University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Breaching the labial lips: thought and new language in the menstrual poem and Homesick for myself (poems)

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Breaching the labial lips: thought and new language in the menstrual poem and Homesick for myself (poems)

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Content BREACHING THE LABIAL LIPS:
THOUGHT AND NEW LANGUAGE
IN THE MENSTRUAL POEM
&
Homesick For Myself
Poems
by
Rachel Neve-Midbar
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING)
August 2023
EPIGRAPH
There is a voice crying in the wilderness, the voice of a body dancing,
laughing, shrieking, crying. Whose is it? It is, they say, the voice of a woman,
newborn yet archaic, a voice of milk and blood, a voice silenced yet savage…
—-Hélène Cixous
ii
DEDICATION
To menstruators everywhere
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It only takes a moment in a classroom. One teacher with a slight nod, some interest…
even perhaps excitement. She smiles, allows you to take on that out-of-the box project. He
suggests that you are capable of more. They support you as you turn your life around like a great
ocean liner. Slowly taking the turns, trying to miss the ice-floes.
This project would not have come to pass if Rebecca Lemon wasn’t such a professor. In
one irreverent moment in her Shakespeare class I blurted out “menstruation!” She smiled. And
she nodded. She allowed me to write and to research. Not once did she roll her eyes at the
subject matter or tell me it was impossible or unnecessary. She felt my indignation at the lack I
found in research about menstruation in literature. She supported my early efforts, whether they
were creative or critical. Not for a moment did she tell me I couldn’t make this happen. This
project would not have come to pass without her continued support.
But I never would have met Rebecca, been in her class or at USC at all if it wasn’t for my
Chair, David St. John. I met David in 2013 in a low residency MFA program. It was he who
suggested I think about a PhD, who never, ever wavered from a strong supportive stance to make
into reality a dream I didn’t even know I had. Thank you so much David. For everything.
Thank you to my entire committee for taking time to read and comment on this work.
Dana Johnson and Alexis Wellwood. I can’t wait to get your feedback. I know it will be incisive
and brilliant.
iv
I want to send out a very special thanks to my partner, Joe Williams for every load of
laundry, for every meal, for every word of encouragement when I felt down, for continually
reminding me that I am “great” and that I can accomplish whatever I set my mind to.
I want to thank my family. My mother and my sister Carice for her support and the pride
she takes in my work. I want especially to thank my children, Avigayil, Aliza, Batya, Shimmy,
Klil and Meir for being the beautiful, wonderful, crazy, out-of-the box people that you are. I
could not be more proud. And to my grandchildren, Zoharia, Sarai, Alva, Shalev and Maayan for
alway welcoming me with open arms and for loving books as much as I do.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
EPIGRAPH .......................................................................................................................................ii
DEDICATION ..................................................................................................................................iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................................................iv
ABSTRACT: ....................................................................................................................................viii
INTRODUCTION: ...........................................................................................................................1
CHAPTER ONE: THE SECOND WA VE IN FRANCE ..................................................................15
IT BEGINS WITH SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR ..........................................................................................17
KRISTEV A AND THE ABJECT FEMALE BODY ...................................................................................21
LECLERC AND A NEW LANGUAGE, WOMEN’S LANGUAGE .........................................................24
CRITICISM OF THE FRENCH SECOND WA VE FEMINISTS ..............................................................29
ADRIENNE RICH: MENSTRUATION TABOO, YES…BUT MAGIC TOO .........................................32
CHAPTER TWO: WHY POETRY? ................................................................................................36
MENSTRUATION IN PROSE ...................................................................................................................38
WHAT IS DIFFERENT ABOUT THE POEM? .........................................................................................40
PERMISSION IN THE HOMOEROTIC POEMS OF RICH AND LORDE .............................................43
CHAPTER THREE: POETRY IS THE EROTIC & THE EROTIC IS MENSTRUAL BLOOD ...49
THE USES OF THE EROTIC ....................................................................................................................49
THE EROTIC IN ZAMI .............................................................................................................................52
THE POEM IS SOURCED FROM WITHIN THE EROTIC .....................................................................56
CHAPTER FOUR: THE MENSTRUAL POEM WITHOUT SHAME: LUCILLE CLIFTON ......61
CLIFTON’S EMBODIED POETRY ..........................................................................................................61
CLIFTON’S INHERITED POWER ...........................................................................................................65
WOMANISM IN CLIFTON .......................................................................................................................68
CLIFTON’S MENSTRUAL POEMS .........................................................................................................70
CHAPTER FIVE: THE CONTEMPORARY MENSTRUAL POEM AND THE 6-M’s ................80
#METOO AND WHAT CAN BE SAID .....................................................................................................80
THE NECESSITY OF THE MENSTRUAL POEM ..................................................................................82
THE SIX M’S AND THEIR POEMS .........................................................................................................88
MENARCHE ...........................................................................................................................................89
MENSTRUATION ...................................................................................................................................93
MATING ..................................................................................................................................................98
MOTHERHOOD ...................................................................................................................................104
vi
MALADY ..............................................................................................................................................108
MENOPAUSE ........................................................................................................................................113
CONCLUSION: ...............................................................................................................................119
HOMESICK FOR MYSELF ............................................................................................................125
THE JOURNEY ..........................................................................................................................................127
THE PIECES ...............................................................................................................................................152
THE WOMAN ............................................................................................................................................178
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................208
vii
ABSTRACT:
THE MENSTRUAL POEM:
This study is an analysis of contemporary poetry where the main conceit is the female fertility
cycle including menarche, menstruation, sex, pregnancy/childbirth, uterine illness and
menopause. Despite that it is a natural experience in most bodies that carry a uterus,
menstruation historically has been considered taboo and ignominious in many societies. The
shame menstruators experience has kept many silent, devoted to menstrual concealment and
suppression in the face of cultural condemnation. In order to understand what is at stake for those
who menstruate to not only talk about, but to write poems about their experience, we must look
historically to discern changes in the embodied experience through the many waves of feminism
in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the accrued courage of writers across generations
that has allowed today a poetics of the deep body and menstruation. This study begins with the
second wave feminists in France, including Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, and especially
Annie Leclerc, who encouraged women to develop their own language to talk about
menstruation. Despite later criticism of them for their assumption that all women are one
homogeneous entity, these women offer a good example of the confusion women felt under a
patriarchal male gaze in the midst of a fight for women’s rights. In the United States two activist,
feminist poets, Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde were breaking cultural boundaries, writing about
lesbian sex. It is only within the courage of the black feminist experience, in the prose of Audre
Lorde and the poems of Lucille Clifton that silence surrounding menstruation is actually broken,
where menstrual poems break away from euphemism and speak realistically to the menstrual
viii
experience. Within the voices of those who build on the courage of poets who spoke before them,
attitudes about women’s menstrual experiences are articulated and language reflecting the
ontological and moral implications of these attitudes is transformed. As these poets write their
experience a new vibrant and vital poetics is born: not only of the body, but of the deep body,
where the inside is as real in the poem as the outside, where the experience of menstruation is
interrogated and where the stain, both personally and historically, is realized—even celebrated.
As these poets write their experience, new language is created, poetry is changed and deepened,
and a new poetics is born: poetry of the deep body.
Note: I understand that the uterus-bearing body comes in many forms and varieties, some female,
some not. So to clarify my use of this capacious term “female,” in this study, each time I use the
words female, feminine, woman or womanly I am referring to the uterus-bearing body in all of
its genders, permutations and varieties.
HOMESICK FOR MYSELF:
A collection of poems exploring the journey of one woman in her broken pieces: girl, daughter,
wife, mother, lover, thinker and how in middle age these pieces might begin to form a whole.
ix
INTRODUCTION:
Recently, the “poetics of menstruation” has begun to crystallize as a movement and
powerful sub-genre of the poetic canon. Poets are breaking the silence around this internal and
private experience (menstruation), reframing what has been deemed, within patriarchal culture,
as shameful (Clancy 2023, vii). Instead, these poets insist upon menstruation as a transformative
phenomenon that most women experience. My project hopes to answer the question, what is "the
poetics of menstruation?” How has it grown and morphed within contemporary culture? Who
were the writers and scholars who have made it possible for today’s poets to write the menstrual
poem? I have created a list of criteria to use to examine how these poets use poetic tools to
interrogate the menstrual experience and to ask how they problematize the presentation of
menstruation? I read these poets against each other, against themselves, and against the poems of
Lucille Clifton and Audre Lorde’s concept of the “erotic.” Lastly, I will examine how the
menstrual poem is changing not only contemporary poetry and culture by introducing a poetics
of the deep body, but also the language the everyday woman will use about her own menstrual
experience. Specifically examining the history of second, third, and fourth-wave feminism, the
#MeToo movement, and the contributions of the Lordian concepts of the dynamic and ecstatic
nature of poetry as well as the female power of the erotic, I ask how the poet Lucille Clifton as a
poet in an “othered” body, a body othered by gender, race, socio-economic position, and
disability, yet a “warrior” poet, was able to open the door for the explicit menstrual poem to be
written? I will then examine the “poetics of difference” as I explore the six M’s of the female
fertility cycle: menarche, menstruation, mating, malady, motherhood, and menopause, assigning
1
one contemporary poem for each, exploring menstruation as a critical methodology that allows
the menstrual experience to structure the writing and to ask: how are these poets able to "change
the language" and create a whole new poetics of the deep body?
Almost all bodies born with a uterus menstruate for one week a month for approximately
forty-odd years of their life. Though this process is naturally biological and allows for the
constant reproduction of the species, the abjection of menstruation is ubiquitous through most
religions, cultures, and societies (Harvard 2023, 13-14). Menstruation has been a weapon
directed against female self-determination, used as an excuse to keep women home, quiet,
complacent, their bodies viewed as polluted (Steele and Goldblatt, Palgrave 2020, 79).
Menstruators have internalized the shame of this abjection to the point of silence. “Negative
attitudes about menstruation are pervasive, and one of the main costs is silence” (Clancy 2023,
2). There is a dearth of understanding about the uterus-bearing body, especially in the area of
menstruation, that has resulted from the shame and silence surrounding its workings in both
discourse and writing (Roberts, Palgrave 2020, 56).
Poetry offers a revolutionary and revelatory dimension that compels its readers to not
only see experience differently, but also to encounter new ways to express that experience.
Poetry allows us to encounter the world through language and when new realms of subject
matter enter poetry, the psychological and emotional vocabularies also become altered and
enlarged. As the French poet Paul Valery writes, “Poetry is not only doing something with
language but also something to language” (Valery 1958, 172).
Although half of the world's population is womb-bearing, patriarchal cultures have
silenced women for centuries and rendered the subject of monthly bleeding taboo. Today poets
2
are breaking silences about the body, writing about trauma, disability, sex, and sexuality.
American memoirist and critic Melissa Febos writes “that these topics of the body, the emotional
interior, the domestic, the sexual, the relational are all undervalued in intellectual literary terms,
and are all associated with the female spheres of being, is not a coincidence” (Febos 2022, 181).
Women who write their experience have been labeled ‘confessional’ and have been thus
considered ‘weak and uninteresting.’ Febos continues in her 2022 “how-to” on writing
contemporary memoir, “personal writing is a sexist mechanism, founded on the false binary
between the emotional (female) and the intellectual (male), and intended to subordinate the
former” (181).
Women have always told their stories, opening their hearts, divulging their private lives,
reaching out to bring their reality to light. But, other than the rare exception, these stories have
been told in whispers, only to each other. How has feminism in the 20th and 21st centuries
changed how women perceive themselves and how society views them and their bodies? Some
thinkers have sought to locate the roots of feminism in the writing of women globally through
history such as in Ancient Greece with Sappho (d. c. 570 BCE), or the medieval world with
Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179) or Christine de Pisan (d. 1434). Certainly, Olympes de Gouge (d.
1791), Mary Wollstonecraft (d. 1797), and Jane Austen (d. 1817) are foremothers of the modern
women's movement (Smith & Robinson 2022, 257). All of these writers stepped out of the
comfort of silence, advocating through their writing for the dignity, intelligence, and basic
human potential of the female sex. However, it was not until the late nineteenth century that the
efforts for women's equal rights coalesced into a clearly identifiable and self-conscious
3
movement, or rather a series of movements (Smith & Robinson 2022, 3-4). Women spoke out,
but it has taken the world, and women themselves, time to listen.
