I, Tiresias

No man is big enough for my arms.

No man is big enough for my arms—look at all that they hold.

Seven generations of weeping women lay heavy against my chest, heaving with sorrow, with the weight of expectation.

Oh, the expectation.

I cup my left breast and curse the idea of all the men it would take to fill my arms and how all of them would nurse—the relentless tug of them pulling at and on me.

I am Eliot’s Tiresias, blind and throbbing between two lives.

My body is a cage.

I, Tiresias.

The seer kneels before me, clouded eyes focus on the place where my womb should be.

“Where did it go?” she asks.