons

on which you’ll have me lie! Let me

deck myself in tarnished bronze before I

squeeze my breasts into your plastic embrace.

I shan’t need your torpid skies, rude

fuchsia and sickly lime. No! You won’t

foretell my most likely demise, how long

I’ll last on shifting cells or whether

the minutest big bang will shatter me

to snippets of myself. I’ve lived

six thousand years without surmises.

Spiralling ceilings don’t hold the future

though every fragment of crumbling limestone

hoards a blueprint of my curves.


[Author’s Note These poems are from the sequence You May Touch If You Like, published in Portrait of a Woman with Sea Urchin (SPM: London, 2015), which was the second prize winner of the Sentinel Poetry Book Competition.   The Maltese Venus is a fertility Goddess variously known as ‘The Sleeping Lady’ and ‘The Fat Lady’, statues and figurines of which have been found in many Maltese Neolithic temples, amongst which, the Hypogeum of Ħal-Saflieni, a sanctuary and necropolis located in Paola, the earliest remains of which date back to 4000BC.  You may read the whole Goddess sequence, as well as other poems set in Malta during WWII by purchasing the collection online: https://abigailardellezammit.net/poetry-books/]


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