Since its inception with the first wave in the early 20th century, feminism has been a
movement that, at its core, has been about freedom for women, a freedom found in speaking out,
in calling for equal rights. The movement has encountered the same opponents everywhere in
different dress, speaking different languages, but still the same throughout: the culture of
misogyny and patriarchy, a culture that has kept women silent and complacent. Each generation
tries to erase any success women attain and still, as American feminist, activist, and poet
Adrienne Rich writes in the foreword to her essay collection, On Lies, Secrets and Silence, “the
entire history of women’s struggle for self-determination has been muffled in silence over and
over” (1979, 11).
Decades of the women’s movement has been devoted to women's slow emergence from
their cocooned and muted place within the home. One generation has built slowly on the next,
one woman taking her courage from the one before, digging deeper into her private life: her
abilities, her voice, her body —to rupture cultural constraints that limit women and to finally
allow women’s voices the freedom to articulate their selfhood. In 1946 in France, one brilliant
woman, existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir sat down to write an autobiographical
essay, a definition of herself “I am a woman” (Beauvoir, 2009, ix). The essay morphed over the
next three years to become a 766-page book on what it means to be every woman, The Second
Sex, where the author discusses the treatment of women in her society as well as through history.
One of Beauvoir's best-known and controversial books (banned by the Vatican), The Second Sex
is regarded by many still today as a groundbreaking work of feminist philosophy, moving
4
between the reality of what it means to be female and hopes for what a woman’s life can be.
Menstruation and menopause are mentioned on over fifty pages, moving dialectically between
science and complaint. Menopause is seen as both a catastrophic loss of sexuality and the final
female freedom. And yet Beauvoir has hope for the future:
In a sexually equalitarian society, woman would regard
menstruation simply as her special way of reaching adult
life; the human body in both men and women has other more
disagreeable needs to be taken care of, but they are easily
adjusted to because, being common to all, they do not re-
present blemishes for anyone; the menses inspire horror in
the adolescent girl because they throw her into an inferior
and defective category. This sense of being declassed will
weigh heavily upon her. She would retain her pride in her
bleeding body, if she did not lose her pride in being human.
(Beauvoir 2009, 736)
In Beauvoir’s book the smallest string of utopian hope for a future society based on equality
between the sexes, a society where a woman could menstruate without shame or societal
repercussion. Where the uterus would be a place of pride in the female body. This is still our
hope and what we are working for today.
In 1968 the streets of Paris filled with protesters as women called for their right to legal
and safe abortions (Smith and Robinson 2022, 384). The protests called for a revolt against
patriarchal values and the cultural norms women felt were oppressing them. This was the start of
second-wave feminism in France (Tomlinson 2021, Intro). At that time several women, Hélène
Cixous, Annie Leclerc, and Julia Kristeva wrote critical works on women’s rights over their own
bodies, as well as their ability to speak and write for themselves. French writer, playwright, and
5
literary critic, Hélène Cixous, wrote a manifesto/essay calling for women to write their truth
called “Laugh of the Medusa.”
Women must write her self: must write about women and
bring women to writing, from which they have been driven
away as violently as from their bodies—for the same
reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman
must put herself into the text—as into the world and into
history—by her own movement…. The future must no longer
be determined by the past.
(Cixous 1976)
The rhetoric of this essay is very high. Cixous is admonishing the women of her time,
trying to whip them into action to step into their own voices. “Laugh of the Medusa” has become
battle cry literature for feminists since.
Annie Leclerc, a professor as well as an activist who worked most of her life in prisons
and for prisoners’ rights, wrote several books, one literally titled, Parole de Femme (Women
Talking). Never translated into English, the book deals with matters of women’s right to speak
out for themselves. Both of these women, in answer to Beauvoir’s work, wrote about female
bodily experiences such as sexuality and abortion, subjects previously considered too taboo to
discuss. Julia Kristeva, Bulgarian-born French psychoanalyst, critic, and philosophical feminist,
was not able to move beyond the misogynist concepts of the patriarchy. Best known for her
“theory of abjection” Kristeva explains in her book, Powers of Horror why menstrual blood
disgusts us, comparing it to feces and offal. Despite variations in points of view, later critics such
as American feminist activist, poet and critic, Audre Lorde and influential postcolonial scholar
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak viewed these French feminists as monolithically straight, white, and
6
middle class and therefore incapable of writing about diversity and intersectionality of the global
“woman.”
In 1968, on the other side of the Atlantic, women were encountering the same questions
as those in France. The feminist cause had been raging in the USA since the publication of Betty
Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique in 1963. Two activists who taught side by side at the
City University of New York, both lesbians and both poets, were also huge voices in American
feminism: Adrienne Rich and the aforementioned, Audre Lorde. At this time, menstrual poems
were occasionally written, but were still deeply hidden under the mask of euphemism. The
treatment of the subject and its surrounding culture was virtually silenced in the poetic canon.
Direct references to menstrual blood is uncommon in poetry.
Usually, the unmentionable is not mentioned. When menstrual
flow does appear, it is often disguised, couched in euphemism.
(Delaney, Lupton, Toth 1988, 186)
Rich and Lorde as two female, queer, confessional and political poets did break
prohibitions in their poetics, entreating future poets to find the power within to keep on breaking
them. Though neither wrote poetry in which menstruation was the main concern, they did break
barriers and silences when they wrote their own poems of the body: homoerotic poems, beautiful
sex poems about relations between women. Yet, as much as these poems broke boundaries and
are of and about the body, they always stopped at the labial lips. No more of the female body is
exposed in these poems than would be in any painting representing the male gaze, with no
further sexual signifiers than a man would use. Despite this, by utilizing the courage to set the
7
terms of their own desires and to write about lesbian sex in 1976, Rich and Lorde broke
boundaries for many women and poets to come.
As activists and intellectuals, both Rich and Lorde also wrote prose. Similar to Simone de
Beauvoir thirty-seven years earlier, in Of Woman Born (1976) Adrienne Rich defined the
bleeding body according to a clearly thought-out binary: the magic and the taboo. Mentioning
menstruation in the essay, “The Primacy of Mother,” Rich views how womanhood has evolved,
returning again and again to the central necessity of the mother. Menstruation is viewed as a
magic power allowing for the continuation of the species (Rich 1976, 102). She also defines this
mother's blood as terrifying to men, a body viewed in revulsion, even among women, and a
complete silence around the subject of menstruation (Rich 1976, 106).
Lorde’s poems do contain blood: the blood of black bodies that has been spilled violently
in the cruelty of American racism. This is where Rich and Lorde diverge. Rich writes from a
position of privilege as an upper middle-class, white poet. Lorde defines herself as black first and
foremost—a pioneer, dangerously speaking out and writing with a decisiveness, incisiveness,
and courage rarely seen. Although her work focused on a broad range of topics that illuminated
her many identities, she concentrated most heavily on issues of multiple oppression and its
resulting fear and silence (Fitzer 2000).
Where the words of women are crying to be heard, we,
each of us, must recognize our responsibility to seek those
words out, to read them, to share them and examine them
in their pertinence to our living.
(Lorde, Olson 1998, 449)
1
From Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Sister, Outsider, 43. But the text is slightly different
1
than what appears here, as Olson took the quote directly from the audiotape of a speech recorded in 1977 by Judith McDaniel and
handed to Olson.
8
For Lorde, language was a site for struggle. In her 1977 speech, “The Transformation of
Silence into Language and Action,” Lorde called language a “tool” that “has been made to work
against us.” She recognized that language tends to represent and reproduce the interests of
dominating groups (Olson, 452). In 1977, and sadly still today, the dominating groups were
wealthy, were white, were male. Lorde recognized that language can be a creative and dynamic
resource for women to transform both the self and society. That change, she held, would come to
society through poetry. Like the French feminists before her, she believed in the articulation of
women’s voices as a power for change. In a later essay, “Poetry is Not a Luxury” published
initially in the journal Chrysalis in 1977 and later appearing in her 1984 essay collection Sister,
Outsider, Lorde defines poetry as “forming the quality of light within which we predicate our
hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into
tangible action” (Lorde 1984, 37). For Lorde, the power of change comes first through the
language formed within the poem. It then will trickle into everyday speech and on into society,
engendering change. “Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary
demand, the implementation of that freedom” (Lorde 1984, 38).
The poem can depict an experience and the emotional reaction to the experience, but it
can also define the poet, as well as the reader, who finds herself within the poem. Poetry
continuously allows for new ways of experiencing the world through language. As experience
develops, the possibilities of the poem continue to transform and expand. “We have the sensation
of grasping a fragment of a noble and living substance” (Valery 1958, 185). Poetry reinforces our
humanity even as it engenders change.
9
In 1978, in “Uses of the Erotic” (also published in Sister, Outsider) Lorde expands her
thoughts on the power of poetry, speaking about an untapped, female power, a power undefined
and non-rational that she calls the “erotic.” “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of
our sense self” (Lorde 1984, 54). The erotic is a female-derived, creative power, very different
from other forms of influence we have come to know. In a world dominated and controlled by
men and male forms of authority, the erotic has remained hidden, just as women have been
hidden. Lorde calls for us to find the erotic within ourselves and to embrace it.
Lorde never defines the erotic beyond “a female power.” Because of a lack of clarity,
these two essays have drawn many thinkers to define the “erotic” for themselves and see in it a
potential and permission for all types of feminist and queer endeavors. It has become a backbone
of the dynamism of change for our feminine selves in whatever form they choose to take, to
slough off shame and to embrace the power in us that makes us women. In this project, I will
link this power to the corporeal female body and to menstrual blood itself.
One poet who took no heed of shame and who embraced and even exemplified the
Lordian “erotic” was Lucille Clifton. She wrote the first direct, unembarrassed menstrual poems
in the United States, and she wrote many. How and why did it fall to this poet to be the one to
emerge with the menstrual poem?
Born in the 1930s and raised in Buffalo, Clifton was discovered as a poet by Langston
Hughes when Hughes first published her poetry in his highly influential anthology, The Poetry of
the Negro (1970) (Holladay 2004, 3). A prolific and widely respected poet, Clifton’s work
emphasized endurance and strength through adversity, focusing particularly on personal female
and family life (Holladay 2004, 5). A poet of profound illumination yet plain-spoken, she wrote
10
without stigma. Clifton was a mother of six, female and black, and she called herself a warrior
poet (Noird 6). Her poems are replete with celebration, spirituality, key elements of the erotic
and, of her poetic voice in which she honors the everyday mysticism of African American
experience. The combination of celebratory tone, even when the subject of the poem is one of
mourning or loss, and deep practical wisdom defines Clifton’s poetics. Her poems have the
power to change the way women see themselves. She wrote several poems about menstruation
that are straightforward in their gaze and are replete with gratitude, love, understanding, and
praise. I will study these poems as well as Clifton’s poetics in order to define how Clifton’s
resilient spirit, her courage, but mostly her complete lack of shame that allows her poems to
resonate. I will also interrogate how her poetry “pays it forward” to allow later poets to write
their own menstrual poems.
Poetry is the most human of art forms, rising out of our daily experience and exhaled
through our human breath (Pinsky 2014, “Intro”). As simply as breathing out, the poem can say
the unsayable. The poem is an “utterance,” a speech act, silence broken (Vendler 2009). Because
poetry is written discursively rather than directly, the poem often carries emotions that would be
impossible to represent elsewhere. “Poetry,” Paul Valery wrote, “is the attempt to represent…by
articulate language…that thing that tears, cries, caresses, kisses, sighs…tries obscurely to
express…to come into being…it stimulates us to understand” (Roditi, 406). The poem carries
great weight and power. Previously, this was a power held for the most part in the world of men.
Straight, wealthy white men. But that is changing.
Building on the courage of all the women and writers who came before them, and with
the permission realized through the power of the viral #MeToo movement in 2017, poets today
11
are writing their menstrual experiences. Thus, after exploring the writers cited above, I move
from de Beauvoir, Lorde, Rich, and Clifton into an exploration of the embodied female fertility
cycle itself in poetry. Specifically, in this project, I will define what I mean when I say
“menstrual poem,” exploring the necessity of such a poetics. I will examine six poems that each
depict one aspect of female fertility. Reviewing poems written specifically since 2017 by
contemporary poets from diverse backgrounds, nationalities, races, and ethnicities who are
writing poetry of the deep body with special attention to menstruation in each stage of the female
fertility cycle: menarche, menstruation, mating, malady, motherhood and menopause, I will
critique the poems, comparing them to each other, as well as the poems of Lucille Clifton and
Lorde’s concept of the erotic. Using the definition of the menstrual poem that I created, I will ask
two questions of each poem:
1) How does the poet problematize the presentation of menstruation?
2) How does the poet use language and structure to interrogate the menstrual
experience?
