Gynecological Instruments For Working on Mutant Women
by Sandra Kasturi
after “Worm” by Enne Tesse (with a nod to David Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers”)
A woman I knew once said of her sister:
she should have been my twin.
And it’s true: she should have been.
They devoured each other more thoroughly
than the Ouroboros worm.
Jeremy Irons and Jeremy Irons are sharing a woman.
Each twin’s hand inches along the fleshy paths
of the other, following a trail of pheromones.
They design gynecological instruments easily mistaken
for dowsing rods or invertebrates. A symbiosis of invention firing
synapses of quantum entanglement or the G(od) spot or both.
That’s the thing with twins—everything is yours and not
yours: even your reflection. Between twinship and kinship lies
the spectre of one twin absorbing the other,
a kind of divine cannibalism, leaving nothing behind
but a teratoma of the soul: a worm with teeth.
Twins emerge from women just like other children.
Each one a mutation of uncanny similarity,
as if you clicked “2” on the order form by accident
and now can’t return the extra.
Gynecological instruments mutate
as women mutate. Jeremy Irons faces himself
and turns his insides out.
I am ready to become a mutant woman. I hold a mirror
to my crotch, try to decipher my strange insides
in a kind of contortionist hieromancy. What might I not deliver,
given half a chance? Twins, triplets, whole litters,
Roman legions marching out.
Look, here in the chasm of love,
the holy conqueror worm rampant:
one mutant face, one human face, creeping
silhouettes slouching through me
toward the breaking daylight.
Sandra Kasturi is a mixed-race poet, fiction writer, book reviewer and former publisher. Her poetry collections are The Animal Bridegroom and Come Late to the Love of Birds (both from Tightrope Books), and Snake Handling for Beginners (Exile Editions, November 2026). Her work has appeared in: Rattle, Contemporary Verse 2, The New Quarterly, ARC Poetry Magazine, Taddle Creek, Canadian Notes & Queries, Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out, various Tesseracts anthologies, Postscripts to Darkness 6, Abyss & Apex, Amazing Stories, Black Feathers, The Sum of Us, 80! Memories and Reflections on Ursula K. LeGuin, Tales of the Unanticipated, Annex Echo, On Spec, Gods, Memes and Monsters, Polar Starlight, Polar Borealis, and more. Sandra has won the Whittaker Prize, ARC Magazine’s Poem of the Year Contest, Kingfisher Poetry Prize, and the Sunburst Award (for fiction). Sandra was a runner up in the Poetry Society UK’s Stanza Competition last year and was previously longlisted for its National Poetry Competition. She was also a finalist for the National Poetry Series (2024), and a semi-finalist for the Washington Prize (2025). She recently tied for first place in the First Page Cage Match at Pulp Literature for an excerpt from her novel, Medusa Gorgon, Lady Detective. Sandra is fond of red lipstick, G&Ts, and the movie Aliens (original theatrical release only).