I know you don't want me to tell you about endo, by Louise Mather

A large tree in the middle of green woodland. Large white text reads: I know you don't want me to tell you about endo,. Smaller text reads: Discussing disabled characters in fairy tales and folklore.

Content Warning: illness, trauma, mental health, blood, fertility, self-harm, death & abuse

about being in the bathroom for hours in the blazing heat, hammer it to a fairy tale, let me sleep for years, all those winters for evil, bury it, bury it, under the snow, I really can't do it justice, no windows because I'm screaming or it sounds guttural, that pull before bearing down or death, and I feel it, in my thighs and my back and my hips and my throat, I couldn't eat all day and I had to run or stumble or crawl, bile, lumps on my tongue, tablets half-dissolved, never timed well or strong enough so sit on the toilet to empty the whole of my body until it is a sliver of flesh, sweat, ash or ghost or I used to have a face, vomit over and over and over in the sink and my insides are beaten with echoes or glass or burning, shaking until the room is barely a shell for existence that breaks away in hot atoms, lie down for the afterlife, see what the blood could have been, count another number of days, yes, a month is a lie, as is everything, that this pain feels deserving, is punishment for all future sins, the psychiatrist they sent me to made sure of it, then he sat back and laughed, kissed the money and watched the tide swallow the red dusk.

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About the author:
Louise Mather is a writer from Northern England and founding editor of Acropolis Journal. A finalist in the Streetcake Poetry Prize, her work is published in various print and online literary journals including The North, Acumen, Fly on the Wall Press, Dust Poetry Magazine, Cape and Ink, Sweat and Tears. Her debut pamphlet ‘The Dredging of Rituals’ was published in 2021. She writes about ancestry, rituals, endometriosis, fatigue and mental health. Twitter @lm2020uk IG: louise.mather.uk