I will explore ‘menarche,’ or the initiation of the body into the menstrual experience,
through the poem “Mark of Cain” by I.S. Jones; the experience of ‘menstruation,’ or the month-
to-month reality of the “stain,” the stigma of the menstrual incident, will be addressed by turning
to the poem, “While Bleeding” by Doireann Ni Ghriofa. Sex during menstruation, or ‘mating’
most often considered a ‘taboo’ experience, will be studied in the dialectical, capacious poem “I
Don’t Like to Have Sex While I’m on My Period” by Kendra DeColo. Next, I will delve into
‘motherhood,’ a central menstrual experience of childbearing in a heartbreakingly depicted poem
about postpartum bleeding by Brittany Rogers called “Pantoum for Postpartum.” Menstrual
12
illness or ‘malady’ is the least discussed aspect of a woman’s fertility cycle. Women’s medicine
is far behind any other. One of the most agonizing of the many ailments women can have is
endometriosis. In a poem by k Abram, “endometriosis ode,” we will see how the pain of this
misunderstood disease is almost inexpressible. Finally, in Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s poem, “My
Perimenopausal Body Cistern Disappointing How Surprising” we will read about ‘menopause,’ a
misunderstood and minimally discussed aspect of female fertility that is today treated like
another illness, women must “get through,” “recover from,” and whose symptoms must be
hidden as all menstrual symptoms must be hidden—in shame.
Sometimes still using the motifs and imagery found in earlier menstrual poems, these
poets have moved the needle on what a poem can do and what it is possible to write about.
Contemporary menstrual poems are full of color, scent, the viscera of the menstrual experience.
Nothing is held back. Shame is revealed in full light in order to bleach away its power. Just as the
menstrual experience is felt inside the body, the menstrual poem shares the inside of the body
with its outside. It is an aspect of the human embodied experience not otherwise found in poetry.
This is a new poetics of the deep body not previously recognized.
“The future” writes Helene Cixous “must no longer be determined by the past” Cixous is
2
talking about the body. The female body. Women continue to reach deeply within, to connect to
their Lordian erotic power, to take courage from those poets who came before, who wrote with
courage to break through entrenched cultural attitudes in order to slough off the shame and
stigmas that have rendered women as less, as weak, as silent. Breaking that silence has allowed
Laugh of the Medusa p, 875.
2
13
women to recognize their own power and has engendered a new poetics, the poetry of
menstruation and the deep body.
14
CHAPTER ONE: THE SECOND WA VE IN FRANCE
Feminism is not a philosophy, or a theory, or a point of view.
It's a political movement to transform the world beyond
recognition. It asks: what would it be to end the political, social,
sexual, economic, psychological and physical subordination of
women? It answers: we do not know; let us try and see.
(Srinivasan 2021, xi)
In order to navigate not only social perceptions of the female bodily experience, but how
women have seen themselves and how those perceptions have developed across time, we must
begin with the second wave feminists. In the 1960s and 70s in both Western Europe and the
United States, Second Wave Feminism became a real force of power, devoted to gaining rights
for women in and out of the workplace and for the right to regulate their own bodies, especially
in the area of birth control and abortion (Smith & Robinson 2022, 4). Starting initially in the
United States with American women, the feminist liberation movement soon spread to other
Western countries (12). A feminist deconstruction and rejection of long held patriarchal attitudes
concerning the female fertility cycle can be traced back to France in the 1970s (Tomlinson 2021,
1). Women’s concerns were not among the most pressing issues after WWII, and the feminist
movement was decades from becoming a political force. Nonetheless, the liberation period
through the early 1950s was marked by a flurry of writings by a variety of authors on women’s
role in a revitalized France and a campaign for concrete action (Greenwald 2019). What happens,
however, when women decide to venture beyond their boundaries, not only to write themselves
15
in terms of taking up the pen and paper, but also consciously to ‘write themselves’, to ask what
of this world is mine, and what do I desire? (Atack, Fell, Holmes and Long 2019, 101)
One of these writers was Simone de Beauvoir who wrote and published a critical book on
womanhood, one of the first strong publications of contemporary feminism, called The Second
Sex, published in 1949 (Scarth 2004, 99).
Beauvoir became a mother figure to the second-wave feminists who came after her and
her approach to menstruation, childbirth and menopause informed many of the voices who came
after, including Julia Kristeva, (b. 1941) Hélène Cixous, (b. 1937) and Annie Leclerc (b. 1940).
These women put pen to paper in order to theorize female subjugation and to seek strategies to
overcome it, especially as it concerns the female body and fertility (Tomlinson 2021, 24). In
French second wave feminist texts, the female bodily experience is characterized by taboo,
shame, negative stereotypes born in patriarchal perspectives ingrained in cultures that have
developed out of monotheistic religion that has denigrated the female body. These writers also
addressed silence. They posit language, or lack thereof, as not only the cause of, but also the
solution to alleviating female oppression (Scarth 2014, 7). They exhort women to speak out, but
to do it in a language cleansed of its phallocentric nature (Grosz 1986, 68). These writers coined
3
terms such as Leclerc’s title Parole de Femme (Women’s Talk) and Cixous’s term ‘écriture
féminine’ (feminine writing) from her essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976, 875).
Beginning with Beauvoir and moving to the French feminists, this chapter will explore
attitudes towards the female body and menstruation during second wave feminism in France. In
order to consider the extent to which poets writing about their bodies has evolved, it is important
“phallogocentrism” is a neologism coined by Jacques Derrida to refer to the privileging of the masculine (phallus)
3
in the construction of meaning. (Dely 2007, p. 5).
16
to first establish how second wave feminists characterized the female body and its experience, as
well as patriarchal attitudes towards it. I will also explore how these feminists began to support
women writing about their experience. I will reveal how the female body was received, how
difficult it was to break the female silence around certain embodied experiences and find a voice
to write about the female body, even for a group of philosophers who were educated, wealthy
and white. Some, like Julia Kristeva as a pioneer in bringing the female fertility cycle to the
page, were finally only able to delve into and then rearticulate patriarchal attitudes about the
female body and menstruation. Later, these thinkers were heavily criticized for their inability to
see beyond their own class and speak for a universal woman. I will look at two critics, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak and Audre Lorde. This criticism itself points to the poets who were
eventually able to bring menstruation to the poet’s page.
IT BEGINS WITH SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
No text has been more influential on second wave feminists than The Second Sex (Scarth
2004). In it Beauvoir examines a great variety of female bodily experiences including
menstruation, childbirth and menopause. She frames her study of the female bodily experience
by arguing that women have been objectified, dominated by men (Beauvoir 1949, 21). Beauvoir
described how women were living mostly still at home in Europe post WWII, but she also
described how women could look for more, to move beyond the “woman’s place” in society.
Beauvoir did view a woman’s body, a body that menstruated, as something that held her back.
“Simone de Beauvoir showed how the male perception of ‘Women as Other’ dominated
17
European culture, keeping ‘woman’ entrapped in myths which robbed her of her independent
being and value” (Rich 1986, 177). The philosophy of second wave feminism was that women
needed to move beyond their typical ‘womanhood’ of domesticity and motherhood and enjoy a
more equitable environment. This is a concept we are still grappling with today: how can the
menstruating body exist in society (Clancy 2023, 172)? From Beauvoir’s time until today the
answer has been concealment and suppression, using methods that didn’t exist in Beauvoir’s
time, regulation through contraceptives. Today, over seventy years since The Second Sex was
published, we are still asking when the menstruating body can be “out and proud”?
Beauvoir, however, was only writing into the beginning of this search. Her research
sought to describe the incredible differences between women and men in the twentieth century.
She described how children, both male and female, are born and grow in similar fashion. For the
male, all is straightforward as he develops through puberty and becomes sexually active. “He is
his body.” she writes (39). “Women’s history is much more complex” (39). From an embryonic
state when the eggs in her body develop, the female is plagued by her fertility (39). It continues
throughout her life, through the humiliation of menstruation and on to menopause when a
woman has aged, is stripped of her femininity, and faces the loss of her desirability (620).
Beauvoir suggests that society determines a woman’s sexual attractiveness, her desirability,
based on her fertility. Without it, she is removed from happiness and her place in the social order
is forever changed. Altogether, Beauvoir seems to see menstruation as a real “curse.”
It is no surprise that the “mother” of second wave feminism would see the female body,
her own body, as persecuted and weak. She does mention in the area of menopause that a woman
is yes, on the one hand losing her place in society, her sex appeal, but she also views that the
18
female is finally released from the persecution of having a menstruating body (630); that a
woman, by becoming a crone, is finally freed from the very element that separated her from men.
She is finally free to be an unsexed body, undesirable, and therefore less restricted in society.
Beauvoir also dreams. In The Second Sex, she presents us with possibility. In her brilliance, she
imagines in 1949 a more egalitarian society where society’s views on menstruation might be
different:
In a sexually equalitarian society, woman would regard
menstruation simply as her special way of reaching adult life;
the human body in both men and women has other more
disagreeable needs to be taken care of, but they are easily
adjusted to because, being common to all, they do not represent
blemishes for anyone; the menses inspire horror in the adolescent
girl because they throw her into an inferior and defective category.
This sense of being declassed will weigh heavily upon her. She would
retain her pride in her bleeding body if she did not lose her pride
in being human (757).
Beauvoir recognized that it isn’t disgust with her own body that makes a woman inferior.
The shock of menstruation for the young woman is the message she receives from society, that
her body is “defective” and “inferior.” It is something she should be ashamed of as it changes her
rank in society no matter how strong she is. Beauvoir dreams, “if she would retain her pride in
her bleeding body….” This is a dream we will see reflected half a century later in the writings of
Audre Lorde and the poetry of Lucille Clifton, and in the wish of contemporary poets writing
that same bleeding body today.
Beauvoir attributes female objectification from society and even from herself to
patriarchal ideas born in Judeo-Christian culture, perpetuated, reified and encouraged in The
Hebrew Bible (303). This juncture, where the female body confronts attitudes in the Bible,
19
especially taboos around bodily fluids and emissions that occur during menstruation and
childbirth, is where the French feminists, especially Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror (1980)
and later Jane Ussher in Managing the Monstrous Feminine (2005) were strongly influenced. All
three of these writers point to the Book of Leviticus and its pejorative and harmful approach to
menstrual blood, “Leviticus compares it to gonorrhea; the bleeding feminine sex is not only a
wound but a suspicious sore” (Beauvoir, 1949, 168). The Bible likens natural female blood to a
sexually transmitted disease. Beauvoir emphasizes that the Bible has turned a harmless substance
into a material capable of contamination.
Historical attitudes toward menstruation and adherence to strict ritualistic behavior
coordinated with the menstrual cycle are reflected in a number of cultures. For instance, during
the first few days of her menstrual period a Hindu woman may not mount a horse, an ox, or an
elephant, or drive a vehicle (Yashaswini, Bhavva); and many peasants of Central and Eastern
Europe persist in the belief that a menstruating woman should not bake bread, churn butter, or
spin thread (Beauvoir 1949, 170). The Orthodox Jewish, Christian and Muslim cultures will
serve here as further examples of this phenomenon where a menstruating woman is untouchable
(Whelan 1975,107). This is the basis of religious and cultural ideas like concepts of a red tent,
Jewish family purity laws, niddah, mikveh and full separation of the sexes when a woman
menstruates (Morrow 2017). The Koran states:
They question thee (O Muhammad) concerning menstruation.
Say it is an illness, so let women alone at such times and go not
into them til they are cleansed. (Koran 2:222)
20
And the “priests ordered fifty days of penance for men who had sexual relations during
menstruation” (Beauvoir 1949,170). But it's not just that sexual relations are prohibited. Women
are considered polluted and able to contaminate their partners. Menstruation itself is so
prohibitive that women must be separated completely from their homes and families. They are
contaminating to others. Is it any wonder that women eventually came to the conclusion that they
shouldn’t reveal when they are menstruating, shouldn’t talk about their menstruation, must hide
it at any cost? Menstruation must be hidden under a cloak of complete silence.
KRISTEV A AND THE ABJECT FEMALE BODY
From the Hebrew Bible and possibly even before, abjection is a major theme that
problematizes the societal discourse around the female body. As noted above, Simone de
Beauvoir explores ideas of abjection in The Second Sex. Mary Douglas continues the
investigation in her 1966 book, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and
Taboo, but it isn’t until Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, published in 1980, that the concept of
the abject female body is fully investigated. Through her theory of abjection, Kristeva explores
how the female bodily experience is viewed by society with revulsion. She contextualizes this
through the Book of Leviticus, where menstruation and childbirth are considered impure and
polluting (Kristeva 1982,17).
