the PT says, sliding her gloved finger inside me. We’ll go slow. Tell me if it hurts. Even empathy needs consent. She probes my narrow tunnel, muscles clamp down, pupils constrict beneath overhead light, shadows stretch across paint-chipped walls. When she presses on my lower belly, the smell of latex and sweat stings the back of my throat, overpowering—like the bald man with huge, wet lips and a tongue shoved between my legs, pressing me into the cracked seat on the bus where we just met, my face pinned against the foggy window. Her words, the vagina expands during arousal, swell behind my back teeth. Shame penetrates deeper than pleasure. I start to retch. Breathe, she says, removing first her finger, then glove, stopping to give my hand a gentle squeeze, but it stings in place of a mother’s hug. I want to tell her, Stop—but how can I explain her touch burns worse than that hot, cramped bus reeking of body odor and stale cigarettes? I might faint right here on her table. When she passes me a box of Kleenex—I’m embarrassed to wipe myself with anything peach-pink, scented, soft enough to absorb what leaks from crinkled folds. I stuff a tissue into my pocket. I’m afraid to throw it away. What if, like my mother, she thinks I’m a waste?
Tammy Smith is a poet and licensed clinical social worker from New Jersey. Her work and lived experience in mental health deeply inform her poetry, which explores the intersections of personal and collective struggle. She is the winner of the 2026 Four Feathers Press Chapbook Contest and received honorable mentions in the 2026 New Jersey Poets Prize and the 2026 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in ONE ART, Thimble Literary Magazine, Paterson Literary Review, The Stillwater Review, The New Verse News, San Pedro River Review, and elsewhere.