Slice.

In his attempts to treat the condition vesicovaginal fistula, Dr. J. Marion Sims experimented on black slave women during the 1800s. Within 5 years, a 17 year old slave woman called Anarcha endured 30 operations under the medical supervision of Dr. Sims to repair a vesicovaginal fistula. She suffered these invasive surgeries without the aid of anesthesia. Debates on whether Sims was negligent in failing to administer this form of pain management to disenfranchised women abound. Still, the emotional and physical distress slave women like Anarcha lived through largely remain unexplored in Sims' biography and medical journal articles. My poem, "Slice," redresses the disassociated accounts of these women's lives by placing the emotion and physiological trauma they experienced at the center of a literary piece that seeks to honor their humanity and acknowledge their pain. The feelings embodied in "Slice" convey a poetic interpretation of Anarcha's experiences because she is the speaker in this poem. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).