According to Kristeva, an abject response is one of repulsion, rejection, a defense against
threat (2). Because they blur the boundaries between life and death and therefore threaten the
stability of a subject, anything from bodily emissions to a corpse can elicit an abject response (9).
21
Kristeva demonstrates this through an explanation of a human being’s subjectivity as dependent
on their ability to distinguish between the self and the other. Thus, humans will violently reject
that which threatens to collapse that distinction (3).
Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste or dung. The
spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the
retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from
defilement, sewage and muck. The shame of compromise, of
being in the middle of treachery. The fascinated start that leads
me toward and separates me from them (2).
For Kristeva the abject is a human reaction against the “other,” so anything non-human
retains the distinction between the human and the animal. Kristeva identifies two types of
‘polluting objects’ that are expelled from the body that are so disgusting they become abject:
excrement and menstrual blood (71). She defines excremental pollutants as those which threaten
from the outside – ‘life by death’ (71) – and menstrual polluting objects as ‘danger issuing from
within the identity […] of each sex in the face of sexual difference’ (71), as specifically gendered
blood Kristeva’s theory of abjection has provided a powerful framework for understanding the
complex relationships between disgust and desire in psychoanalytic and aesthetic terms
(Tomlinson 2021, 32).
Much of Kristeva’s work is based on a few lines found in the Book of Leviticus and
especially the word “abomination” to explain the taboo and fear surrounding menstruation
(Kristeva 1982, 119). This intense and heightened word seems to depict menstrual blood as
something immoral and monstrous. There is no doubt that this is how Leviticus (15:19-33) has
been interpreted, though the Hebrew word meaning “abomination” or “disgusting,” הבעות,
doesn’t appear in the original text in Hebrew. This understanding stems from how the text has
22
been interpreted and lived within the three main mono-theistic cultures. Resonating with
Kristeva’s theory that abjection constitutes a human rejection of the sexual female, she argues
that menstruation is a reminder of our animal selves and thus threatens the sexual order (Kristeva
1982, 86). She explains that in order to maintain a clear sexual division, patriarchal society
responds with revulsion not only to the menstruating body, but also to the female body after
childbirth (119). Bleeding women are untouchable, and their blood must remain invisible (120).
Some scholars have broadened Kristeva’s theories to examine other aspects of female
fertility, such as menopause, which is completely unmentioned in Powers of Horror. In
Managing the Monstrous Feminine: Regulating the Reproductive Body, published in 2006, Jane
Ussher continues Kristeva’s work in analysis of the female fertility cycle well into the aughts.
Managing the Monstrous Feminine explores how popular culture, law and science shape our
understanding of the female body. Ussher draws on Kristeva's theory of abjection in order to
explain why society positions the female body as monstrous and associates it with excess
(Ussher 2006, 13). Examples from media, popular culture, medicine and even law in a variety of
cultural contexts are offered as evidence for societal attitudes towards menstruation.

The margins of the body, in particular the markers of fecundity--
menstruation, pregnancy, the menopause--stand as signifiers of the
difference between within and without, male and female, necessitating
containment through taboo and ritual, in order to keep the abject body
at a safe, non-polluting distance from the symbolic order.
(5)
23
We can clearly see here the influence of Kristeva in this blatant reference to an abject response
triggered by the natural physiology of the female body. Ussher’s use throughout Monstrous of
words like “taboo” and “polluting’ are emblematic of Kristeva’s influence.
Kristeva’s theory of abjection is still prevalent throughout literary criticism and women’s
studies, and has become a primary tool for analyzing menstruation in literature. But the purpose
of this study is to work against these views, which are archaic and at best seem a re-examination
of patriarchal views of the female body and to just be explaining patriarchy to itself. But how
will the landscape change if our gaze never leaves the oppressor, if the philosophies we look to
again and again only re-iterate the same confining and demoralizing concepts that have kept
women silent and ashamed for centuries? If we are to strive for freedom of language that will
bolster a culture that supports an open discourse around menstruation, I believe Kristeva’s
concerns will need to be left behind.
LECLERC AND A NEW LANGUAGE, WOMEN’S LANGUAGE
French feminist, Annie Leclerc, attacked the subject of menstruation head-on. She argued
that, yes, in the Western world, menstruation is generally perceived as abject, shameful, and
taboo. She explains that a culture of concealment manifests itself in cultural insistence that
menstrual blood must remain hidden from view and excluded from conversation. But according
to Leclerc this needs to be changed and the way to do so is for women to find their own voice
and talk about their menstruation. ‘Any woman wishing to own her language cannot escape that
signal imperative: invent woman’ (Leclerc, 1974, 16). She even went so far as to title her book,
24
which has never been translated into English, Parole de Femme, “The Talk of Women” or
Women Talking .
4
[ê]tre femme, c’est n’avoir pas de règles. Être femme, c’est
n’être pas femme quand les signes en seraient trop évidents […]
je sais trop quel dégoût, quelle répulsion je peux inspirer avec
mon sang, alors je mets un tampax. C’est commode, commode.
Comme ça on n’en parle plus. (Mais savez-vous bien ce qu’il
me faut braver pour parler de ce sang ?)
(Parole femme, 62)
[to] be a woman is to have no rules. To be a woman is to not
be a woman when the signs (menstrual blood) would be too
5
obvious […] I know too well what disgust, what repulsion I can
inspire with my blood, so I put on a Tampax. It's convenient,
convenient. So we don't talk about it anymore. (But do you know
what I have to brave to talk about this blood?)
(Google Translate)
Leclerc’s choice of the words ‘dégoût’ (disgust) and ‘répulsion’ (repulsion) characterize typical
patriarchal responses to menstrual blood as ones of horror and disgust. Parole de Femme points
to the paradox of menstruation being a defining aspect of being a woman (‘[J]e ne suis femme
qu’à la condition d’avoir mes règles’ {I'm only a woman if I have my period}(41)) and yet, in
order to fit into an image of womanhood that is acceptable within the society in which Leclerc
lives, women must not only conceal her menstruation, she never ever speaks of it (‘[ê]tre femme,
c’est n’avoir pas de règles’ {‘[to be a woman is to have no rules} (62)). No rules, meaning
outside of society. Because in society, a woman can’t be herself. Parole de Femme thus reveals
the impossible position in which women find themselves, their natural functioning body as a
I am not conversant in French. I used Google Translate to help me translate Leclerc’s short book because I felt her
4
point of view is very important to this thesis.
my addition for clarity
5
25
vessel of shame. Again, that ubiquitous shame. Leclerc demonstrates that the reality of a
woman’s body is quite different from society's demands, that women’s shame concerning their
menstruating bodies is rooted in negative and paradoxical patriarchal attitudes towards menstrual
blood. Where, she asks, is the example of women’s true lived experience (62)?
Leclerc exemplifies her argument that menstruation is surrounded by silence and
experienced by women as shameful by providing examples. She illustrates how, even in France,
the taboo nature of menstruation is perpetuated by the discourse used in advertisements for
“sanitary” protection products. These (‘adverts ‘se contentent généralement d’une image, d’un
mot clé, d’une formule érotiquement ambiguë ; la non. On ne peut ni montrer, ni suggérer, ni
éveiller le désir, il faut convaincre, expliquer, justifier, raisonner’ {adverts' are generally content
with an image, a key word, an erotically ambiguous formula; no. You can neither show, nor
suggest, nor arouse desire, you have to convince, explain, justify, reason} (62)). Once again we
have a discourse of denial, silence, and taboo. Leclerc argues that these advertisements cause
women to feel ashamed and humiliated by their menstrual blood: (‘ce sang leur apparaît sous
forme d’humiliation gratuite, injustifiée, injustifiable’ {this blood appears to them in the form of
a gratuitous, unjustified, unjustifiable humiliation}(64)).
Leclerc’s rhetorical question (‘savez-vous bien ce qu’il me faut braver pour parler de ce
sang ?’) {do you know what I have to brave to talk about this blood}(62))? This emphasizes the
sheer extent to which menstruation is considered unmentionable and exemplifies the bravery of
making waves and generating a particularly female expression; the courage necessary to voice
the menstrual experience is a motif I will revisit again and again throughout this project. Here,
26
Leclerc is also laying the groundwork for women in the future to tackle the subject of creating a
space for women to verbalize instead of remaining silent in an overt manner.
Leclerc highlights the difficulty of writing about menstruation. She states that
menstruation is (‘le sujet le plus difficile à aborder quand on veut parler de sa féminité, le plus
refusé, le plus refoulé’ {the most difficult subject to discuss when you want to talk about your
femininity, the most rejected, the most repressed} (37)). She develops the use of the term
(‘tabou’{taboo}). And out of the use of this term, she confronts that women are ‘abjected from
themselves.’ (‘Je crois que les femmes sont encore plus tenues à l’écart de leur corps que les
hommes, à cause des tabous très lourds qui pèsent sur notre sang, sur nos règles’ {I believe that
women are even more kept away from their bodies than men, because of the very heavy taboos
that weigh on our blood, on our periods}(37)). This leads women not only to keep silent; it
creates in the female experience a widespread dysmorphia and dysphoria that has led to a lack of
preparation and understanding about every aspect of the female fertility cycle by women and by
the medical establishment meant to service their needs (Fahs, Palgrave 2020, 961). Women,
through extended silence, have become disassociated from their own most personal, internal
experience. This demonstrates what the revolutionary nature of the act of writing about
menstruation can mean for every human in a uterus bearing body.
In response to the negative patriarchal discourses and imposed silence that Leclerc
observes within Western culture, she encourages women to change their approach to their
menses. Rather than feeling ashamed, she urges them to articulate their menstrual experiences in
positive language. She doesn’t just want silence broken; she demands a loud and positive shout!
27
Leclerc laments, thus far, their lack of commitment to fighting negative patriarchal stereotypes
about menstruation:
comment avez-vous répondu à ces superbes condamnations
et damnations ? Qu’elle fut triste et pitoyable votre réponse!
V ous avez fait de votre sang, de votre gésine, de votre lait,
des choses anodines, des choses de passage, de pauvres choses
à laisser de côté, à souffrir en silence, des choses à supporter,
comme les maladies, les rages de dents, ou les boutons sur la
figure.
(62)
how did you respond to these superb condemnations
and damnation? How sad and pitiful was your response!
You have made of your blood, your birth, your milk,
trivial things, passing things, poor things to
to leave aside, to suffer in silence, things to bear,
such as illnesses, toothaches, or pimples on the
figure.
By criticizing women for treating their menstrual blood as if it were something trivial and
a nuisance that they simply have to tolerate, she is suggesting an idea that is developing on the
other side of the Atlantic in Audre Lorde’s prose: that there are unique and powerful aspects to
the menstrual experience, that women need to view menstrual blood as something extraordinary
and worthy of celebration. Leclerc, herself practices this ‘woman-first’ stance, which she asks
her readers to adopt when she proclaims: (‘[v]oir et sentir le sang tendre et chaud qui coule de
soi, qui coule de source, une fois par mois, est heureux’ {seeing and feeling the warm tender
blood flowing from oneself, flowing from the source, once a month, is joyous} (48)). Leclerc’s
positive and open approach celebrates, rather than denigrates, the menstrual experience. She
seeks to shatter the silence that surrounds menstruation. I recognize this even as I read Leclerc
28
through a translation device. Her observations remain in obscurity to an English speaking world
even today.
CRITICISM OF THE FRENCH SECOND WA VE FEMINISTS
French second wave feminist texts have garnered a significant amount of criticism for the
manner in which they approach the female experience. They have been particularly criticized for
their non-differentiation between women and not recognizing women from outside their own
small sect of society. There are many facets to a woman’s identity and experience such as race,
ethnicity, sexuality, religion, gender, education and socioeconomic status that the French
feminists just never paid any attention to. Each of these factors influence a woman’s experience
from her most public to her most intimate, especially her menstrual experience.
“Intersectionality refers to particular forms of intersecting oppressions, for example,
intersections of race and gender, or of sexuality and nation. Intersectional paradigms remind us
that oppression cannot be reduced to one fundamental type, and that oppressions work together
in producing injustice” (Collins 2012, 18). Patricia Hill Collins, an African-American theorist
who is critical of white feminism in general, wrote that the concept that a woman’s experience is
influenced by a complete network of factors is what Kimberlé Crenshaw called
“intersectionality” in 1989 (Tomlinson 2012, 35), and whether a critic’s experience comes before
29
the codification of this term or not, it is the only way to view any human experience. This
definition underlines that female oppression is multifaceted, and therefore there is no specific
way to successfully challenge the experience of any particular group.
