Mirena
doesn’t sound like the name of an intrauterine device, sounds like a girl’s name, like the name of the freckled girl from the complex down the road, whose mother wasn’t home when I came over after school because she worked the swing shift as an aide at the local nursing home. The girl whose name began with an M and ended with an a and I ate fried bread with ketchup, feasted on Tiger Beat, French-braided each other’s hair. We played Prince on repeat, lacquered our lips with bubble gum-flavored Kissing Potion and licked it off. Her room had a door with a lock. After college, I heard she’d hooked up with a guy who knocked her around, and up, then took off; shortly thereafter, having left the baby with her mom, she, too, disappeared. Thirty years later, here I lie with a blue-gloved OB-GYN between my legs, who clasps you by your polyethylene threads as if you were a two-hooked lure, and I, a big-game fish, proclaiming Look! Here’s what allowed you pleasure without worry all these years!, asks if I’d like to take you home, you looking as pristine as the day he slid you into place, uniformly white and glistening, cylindric body splaying into two clown feet, or, right side up, two extended arms. I decline the offer, but later I regret it, wishing I’d kept you the way one keeps a treasure: in a floral-scented drawer, underneath a pillow, or dangling as pendant from a chain. Little plastic anchor, for so long you lay nested in the pink bed of my uterus, casting waves of progesterone to chase away the schools of sperm that pushed and wriggled their way through. For this I thank you, you who allowed me to be plumbed, my desire free of consequence, a one-point-two inch, two-pronged miracle, almost as miraculous as that time when I was twelve, and the girl with the name like yours and I — before we knew sex with a man could fill us with more than we were ready to bear — swayed and sang with the funk falsetto, rounding our sticky mouths around the words we tasted: turn you on, lover, come for, my hips behind her jeaned hips, our bodies like waves colliding, then breaking in two directions.