Poem 8 – Hooked on Haibun

The assignment was to write a Haibun, a Japanese form combining prose and poetry. We had been wondering how to utilize the two weird gynecological texts some guy donated, so here's a bit of DNA from them in dialogue with other vaginal traces in the Archive. The "Birth Fygvres" image from one of the gynecological tracts was placed on the back of the poem page.

Hooked on Haibun

Congenital defects were believed to be caused by thoughts and events that occurred to the mother during pregnancy. Mothers suspected of having engaged in perverse activities. Some methods used by midwives were covering windows and locking doors to protect from evil spirits. Difficult labour sometimes aided by dangerous “hooks” to remove the child. They kept the nature of the instrument a secret for nearly a century.

If it happens from defect of the spirits
let it be rubbed, the spirits aroused
flowing to the painful part

*

But if this retention is of another humor, that is hot and dry and called bile, then women feel burning and pricking of heat inside, and their urine is of a high color and greasy; and at the time of their purgation they excrete toxic matter like coal, waters a feeble color smell slightly.

Where had the vagina searched?
Why was the vagina of velocity gathering?
Why were we swerving?

*

There are corrupt humors in the womb outside the veins in the hollowness of the uterus, and they hinder women. And they feel heaviness. And there is much tending to. And they fly up to the heart and lungs. Hot about the mouth of the womb. Dark yellow and greasy. Inside and aching, pricking and hardness.

So existing a vulva
(so additional a sheet)
sounds