Collins herself criticizes the white feminist movement for ignoring class and race. In the
chapter “Defining Black Feminist Thought” which features in The Second-wave: A Reader in
Feminist Theory, Collins suggests some factors which may influence women’s experiences: “In
spite of the differences created by historical era, age, social class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity,
the legacy of struggle against racism and sexism is a common thread binding African-American
women” (Collins 1997, 244).
Another of those who have criticized the French feminist group is Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, who problematizes the work of the second-wave feminists from a postcolonial
perspective. In her essay “French Feminism In An International Frame,” Spivak not only
criticizes the second-wave feminists for being “class and race privileged literary women” (1981,
158), she also asserts that their work reflects “the inbuilt colonialism of First world feminism
towards the Third” (1981, 184). Spivak argues that this is the reason it is inappropriate to use
second-wave feminist theory as a framework with which to examine the experiences of “third
world women” or even any women today who are more nuanced in their thinking and
experience. Any “deliberate application of the doctrines of French High ‘Feminism’ to a different
situation of political specificity might misfire” (1981,156). Hence, Spivak’s work acts as a
warning against applying the theories of the second-wave feminists to texts that represent women
from outside the West.
30
Audre Lorde, black, lesbian activist and poet, took the idea of colonialism one step
further when she delivered a paper in 1980 at Amherst College. Later published in a posthumous
collection of her work as the essay “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,”
the paper finds fault with the second-wave feminists for their refusal to recognize differences of
age, ethnicity, class and sexuality in the women they purported to critic, yet support. Lorde
problematizes the theories articulated by the second-wave feminists by illustrating that, as a
black and lesbian woman, she is unable to relate to their white and heterosexual privileged
position. She asserts that white women focus upon their personal oppression and ignore any and
all of the oppressions of others. “Certainly, there are very real differences between us that are
separating us” (Lorde 2017, 95). She views this as a form not only of oppression, but of overt
racism.

Racism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one
race over all others, and thereby the right to dominance.
Sexism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one sex
over the other, and thereby the right to dominance. Ageism.
Hetrosexism. Elitism. Classism.
(2017, 96)

In the written copy, this section is italicized. You can imagine Lorde’s succinct
articulation of this list of ‘isms.’ She sees a colonial aspect to the upper middle class, all white
women’s assumption that their experience speaks for the experience of all women, and she
reforms this idea, going much further than Spivak and calling it “racism.” In the face of this
blindness, any women not themselves are therefore silenced. “Refusing to recognize difference
makes it impossible to see the different problems and pitfalls facing us as women” (99). When
31
differences of race, sexual preference, class and age are never addressed in the writings of the
French second wave and this renders their work somewhat meaningless (99).
ADRIENNE RICH: MENSTRUATION TABOO, YES…BUT MAGIC TOO

Meanwhile, in the USA, second wave feminism was unfolding in the context of the anti-
war and civil rights movements. Instigated by Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine
Mystique, which criticized the postwar belief that a woman’s role was to marry and bear
children, the American second wave feminists were galvanized (Smith and Robinson 2022, 293).
Though Friedan’s feminist thinking wasn’t revolutionary—indeed, there were many similar
feminist thinkers before Friedan, including Beauvoir—The Feminine Mystique had a far greater
reach, bringing feminism to the attention of the everyday woman (293). The feminist movement
took off, focusing on public and private injustices, such as reproductive rights and workplace
equality. Second wave feminists realized that women’s cultural and political inequalities were
inextricably linked. They worked under a unifying goal of social equality, with sexuality and
reproductive rights being central concerns to the liberation movement, and with much of the
movement’s energy being focused on passing the Equal Rights Amendment (Bloomington 1970).
Although the Amendment still hadn’t been ratified, second wave feminism had many
successes. The approval of the contraceptive pill by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960
gave women more control over their reproductive rights—within five years, around six million
women were using it (Hanson, Palgrave 2020, 769). Feminists also gained for women the right to
hold their own credit cards, apply for mortgages in their own name and outlawed marital rape.
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Awareness around domestic violence was raised, and gender and women’s studies departments
were founded at universities and colleges. The passing of the Equal Pay Act in 1963, Title IX in
1972, and Roe v. Wade in 1973 were legislative victories for feminists (Hanson Palgrave 2020,
780).
Despite gains in political rights, equal opportunity in the military, in the office, in
marriage and divorce rights, and even in reproductive rights, most American feminists did not
want to talk about nor address openly the subject of menstruation. Judy Blume published a book
Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret in 1970. Written for tweens about menarche, it's the story
of one girl from a religiously ambiguous household coming of age by getting her period.
Margaret became one of the most banned books in libraries across the United States. In some
states, a girl could only access the book at a certain age with parental consent (Washington Post
2023).
In the USA, feminist writers of all races, sexualities, and classes were involved in
interrogating discourses of power, identity, and experience. Adrienne Rich, activist, lesbian, poet,
and feminist leader helped significantly shape social justice work and discussions around
equality in the 1970s and 80s. Her writing, both poetry and prose, helped create the bedrock of
contemporary feminist theory and shape emerging understandings of gender and sexuality.
Rich defined the bleeding female body according to a clearly thought-out binary: the
magic and the taboo. In 1976, she mentions menstruation in the essay, “The Primacy of Mother.”
She explores an anthropological view of how womanhood has evolved, returning again and again
to the primacy of the mother and the inherent magic of a woman’s monthly blood (Rich 1976,
33
102) to create a human infant. The mother, who goes on to magically be the “transformer of
blood into life and milk” (97). Menstruation is a magic power.
Rich also defines this mother blood as the “original taboo” (103). Attempting fairness,
she explores whether it was the female or male of the species who first introduced menstrual
blood as taboo. Ultimately, she quotes Margaret Mead, “menstrual taboo was created by men out
of a primal fear of blood” (105).

Whether or not woman was the originator of taboo,
the mere existence of a menstrual taboo signifies
powers only half understood; the fear of woman
and the mystery of motherhood.
(105)
Again we meet the abjected female body. Here, too, Rich joins those who point out that
the female body is conceived in many cultures as polluted and in need of cleansing (106). Rich is
not able to bridge this binary, even in this essay, where she presents both sides. The female body
in its most magic: the ability to grow new life and propagate the species is the same body that
bleeds, a body abjected, a matter of disgust.
As we saw in Kristeva, the abject is a matter of deep fear and loathing (Kristeva, 2-3).
Often these are aspects of what has evolved out of our human body: vomit, human feces, a
cadaver, a used tampon. The OED tells us that abjection is the state or condition of being cast off
or brought low, humiliation, degradation—the condition of the menstruating woman. For Rich,
this stigma is a reality.
34
Second wave feminists on both sides of the world were able to lobby for enormous
changes in the day-to-day lives of women. They made strides in the area of economic realty,
equal opportunity, in the areas of birth control and even abortion rights. But they made very little
headway in the area of the menstruating body. The introduction of hormone based birth control,
at the time enormous and freeing, has come in 2023 to be seen as another form of suppression of
a woman’s body, so she could survive in the working world (Clancy 2023, 171). Still, mostly due
to the self abjection of most women, menstruation was mostly ignored. From Beauvoir to
Adrienne Rich, only very few feminist texts stood out as Parole de Femme by Annie Leclerc that
had a positive attitude about the menstrual experience. Despite the pioneering spirit of
feminism’s second wave, menstruation abjection, was not a hill these women were interested in
conquering. Most saw their menstruation as troublesome; most had little to no connection to any
positive menstrual experience or examples. Any menstrual poems written at this time were from
outlier poets or were heavily hidden in plain sight behind euphemism.
35
CHAPTER TWO: WHY POETRY?
For silence to transform into speech, sounds and words, it must first
traverse
through our female bodies.
—Gloria Anzaldua, Making Face, Making Soul
“very close to the flesh of language” —Hélène Cixous
6
The phenomenology of the menstrual experience hasn’t changed since…well…since
women have existed. Is this true? No. What is true that menstruation is as old as humanity itself,
but that no two occurrences are the same as the other:
Our conception of a “normal period may not exist outside
of medical textbooks. After measuring the hormonal levels
of a large sample of women in the course of their cycles,
Clancy found that not a single participant’s hormones
7
matched the standard model.
(AlSayyad, 2)
Due to the silenced nature of this physical process, our lack of knowledge about the female
fertility cycle is incredible. We are just beginning to understand that what, until now, was
considered “nonadaptive” is turning out to be very personalized as well as personal; no two are
exactly alike.
Almost all bodies born with a uterus menstruate for one week out of every month for
approximately forty-odd years of life. The menstruating body receives a monthly message
written in blood, rich in meaning and in metaphorical possibility. Menstruation affects all races,
all socio-economic groups, all cultures. Though this process is naturally biological and allows for
Cixous “Castration or Decapitation” French Feminist Reader p 288.
6
Biological anthropologist Kate Clancy, author of Period (2023).
7
36
the constant reproduction of the species, the abjection of menstruation, from menarche to
menopause, is ubiquitous through most religions, cultures and societies; it affects both men and
women. It is devastating that, as in the previous chapter, second wave feminists accepted their
own bodies as polluted and that, throughout history, menstruators have internalized the shame of
this abjection to the point of silence. It is considered incredibly transgressive to resist the norm of
menstrual and menopausal concealment. If discussed at all, the discussions around menstruation
have remained among women, in whispers, the bleeding itself referred to in euphemistic terms.
Through the thousands of ways it is possible to articulate one’s deepest secrets, to tell
one’s story, to change the landscape for what women can not only desire, but achieve, for writers
the expression happens on the page. Therefore, the first question for this project is “why poetry?”
What is it about the poem that furthers a change in societal attitudes and basic language that
doesn’t happen in prose? And why is this specifically true for poetry about the menstrual
experience?
As we look at the music, the memorability of poetry, the discursive nature of the poem
and its demand for attention, we can begin to see how the function of the poem can draw in the
reader, demand their extended scrutiny and therefore a change in thought. We will then view how
the process works when considering the early queer poetry of activists and poets, Adrienne Rich
and Audre Lorde.
In her introductory book of poetry criticism, Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and
Anthology, Helen Vendler calls a poem a “speech act,” an ‘utterance.’ The word utterance is the
noun form of the verb “to utter.”
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Utter in Old English: “outer,” a comparative adjective meaning “farther out than another.” And in
Middle English “utter” is a verb meaning to drive away, speak, show, announce. (OED)
Utterance: “the action or result of issuing, sending forth, giving voice to.” But another, older and
now obsolete meaning can help us to understand the poem and the responsibility of the poet:
originating from an old French word “oultrance” meaning “a degree which surpasses bounds or
goes beyond measure in respect of severity, vehemence, etc.; immoderate force or violence;
excess, the uttermost.” (OED)
The uttermost. That first demand of a poet. Don’t look away. Don’t squint. Don’t hide.
Say what needs to be said with a true human heart. Say the unsayable. This is the most difficult,
8
yet essential, requirement of the poet willing to write the menstrual poem.
MENSTRUATION IN PROSE
Menstrual stories are also sometimes written in prose. Of course, this too is silence
broken, a story told, as it is any time a writer writes the menstrual experience. Why aren’t these
stories as effective as the poem? Let's have a look at a couple of examples.
One depiction of menstruation in prose, one that depicts menstruation as an everyday
event, is “Chance,” the first story in Alice Munro’s triptych of “Juliet stories” (Katie 2019, 198).
In “Chance” we find Juliet on a train. Munro often creates a duality or a dichotomy for her
female characters. The duality for Juliet in “Chance” is her life, her reading for her doctoral
studies, her meeting of a new love interest juxtaposed with her menstruation and her need to
From the teachings of poet Marvin Bell (z’l)
8
38
retire to the bathroom again and again to change her pad. One can say that these different
activities are Juliet’s “outside” persona and her “interior” or very personal persona. But the
activity in the bathroom uses the same language over and over again. It never deepens or
changes. The two tropes in reality are activities that move her forward and an activity that
disrupts her more productive time and takes her out of her life. Menstruation in this story
becomes a trope of stagnancy, not just because the image is one of abjection (because it is
never ”disgusting”), but is static. Juliet’s “femaleness” is a weight and a burden. It won’t help her
in her life.
