The Period Poem
Dude on twitter said:
“I was having sex withmy girlfriend when
she started her period.
I dumped that bitch immediately.”
Dear nameless dummy on Twitter:
You’re the reason my daughter cried funeral tears
When she started her period.
The sudden grief all young girls feel
After matriculation from childhood and
The induction into a reality that they’ll have to negotiate
People like you and you’re disdain
For what a woman’s body can do.
Herein begins an anatomy lesson infused with feminist politics
Because I hate you.
There’s a thing…called a uterus.
It sheds itself every 28 days or so
Or in my case every 23 days
(I’ve always been a rule breaker).
I digress.
That’s the anatomy part.
The feminist politic part is that women
Know how to let things go,
How to let a dying thing leave the body,
How to become new,
How to regenerate,
How to wax and wane not unlike the moon and tides,
Both of which influence how YOU behave.
I digress.
Women have vaginas that can speak to each other.
By this I mean, when we’re with our friends,
Our sisters, our mothers,
Our menstrual cycles will actually sync the fuck up.
My own vagina is mad influential.
Everybody I love knows how to bleed with me.
(Hold onto that, there’s a metaphor in it).
But when your mother carried you,
The ocean in her belly is what made you buoyant,
Made you possible.
You had it under your tongue when you burst through her skin,
Wet and panting from the heat of her body,
The body whose machinery you now mock on social media,
THAT body wrapped you in everything
That was miraculous about it and sang you
Lullabies laced in platelets
Without which you wouldn’t have a twitter account
At all, motherfucker.
I digress.
See, it’s possible we know the world better
Because of the blood that visits some of us.
It interrupts our favorite white skirts and
Shows up at dinner parties unannounced.
Blood will do that.
Period.
It will come when you’re not prepared for it.
Blood does that.
Period.
Blood’s the biggest siren and
We understand that blood misbehaves.
It doesn’t wait for a hand signal or a
Welcome sign above the door.
And when you deal in blood
Over and over again like we do,
When it keeps returning to you,
That makes you a warrior and
While all good generals known not to discuss
Battle plans with the enemy
Let me say this to you, dummy on Twitter:
If there’s any balance in the universe at all…
You’ll be blessed with daughters.
Blessed.
Etymologically “Bless” means: to make bleed.
See? Now it’s a lesson in linguistics.
In other words blood speaks.
That’s the message.
Stay with me.
Your daughters will teach you
What all men must one day come to know,
That women, made of moonlight, magic, and macabre,
Will make you know the blood.
We’ll get it all over the sheets and cars seats.
We’ll do that.
We introduce you to our insides.
Period.
And if you’re as unprepared as we sometimes are,
It’ll get all over you and leave a forever stain.
So, to my daughter:
Should any fool mishandle
The wild geography of your body,
How it rides a red running current,
Like any good wolf, or witch, well then…
Just BLEED.
Give that blood a Biblical name,
Something of stone and mortar.
Name it after Eve’s first rebellion in that garden.
Name it after the last little girl to have her genitals
Mutilated in Kinshasa (that was this morning),
Give it as many syllables as there are unreported rape cases.
Name the blood something holy.
Something mighty.
Something un-languageable.
Something in hieroglyphs.
Something that sounds like the end of the world.
Name it for the roar between your legs and
For the women who’ll not be nameless here.
Just bleed anyhow.
Spill your impossible scripture
All over the good furniture.
Bleed and bleed and bleed
On EVERYTHING he loves…period.
The Delightful Mrs P 
Reblogged this on The Wælcyrie of Carr Naze.
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