it’s not that I wouldn’t, if I could,
and obviously why wouldn’t you want to

I had Crohn’s disease and it nearly killed me, twice,
but don’t look sad or awkward
it’s just how things went;
so my surgeon (because I consider him mine)
removed my large intestine
and I assumed he’d remove my rectum as well
but he decided not to
(to be kind, he told me, in case
things could be reconnected one day
although maybe he was really leaving
something behind for all the anal sex)

my rectal stump (I really hate the sound
of that phrase: ‘rectal stump’) got sad
from missing my large intestine
so my surgeon removed it eight months later
(the surgery is called a proctectomy
if you need to google something)
and I assumed he’d just sew me up
with a neat straight seam
leaving me the kind of alien who’d never
had to shit from their anus
but he decided to fashion
an approximation of an anus from my tissue,
even though it’s an anus to nowhere

I wish I had a neat straight seam

when I was 18 and already starting to get sick
I had anal sex with the guy I was semi-regularly fucking
(on a weights bench in his father’s garage,
which is the most 18-year-old place to have sex)
and there was a bit of blood
and I remember the rush of heat to my cheeks
that he might notice and know I was sick
know that I was haemorrhaging blood
most days when I went to the toilet
know that I was scared I might have cancer
know that I wasn’t telling anyone

when I told my new lover about my ileostomy
(because that’s what you end up with
when your large intestine is gone;
an ileostomy, that is, not a new lover)
he said “so anal’s out then” and laughed gently
(and that laugh made me like him even more)

Paula Harris lives in New Zealand, where she writes poems and sleeps in a lot, because that's what depression makes you do. She won the 2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and the 2017 Lilian Ida Smith Award; her poetry has been published in various journals, including The Spinoff, Poetry NZ Yearbook, Snorkel, and Landfall. She tweets @paulaoffkilter.

Gem Blackthorn is QMT's Sex Columnist, and the author/curator of Lust Thrust Thursdays. Send her your submissions and questions at sexsexsex [at] queenmobs.com