Another example is from a recent memoir. In All of This, Rebecca Woolf writes about her
husband’s quick and terrible death from pancreatic cancer and the aftermath as she returns to
herself. Having decided just before his diagnosis that she is ready to leave him, the story is
fraught on a myriad of levels. Overwhelmed with her husband’s medical needs, Woolf is not able
to attend to a problem with her IUD. In fact, she is completely unable to think about herself or
her own body in any way. Through the last week of her husband’s life, she bleeds into toilet-
paper stuffed, crusted, unwashed underwear. As an image of self-denial, I can't imagine a
stronger one. After the funeral, Woolf’s reaction to her loss is to jump into a very active, internet-
fueled sex life. She bleeds through those early months, leaving her mark on bed after bed. It’s
almost as if she is bleeding out her bad marriage, her husband and the terrible experience of
seeing him through his death. Woolf’s revelations and her depictions are all incredibly
courageous. Yet, speaking as a reader who has spent the last five years thinking about
menstruation in literature, I feel like Woolf’s story is her own. Menstruation in Woolf’s story
39
becomes an image of loss and self cleansing.Though this story is essential, I wonder if the
language of the menstrual experience is expanded through Woolf’s experience?
It is vital that stories about menstruation be written. It is important to tell our stories and
for others to read them in order to normalize talking about menstruation. Certainly we learn this
from the history of Are You There God, It's Me Margaret?, but I believe the poem has a better
chance of changing the language of how women think about themselves and their bodies. Poetry
changes what is possible and will connect us to our deepest selves.
WHAT IS DIFFERENT ABOUT THE POEM?
“Women have understood that we need an art of our own to remind us of our history and
what we might be; to show us our true faces—all of them, including the unacceptable; to speak
of what has been muffled in code or silence” (Rich 1986, 182). And women need a poetics that
allows them to write their embodied selves “through experimentations in language to explicate
the emotional, physical and psychological experience. The embodied experience” (Sharpe 2022,
xviii).
The fertility cycle depicted in poetry takes a different shape because poetry works
differently in the human mind and heart. As I stated in the Introduction, poetry is the most human
of art forms, rising from our everyday experience and exhaled in our human breath; it's the
embodied cognition of the ineffable. “Poetry is a revelatory distillation of experience, providing
40
the illumination by which people examine their lives and give substance to their unrecognized
feelings” (Lorde, 1984, 37).
Poetry is language under pressure. A poem carries not only the meaning of the poem’s
conceit and emotional content, but also condensed language, compressed in order to emphasize
the music of each word and all the words together. Within a successful poem there exists a space
or spaces where the meaning and the music become so inextricably melded in rhetorical valences
that the poem conflates beyond itself and becomes more than either the meaning or the music
arriving at what poet Paul Valery called “absolute poetry,” the disrupted, the surprise—the
melding and offspring of the two. It is the music within the language that enters our brains in the
same place as any melody, causing an emotional as well as intellectual response. The same music
that causes us to play a line of poetry over and over in our minds.
Poems are built on rhyme and sound patterns. Characteristic patterns originate in a
prepossession of feeling and the expectation of what comes next (Patel 2008). Certain sounds
create particular patterns of anticipation which cause expectations in the reader, and when these
patterns are broken, surprise can enter the poem. That surprise, its energy and wakefulness,
remains with the reader. Often, a poet will utilize the rhythm of “iambic pentameter.” Iambic is
the term used to mark a short stress followed by a long stress in a single syllable or word. This
sound pattern follows the regular thump of the human heart; the sound humans are closest to in
utero surrounded by our mother’s heartbeat to life with our own internal rhythm and the sound
we live within so closely every day that we don’t even realize we are existing according to its
rhythm. Poetry created within this rhythmic pattern speaks to our primordial selves and returns
the reader to a type of peace and equanimity. “Known objects and beings are in a way—if I may
41
be forgiven the expression—musicalized; they have become resonant to each other and as though
tuned to our own sensibility” (Valery 1958, 188).
“We survive through poetry” writes Paul Valery in his classic on the practice of poetry,
The Art of Poetry. We find the words to bring the moment in all of its intellectual and emotional
valences to the page. “Because poetry involves gaining strength through the unconscious and
because the unconscious, that other limitless country, is the place where the repressed manage to
survive” (Cixous 1976, 880). The poet writes memory, the news, the everyday, the embodied
experience—even the menstrual image—and returns them to the reader transformed by her
multifaceted attention. Poetry is not about answers. It is about the questions. The poet brings her
questions to the poem and responds with her wonder. She brings her curiosity of human
experience, both personal and public. “The nature of things would be revealed in experience
provided that everyday assumptions would be set aside. This is the definition of poetry”
(Derrida, Cook 2004, 534). To recognize it, to verbalize it, to share it.
Women haven’t always felt that they had the permission for this type of explication.
When a female poet comes along with the courage to move beyond what society deems is
acceptable, to give herself the gift of her writing, she can create whole new grammars and
vocabulary. “By making the language to bear the weight, and to sound the word against the self’s
calcification to registering the order and scale of emotions” (Sharpe 2022, xix). Once the thing is
said, the emotional and physical experience becomes the poem.
Poetry is an opening. It creates change, extends the range of what is possible. Poetry is
“an act that will also be marked by woman’s seizing the occasion to speak, hence her shattering
entry into history, which has always been based on her suppression. To write and thus to forge
42
for herself the antilogos weapon” (Cixous 1976, 880). When women write poems it not only
about an individual finding her voice, but also creates the possibility of the breakdown of social
constructs of race, sexual orientation, class, and gender. Poetry has the power to change
perceptions of what is acceptable in culture and society. Cixous defines this power as “woman
for women,” “Everything will be changed once woman gives woman to the other woman.”
(Cixous 1976, 881).
PERMISSION IN THE HOMOEROTIC POEMS OF RICH AND LORDE
In sync with the social prohibitions prevalent in the United States before the 1950s, when
homosexuality was still against the law and no bodily functions were publicly divulged,
mainstream female poets would only write euphemistically, if at all, about menstruation. During
the 1970s and 80s, despite second wave feminism, only vanguards and outlier poets began to
form poems about menstruation. The treatment of the subject and its surrounding culture was
virtually silenced in the poetic cannon. However, two female, queer, confessional poets, Audre
Lorde and Adrienne Rich, broke prohibitions while entreating future poets to find the power
within to keep on breaking them. Though neither wrote poetry in which menstruation was the
main concern, they did write poems of the body, homoerotic poems, beautiful sex poems about
relations between women. Their willingness to be exposed encouraged poets who would
continue to make waves, breaking silences and changing how women see themselves and their
possibilities in society.
43
In 1976 Rich published a beautiful chapbook of 21 Love Poems about an affair with an
unnamed woman. The poems are full of excitement and desire, dreams, daily work, and what it’s
like to wake in her lover’s bed. But outside “The Floating Poem, Unnumbered,” the only
mention of sex is tangential. In the “Floating Poem” (Rich 2016, 472) the first line breaks on the
lover’s body, emphasizing the physical right from the first: “Whatever happens with us, your
body” (line 1).
The poem moves over a metaphoric mention of lovemaking, and then we arrive at “Your
traveled, generous thighs” (line 5). Here Rich, the master-poet, reverses, or rather doubles, the
orgasm with a double entendre of the word “come,” so that both lovers are coming together. She
renders this powerful image and with exceptional internal rhyme, and uses it to undo the usual
insults said about women who are open to their sexuality, emphasizing the “innocence and
wisdom” of women:
between which my whole face has come and come—
the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there—
(line 6-7)
Rich then moves to her lover’s breasts:
the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth—
(line 8)
And to the return of her lover’s caress in her “rose-wet cave” (line 12).
It’s at the labial lips that Rich stops; that is as explicit and deep into the body as she takes
the poem. We have seen no more of the female body than would be exposed in a painting by
Ruebens, Titian or Modigliani, with no further sexual signifiers than a man would use. The
experience remains no more than skin deep. Despite this, by utilizing the courage to set the terms
44
of her own desires and to write about it in 1976, Rich broke boundaries for many women and
poets to come.
Rich’s poet-sister-in-courage was Audre Lorde. Lorde, in every aspect of her life, stepped
out of what was expected, defining herself as a lesbian, black woman, feminist activist, poet,
mother, warrior, socialist, teacher, librarian and cancer survivor. (Ahmed 2017, v) She lived
inside her “othered” body and identified herself with others who have been excluded from
society: women, lesbians, and the black community: anyone who has been ostracized and
rendered powerless. As we have seen in the last chapter as Lorde spoke out against the
uniformity of the white, heterosexual, wealthy French feminists, she was always willing to say
what others might not be willing to say, but what needed to be said, often firmly and decisively
against what she considered wrong. She taught that “you are never really a whole person if you
remain silent” (Lorde 2017, 3). She demanded that level of honesty from her followers and
students, taught them that “introducing ourselves matters; naming yourself, saying who you are,
making clear your values, cares, concerns and commitments matters” (Ahmed 2017, viii).
Lorde’s writing and speeches were “rooted in the power of our unexpressed and unrecognized
feeling.”
I have come to believe over and over again that what is
most important to me must be spoken, made verbal, shared,
even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
(Lorde 2017, 1)
So many feminists spoke out, broke silence and shouted for equality, but few did it with the
uncompromising solidity of Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde.
45
Lorde, always open about her sexual orientation, wrote many love poems, though each
are also a treasure-trove of other urgent matters: racism, mythology and art (Sipyinyu 2007, 31).
Published in 1975, her “Love Poem” (Lorde 1997, 127) explicitly describes the erotic lesbian
experience:
Speak earth and bless me with what is richest
make sky flow honey out of my hips
rigid mountains
spread over a valley
carved out by the mouth of rain.
(line 1-5)
Here again are the hips, the face, the mouth. In the penultimate stanza,
impaled on a lance of tongues
on the tips of her breasts on her navel
and my breath
(line 11-13)
The tongue, the breast, the navel. This is the female body depicted in the way we have seen
before in Rich’s poem. A body, beautiful, perfect, desirable, yet barely breached. Though, in this
poem, Lorde does breach the outer skin of the body:
And I knew when I entered her I was
high wind in her forests hollow
fingers whispering sound
honey flowed
from the split cup
(line 6-10)
The female honey flows, but if there is a smell, we don’t know. If the skin is old,
wrinkled, soft, dark, we are unaware. Though these poems are embodied, we need to ask, from
46
the space of a thirty-year hindsight, are these real bodies? Are these real women experiencing
themselves and each other? “Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of
the unconscious spring forth” (Cixous 1976, 888). Contained within the love poems of both these
poets is a certain lack of specificity and reality that in 2023 we have come to expect in poetry.
Yet, I ask here and will ask again throughout this project, what if these poets were writing today
in 2023? How would these very early homoerotic poems, poems that cracked open a whole new
way for women to speak about their desire in the 1970s and 80s sound different today? If the
courage that Lorde and Rich brought to poetry then is brought to poetry today, would they be
writing the menstrual experience? I think so.
Rich did exhort future poets “to speak/ a new language.” In her remarkable 1977 poem,
“Transcendental Etude” (Rich 2016, 510-515), Rich writes to the future women who will speak
out.
No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music
(line 43-5)
That we would need to know ourselves so well that we could translate that knowledge into
courage.
…practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down in the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
(line 48-52)
47
Remembering the mother-magic we all knew in our mother’s bodies, the milk from
which she nurtured us (line 126)—a memory and the desire to return to it, the determination to
cut away “an old force that held her/ rooted to an old ground,” (line 106-7) and for each woman
to love herself “as only a woman can love me” (line 136). Rich calls this feeling “homesick for
myself” (line 137)—female internal power. And it is from that new voice that “a whole new
poetry” (line 147) can begin.
These poets brought their power to the page and that power did translate and has
continued to translate into more women, more poets who no longer want to adhere to the rules of
patriarchal demands. Women want to speak openly. Despite the fact that not everything was
spoken about during the time when Lorde and Rich were writing, they did open the door for
women to turn to their most personal questions: what do I desire? Just that questioning has
brought permission to so many to write their deepest truth, despite the fact that one subject
remained unmentionable, the “abjected” subject: menstruation.
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CHAPTER THREE: POETRY IS THE EROTIC & THE EROTIC IS MENSTRUAL BLOOD
THE USES OF THE EROTIC

Audre Lorde wrote poems, but she also wrote essays where she explored the complexities
of intersectional identity while explicitly drawing from her personal experiences of oppression to
include sexism, heterosexism, racism, homophobia, classism, and ageism. In her collection,
Sister Outsider, three essays stand together to form the genesis and reckoning of her esoteric and
highly elastic philosophy: “the erotic.” The erotic is the most well known Lordian theory, despite
the fact that it is barely discussed anywhere else in Lorde’s oeuvre. The theory debuted in a paper
given at Mount Holyoke College in 1978 and then later was published as a short seven-page
essay, “Uses of the Erotic.” The essay defines how women can tap into their own power,
completely removed from any misogynistic influences. Lorde called this power “the erotic,” not
a carnal erotic, but a dynamism that emanates from deep within the female body (Lorde 1984,
57), similar to the source of magic that Rich wrote about in “The Primacy of the Mother.”
