riven ovenbird I was four when I found my mother perched on the step that led to the kitchen, needle held in her unfaltering fingers, searching point poised above the flesh of her big toe, wherein a stray splinter lodged itself against her nail, inflamed and pulsing. I cried as she split her own skin with that stainless spear. What I felt was more than imagined pain. I could feel the needle’s sharpened tusk, its sudden piercing blow, as if it were my own body split and bleeding. I thought we were all born as mirrors to each other’s pain. It took time to see that most do not have this gift (this curse) of so much shared feeling. But I’m more afraid of being numb than being flayed, and I have refused every epidural offered, in favour of the agony of opening. Every day forces my organs into prolapse, my insides sliding hot and gory down my leg. I’m forever coming undone, but I borrow the needle from my mother’s hand and use its rusting shank to pull myself together with sinew drawn tight against irrevocable rupture. 260309 what's it to you? who go blather from