Playing Sims

I once offered to be an egg donor,
they treated me like an overnight bag
except with pages of forms to fill and
two one-hour interviews even before
I was given such info as having no say
over the child finding me at 18, even
before I knew I was fertile, the eugenics
lab had already asked for my four best
features, my colour and my ethnicity,
even that of my great-grandparents so
that the prospective parents could choose
a version of me like a snack from a
vending machine or a university campus.

My tail twitched and my udders hung
heavy with the unused milk turning
to pus when they determined I wasn’t
what the human race wanted,

so I was butchered and slabbed into
red marble streaks that could have
passed for tuna steaks, the clot colour
of old smelly periods, and sold as meat
in local co-operative supermarkets.

=

The lines like two adjacent tightropes, brand their equals into skin, failing to match perfectly, as the hand must’ve wobbled, with a view so great, since an abyss can always terrify. The knives had gleamed their devilish smile, to trap soul-kites in the underworld. The consequence, a prideful addition, while the subtraction of self-worth swelled up and down, like the frequency monitors in hospitals, where life – and psyche – teeter.

Dide is a multidisciplinary writer, composer and artist. Her debut poetry pamphlet is being published by Broken Sleep Books in 2022 and her debut poetry collection by Verve Press in 2023. You can follow her @_d_i_d_e_ and www.dide.uk.