Lorde’s theory of the erotic has been used to support all kinds of women’s causes; it is the
ultimate permission for women. “To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged
mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence” (Lorde 1984, 54). The erotic is a
galvanizing concept and, because of the idea’s amazing adaptability, it had a groundbreaking
impact in the development of many contemporary feminist theories.
49
According to Lorde the erotic is a strong, internal female power that exists within each of
us and that, if tapped, has the potential to change the world. This erotic force is not the
superficial, plasticized “sexiness” that has been encouraged in a male dominated society in order
to subjugate women (54). Male models of power, including pornography, profit, and politics, all
cancel out the dynamism of the erotic.
But if the erotic isn’t about sex, what is it? I compiled a list:
• The erotic is a power.
• The erotic is female/ hidden/ unexpressed and unrecognized.
• The erotic is a resource.
• The erotic is creativity.
• The erotic is dangerous.
• The erotic is a life force.
• The erotic can be found in every aspect of human life.
• The erotic will engender change/ it will change the world.
• The erotic is energy.
• The erotic is honesty.
• The erotic allows and emphasizes joy.
• The erotic is feelings that must be recognized and shared.
• The erotic nurtures knowledge.
• The erotic is spiritual and connects the spiritual and the political.
• The erotic breaks silence. Opening to the erotic-power reclaims women’s language (parole
femme!).
This list is important as we look at menstruation and the menstrual poem through the lens
of the erotic. The erotic is a feeling. It's about conducting life from that place of feeling, instead
of favoring the intellectual aspects of human existence. “ For the erotic is not a question only of
what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel the doing” (56). Where are
these feelings sourced? How do they manifest? What does it mean when Lorde references “deep
inside?” Inside where? Is there a physical place, perhaps the vagina? Or deeper, into the internal
50
body, to the uterus, that a woman can delve into to find the erotic power? In “Uses of the Erotic”
Lorde never defines exactly where the erotic is sourced. What she does say is that this power,
once accessed, will change not only how a woman thinks about herself, how she walks in the
world, but will change her very language:
When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an
assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative
energy empowered, the knowledge and use of
which we are now reclaiming in our language,
our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our
lives.
(55)
When Lorde privileges feelings, she allows women to be their true selves inside their
bodies. If the cultural energy surrounding the subject of menstruation came to us in the form of
acceptance rather than concealment and silence (as Lorde entreats us to accept and internalize the
erotic) would women experience less menstrual anxiety and therefore less pain? Would they
demand better medical treatment? As we will see, it takes courage to write the menstrual poem.
Can anyone write it without connecting to the emotional terrain of the erotic: the fearlessness, the
trust, the sloughing off of shame, the power?
There is no better place to see how far back the misogyny of the “erotic” goes than the
Oxford English Dictionary, where we see that the etymology of the word comes from the Greek
meaning “sexual love.” In “Uses of the Erotic” Lorde’s own etymology comes closer to her quest
for erotic power, as well as to our concept of the menstrual poem. Lorde redefines the word when
she writes that the “erotic comes from the…word eros, the personification of love in all its
51
aspects —born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony” (55). When Lorde
9
capitalizes the word “Chaos” she brings us very close to the female mind and body, how it is
experienced, especially when it is menstruating. Feelings during menstruation are enormous,
painful, magical. Often we women are challenged during the time to keep our emotions in check
(Gottlieb, Palgrave 2020, 144). Is it possible that these emotions are viewed as “chaotic” simply
because women are given no other option than suppression and concealment during
menstruation?
The erotic is an affirmation in the face of difference, especially for the “othered” body, a
body sexualized by misogyny, degraded because of race, rejected because of sexuality and
abjected because of menstruation (56). Lorde reminds us of the importance of reclaiming and
practicing the ethics of pleasurable feminism, “that is the reclamation of female embodiment”
(Hua 2015, 113). What is interesting is that, when examined closely, both of the derogatory
identities often ascribed to the menstruating woman, the hysteric and the witch can be found in
“the erotic [as] a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our
strongest feelings” (55).
THE EROTIC IN ZAMI
What is “love” for Audre Lorde? If “eros” is more complex than merely sexual love, how
can we understand Lorde’s definition? Who and what is loved? The answer to this question as
emphasis mine
9
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well as the link between the erotic and menstruation can be located when we examine the one
other place where the erotic is referenced in Lorde’s writings: in her biomythography, Zami.
Part autobiography, poetry, narrative, myth, and revisionist history, Zami: A New Spelling
of My Name chronicles much of Lorde’s life, from her childhood memories in Harlem to her
coming of age in the 1950s as a black diasporic, lesbian poet, and activist in the United States.
Zami is not simply an autobiography but a biomythography, in which myth and fiction function
to frame past, present, and future selves (Hua 2015, 114). Reading Zami is an emotional tour of
where Lorde accessed her strength though her life.
The embodied erotic can be found in a story from Lorde’s early life, in the mortar-and-
pestle scene (Lorde 1982, 71). In this famous scene, fifteen-year-old Audre Lorde pounds spice
with her mother’s Grenadian mortar and pestle to make the traditional West Indian dish “souse,”
that will be served at a celebration of Lorde’s menarche. The mortar, with its lovely exterior
carving, is described with exquisite sensuality, exemplifying the feminine erotic through images
of roundness: fruits, plum and pear: “There were rounded plums and oval indeterminate fruit,
some long and fluted like a banana, others ovular and end-swollen like a ripe alligator pear…. I
loved to finger the hard roundness of the carved fruit” (71). The details of Lorde’s prose is
determinedly sexual. Grinding the spice with the pestle against the round interior of the mortar
recalls rhythms of lovemaking, where the sexual subject can become “both man and woman.”
Caressing the wooden fruit with my aromatic fingers, I thrust
sharply downward, feeling the shifting salt and the hard little
pellets of garlic right up through the shaft of the wooden pestle.
Up again, down, around, and up. . . . All these transported me
into a world of scent and rhythm and movement and sound that
grew more and more exciting as the ingredients liquefied.
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(74)
In this private act of sexual awakening in conjunction with the pounding of spice, a new self-
proclaimed eroticism emerges within the domestic space of her mother’s kitchen:
“I could feel bands of tension sweeping across my body back
and forth, like lunar winds across the moon’s face. . . and I
smelled the delicate breadfruit smell rising up from the front of
my print blouse that was my own womansmell, warm, shameful,
but secretly utterly delicious.”
(77)
As this young girl is becoming sexually aroused, “a heavy fullness at the root of me…taut and
sensitive as a clitoris exposed” (78). This sexual awakening is linked to her new menstruation.

As I continued to pound the spice, a vital connection seemed
to establish itself between the muscles of my fingers curved
tightly around the smooth pestle in its insistent downward
motion, and the molten core of my body whose source
emanated just beneath the pit of my stomach….The thread ran
over my ribs and along my spine, tingling and singing, into
a basin that was poised between my hips, now pressed against
the low kitchen counter before which I stood pounding spice.
And within that basin was a tiding ocean of blood beginning
to be made real and available for me for strength and
information.
(78)
The erotic is sourced not just in her body, in the “basin,” i.e., the uterus. The basin is
merely a vessel that holds the source of female “strength and information”—Lorde’s new
menstrual blood. In this scene, where the female body in its entirety, from fingers to stomach,
becomes a source of a girl’s awakening desire, another, deeper ascendancy is recognized. And
when the liquid within is tapped, like oil from the belly of the earth, the power is incredible.
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The question remains, why isn’t Lorde more explicit about the source of the erotic in
“Uses of the Erotic?” The concept of the erotic was first shared in 1977. Zami was published just
a five years later in 1982. Could it be that Lorde was afraid to make the explicit connection
between menstrual blood and the erotic because of the abjected nature of menstrual blood in
society? From all we know about Lorde she wasn’t scared of anyone or anything (Lorde 2017,
2). It is possible that she didn’t want to limit her concept of the erotic to a corporeal space? It is
also possible that her agenda: black female empowerment and the sources and understanding of
lesbian love, as depicted throughout her poems, were simply more important to her.
Through the erotic ritual of pounding spice, Lorde’s awakening is projected onto her
earliest love object— her mother’s body. Lorde continues: “Years afterward when I was grown,
whenever I thought about the way I smelled that day, I would have a fantasy of my mother, her
hands wiped dry from the washing, and her apron untied and laid neatly away, looking down
upon me lying on the couch, and then slowly, thoroughly, our touching and caressing each
other’s most secret places (78). Here Lorde turns female abjection— menstruation, female
sexuality, even a female incest fantasy with her mother— into powerful scenes of female
relationship and connection. Connection with a world of desire, but mostly connection within
herself, to the sources of her power. Becoming a woman in the rush of blood that marks her first
menstrual period, Lorde is also on her way to becoming the empowered subject who will later
inscribe this moment in her autobiography as a crucial sense of self-authorization. Thus, Lorde
subverts patriarchal heterosexist culture into erotic culture.
Only now, I find more and more women identified women
brave enough to risk sharing the erotic’s electrical charge
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without having to look away, and without distorting the
enormously powerful and creative nature of that exchange.
Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give
us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world,
rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same
weary drama.
(Lorde 1984, 59)
It is this electric charge that has carried the contemporary woman into this moment in
2023 where slowly, but surely women are sloughing off shame, embracing the power they
realized in #MeToo and beginning to write their true, embodied stories.
THE POEM IS SOURCED FROM WITHIN THE EROTIC
Two other essays in Sister Outsider were papers given in 1977 that later fed into the
concept of the erotic, “Poetry is Not a Luxury” and “Transformation of Silence into Language
and Action” (Rashedi 2012, 42). Each of these pieces is very short, a few pages of thought
without connection or later follow up. In a 1979 interview with Adrienne Rich, Lorde admits
that,
They’re part of something that’s not finished yet. I don’t know
what the rest of it is, but they’re clear progressions in feeling
out something connected with the first piece of prose I ever
wrote. One thread in my life is the battle to preserve my
perceptions — pleasant or unpleasant, painful or whatever…”
(Lorde 1984, 81)
I don’t believe that Lorde did finalize this thought. Therefore, her uncompleted concept
of the erotic has been left open to many interpretations and has become the philosophical support
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for so many varieties of female empowerment. Just as I have shown how the erotic is connected
to menstruation, I want to also show that the erotic and female empowerment is connected to
poetry. I will do that by looking at Lorde’s other two, earlier essays. Again I return to the
question, “Why poetry?” Why is poetry the most effective literary form in which to express and
thus change perceptions around the menstrual experience?
All the elements that create an environment where the erotic can exist are expressed in
the essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury.” In fact, poetry was Lorde’s first form of communication; her
first language (Lorde 1984, 83-4). “This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we
give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed
but already felt” (36). Poetry is a “power within our living” (36); it is of “the deep places each
one of us [that] hold an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and
unrecorded emotion and feeling” (37) Poetry is,
the woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white
nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.
(37)
“The woman’s place of power” (37). The uterus is here, still unnamed, as it was in the essay
about the erotic. Poetry too is a “dark place” where a woman's “true spirit” can “grow,” can rise,
working “against our nightmare of weakness and impotence” (37). Poetry is Lorde’s early word
for “erotic.” The poem is sourced within the erotic. This source of female power is also the
universal power where poems are born. And it is within the poem that the erotic can be fully
realized.
Poetry allows safety as long as we are within it, and any change we need can begin within
the poem. For Lorde the poem is the Black Mother. As the embryo within it the poem, we are
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nurtured and protected there. The poem “whispers our dreams” (38). Lorde posits that this
protection exists because poetry allows us to explore our future death (38). I agree that we are
safe within the poem, but I believe that is because the poet comes to the page with her questions
and the poem allows us to contemplate our questions without the necessity of quick or polemic
answers. There is safety in the community of questions, in the open-hearted, yes motherly way
the poem allows us to grow and develop within it.
Lorde continues. Poetry is the cure for female shame, “those fears which rule our lives
and form our silences” (36); the shame we need to shed in order to realize the erotic. Cultural
controls are lifted, and female power is allowed to unfold and fly.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital
necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of
the light within which we predicate our hopes and
dreams toward survival and change.
(37)
The poem is erotic. It is magic. It is illumination.
In “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Lorde asks women not to
be silent. “What is most important…must be spoken, made verbal and shared” (40). She tells the
story of her diagnosis of breast cancer, a death sentence that she will live with for the next 15
years. When faced with her own mortality, Lorde writes that “what [she] most regretted were
[her] silences (41). “Death” she continues, “is the final silence” (41).
In 1933 in Buenos Aires, the poet Federico García Lorca gave a lecture he called “Theory
and Play Of The Duende” (Lorca, Cook 2004, 201). The “duende” is a word in Spanish usually
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translated as “demon,” is a primitive sacrificial energy that can be realized through passionate
forms of art: music, dance and spoken poetry (201). Lorca defined the duende as “an earth spirit
who helps the artist see the limitations of intelligence,” who brings the artist face-to-face with
death, and who helps them create and communicate memorable, spine-chilling art.
And the duende? The duende does not come at all
unless he sees that death is possible. The duende
must know beforehand that he can serenade death’s
house and rock those branches we all wear, branches
that do not have, will never have, any consolation.
(Lorca, Cook 2004, 205)

As before, the poet is taught not to look away; that art comes in the moment when there is no
choice. Silence must be broken, and the poem formed because without the poem there is no life.
Lorde asks, “what are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your
own, until you sicken and die from them, still in silence” (Lorde 1984, 40)? Just as we learned to
work when we are tired, we can speak out when we are afraid.

For we have been socialized to respect fear more than
our own needs for language and definition, and while
we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness,
the wait of that silence will choke us.
(Lorde 1984, 44)
Women have been silent in the face of patriarchal strictures that demand our silence,
replete with shame from every menstruating body. “The transformation of silence into language
and action” is how women will realize their power. It is the breaking of silence, the articulation,
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the utterance that will release our female erotic power into the world (Lorde 1984, 42). It is the
sloughing off of shame that will allow for the full release of the erotic into the world. Only then
can we engender real change for women.
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CHAPTER FOUR: THE MENSTRUAL POEM WITHOUT SHAME: LUCILLE CLIFTON
—“What black feminism instructs us toward is the imagination of abundance.”
Legacy Russell
CLIFTON’S EMBODIED POETRY
What happens when the poet carries a body considered “othered” by patriarchal culture,
but a spirit so strong that it allows her to step beyond the shame that culture expects her to carry?
Poems that honor menstruation and the menstruating body will be written. Enter Lucille Clifton.
Clifton, born Thelma Lucille Sayles in 1936 in Depew, NY , married at 22, mother of six
all born within 6 years. A woman at the kitchen table, writing poems with family life proceeding
around her. A woman who survives. Clifton, who so resembled Audre Lorde: black, female,
cancer survivor, womanist, warrior poet (Noird, 2010, 10). But where Lorde was hard and
political, Clifton, who, though she never shied away from social or political issues, wrote
10
poems that began in questions and ended in affirmations. Elizabeth Alexander called her poems
“physically small …with enormous and profound inner worlds” (Alexander, 2010). Her voice
was what Chard de Noird, who interviewed Clifton just two weeks before her death, called
“vatic” (Noird 2010, 5). And though it is undeniable that through fourteen poetry collections
spanning forty years, Clifton’s voice had many vatic qualities, her celebratory voice, her spiritual
voice, her womanist voice was always unabashedly and unashamedly human.
Though Clifton’s poems were plain-spoken, she was a writer of profound illumination.
This combination in her work-spare elegance of tone and deep practical wisdom, defines her
Born out of The Harlem Renaissance and as an artistic arm of The Civil Rights Movement, Black Arts Movement (Kevin
10
Young, Collected, 733)
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work. She wrote “as an African American woman, as the voice of [her] slave ancestors, as a
mother, as a civil rights worker, as a wife, as a medium” (5). In “Poetry is Not a Luxury” Lorde
wrote “the black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I
can be free” (Lorde 1984, 38). That whispering black woman, that freedom found in the erotic,
carries the courage to say what must be said; the support for Clifton to speak with a naturalness
and forthrightness about even the most sensitive topics (Rashedi 2012, 53).
Clifton wrote very personal poems emanating from a perspective of radical thought
sourced out of black feminist traditions that existed from a time before feminism, before modern
thought and abstraction. Clifton’s feminism was born in the ancient soil of Benin in her
Dahomey heritage (Smith, Clifton 1976, vii). Her work was largely focused on the African-
American diaspora and experience, motherhood, and family life. Her poems are known for their
self-acceptance and joy, their life-affirming quality, especially when concerned with the
conditions of womanhood. They are tributes to blackness, [and] celebrations of women" (Smith
1996). Clifton was never bashful about asserting her gender or of using it as a thematic device.
Stigmas associated with the female experience did not preclude an affirming mythos. “Clifton’s
poetry reflects a will to endure as well as a feisty feminist spirit” (Holladay 2004, 93).
Clifton challenged the dominant script on how a woman should see her body, “defying a
history of misuse that it still evokes: black bodies that have been owned; black female bodies that
have been violated, that have shone dangerously in the reflected light of white imaginations”
(Farmer 2012). Her poems were often a celebration of the body: the female body, the black
female body, the strangeness of her particular body (Johnson 1983). Her poetry created a new
lexicon of self-definition, love, racial pride, and feminine ideology, speaking a language unlike
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any other. The result was a poet willing to write the first unapologetic, un-euphemistic,
straightforward poems about menstruation. It is worth it to look at the history, the physicality,
and emotional presence of Clifton’s work to consider what was her secret to writing poems that
explored the most abjected aspects of the female experience.
It isn’t always warranted to bring up the corporeal differences of a poet to understand
their work. Clifton, however, displays an unusual courage and physical strength, especially in
consideration of the world and the time she was born into: a patriarchal, racist, elitist America.
What does it mean to carry an “othered” body? “Othered” meaning, not the normal, the
acceptable (Harding 2014, 41). However, Clifton’s “other” doesn’t disenfranchise her from
society. It releases her. She doesn’t accept a downtrodden focus. She just completely removes
herself from any feelings of shame, and her poems are born in that shame-free environment.
Clifton identified herself proudly in her poems as a woman born with a physical
difference. Like her mother and daughter, Clifton was born with twelve fingers: six on one hand
and six on the other (Holladay 2004, 8). Rather than tucking her hands in her pockets ashamed of
her deformity, Clifton wrote poems of pride, seeing her twelve fingers as a sign of her magic
instead of an aspect of shame. In her poem, “if our grandchild be a girl” from her 1987 book
next, Clifton wrote:
i wish for her
fantastic hands,
twelve spiky fingers
symbols of our tribe.
she will do magic
with them,
she will turn personal
abracadabra
remembered from
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dahomean women
wearing
extravagant gloves
(Clifton Collected 2012, 277)
For Clifton her magic, her “witchy” strength is inherited (Lupton 2006, 100), a
sign of it in her six-fingered hands. This congenital difference is exemplified through vivid
bodily images in order to render the black female body as an allegory. By doing so, the speaker
highlights the tension between what constitutes a disfigured/disabled body versus a figured/able-
bodied individual. More importantly, the speaker celebrates the societal stigma of being poly
dactyl. As she celebrates a seemingly disabling feature, not just in herself but in a future female
grandchild, the speaker challenges the Anglo-European model of what Rosemarie Garland-
Thomson notes as “the canonical body”: that which adheres to the social paradigm of being
white and able-bodied (Thomson 1997, 105). Thomson discusses how various twentieth-century
black women writers like Toni Morrison, Ann Petry, and Audre Lorde depict and celebrate
disabled and disfigured bodies as a means to transcend social and cultural limitations. For
Thomson, these authors create African American female characters who are “grounded” in a
singular body that bears the etchings of history; their sense of self-validation, power, and identity
derive from their physical differences as well as their resistance towards cultural norms (105).
These “grounded” characters “…enable a particularized self who both embodies and transcends
cultural subjugation, claiming physical difference as exceptional rather than inferior” (105). In
other words, Clifton offers this depiction of an African-American female self “grounded” in an
“identity” that resists “cultural norms;” her speaker celebrates her congenital difference of being
poly dactyl and redefines it as a source of power rather than something to be concealed from
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both the public and her own eyes. The speaker does not merely celebrate Thomson’s widely
quoted expression of the “extraordinary” or disfiguring body; she taps into her selfhood, an
intrinsic matrilineal power that lies inside of her body. In this way, Clifton was able to access and
experience her own Lordian erotic power.
CLIFTON’S INHERITED POWER
This is Clifton’s birthright, passed down through her great-great-grandmother, Caroline,
who was kidnapped at the age of eight, imprisoned on a slave ship to Louisiana, and then taken
by foot to a plantation in Virginia (Clifton 1976, 14). There she lived out her enslaved life as a
healer and midwife (12). Caroline bequeathed her children and grandchildren their birthright as
Dahomey Women Warriors (73). Dahomey Warriors were an all-female, military regiment of the
Kingdom of Dahomey (in today's Benin, West Africa) that existed from the 17th century until the
late 19th century. European armies who fought against the Dahomey Empire told of these
Amazons, who were the most vicious fighting unit they had ever encountered (Hobson 2021,
228). The strength of this family story was carried from generation to generation, as were six-
fingered hands. Clifton, named after Caroline’s daughter, Lucy (18), achieved her certainty in her
own selfhood from this family strength, despite the suffering of slavery that lay like a stain
between herself and her Dahomey history (Clifton 1976, 28). For Clifton, her forthright agency
and acceptance of her power are born in her Dahomey heritage, perhaps from family stories,
perhaps due to epigenetics. The survival of her family line, their endurance and strength through
the generations of slavery and its aftermath, speaks to the latter. It allowed Clifton to give voice
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to what otherwise might have been silenced and erased, both in her personal history and the
greater African American history.
Clifton was empowered not just by her strangeness, her disability, but by every aspect of
her selfhood that American culture told her should bring her shame. In her 1980 collection, two-
headed woman, Clifton published praise poems to her blackness, her nappy hair, her wide hips,
her female magic. In the poem “homage to my hair” she challenges men to touch her hair, to lick
it, “tasty on your tongue as good greens” (Clifton 2012, 197, line 6). Aging for Clifton is only an
enhancement to her God-given strength, “the grayer she do get, good God/ the blacker she do be”
(line 10-11). The poet dances to the rhetoric of her “black” vernacular, praises her “black” hair,
relishes her aging body.
Clifton grounds her poetry in the body…a body at once female and aging (Johnson 1983,
70). Equally unembarrassed about her femaleness, her woman-body, she sang its praises in poem
after poem. In the poem “what the mirror said”
listen,
you a wonder.
you a city
of a woman.
you got a geography
of your own.
listen,
somebody need a map
to understand you.
somebody need directions
to move around you.
listen,
woman,
you not a noplace
anonymous
girl;
mister with his hands on you
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he got his hands on
some
damn
body!
(Clifton 2012, 199)
“What the mirror said” is a testimony to Clifton’s “feisty feminist spirit” (Holladay 2004, 94). In
this poem, as in many of her poems, “using the exclamatory style of a gospel song, Clifton
infuses wit into a poem of self-affirmation” (72). The inspiration for this poem comes from
visiting her husband, who was then teaching philosophy at Harvard. Looking around the campus,
noticing that it seemed “everyone there was eighteen, except me [Lucille Clifton]”. They were all
thin and young, and she felt out of place; Clifton decided to write a poem about “being a woman
in a world of girls” (Clifton 2012 YouTube, 23:33). This is a situation that might have made
another woman cower at home, feeling dejected. Instead, full of sass and sauce, Clifton writes
with encouragement. This poem speaks to the perfection and marvel of a woman’s body. It
alludes to female differences, but in Clifton’s unique, empowering, and enticing way. Stating,
“listen, woman, you not a noplace anonymous girl;” (Clifton 2012, 199, lines 12-16), “what the
mirror said” allows women to understand that their presence makes a difference, an impact.
Finally, this poem ends with the exclaiming voice asserting, “mister with his hands on you/ he
got his hands on/some/damn/body!” (lines 17-21). These last few lines are a perfect ending to
this spirited poem. They tie sexual power and allure to the power that comes beyond the physical
and is born in the erotic. In this way, throughout all of her poetry, Clifton doesn’t just deny that
her body is an “othered” body; a body othered by misogyny, racism, fat shaming, ageism,
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elitism. No, she celebrates it. And in that celebration, she emotionally ‘flips the bird’ at
constraints placed on women, especially women of color in America.
WOMANISM IN CLIFTON
Clifton’s poems are straightforward, unsentimental affirmations of black feminism. “I
write to celebrate life,” she told Chard de Noird in those weeks just before she died (Noird 2010,
6). This was always a decision for Clifton. She saw the bitterness and pain that are an offspring
of racism and patriarchy. She consciously elected to accentuate black life positively and with
enormous pride (Johnson 1983, 70). Everywhere, throughout her poems, is a proclivity to
celebrate the corporeal self: size, strangeness, differences, disabilities, illnesses, all of a woman’s
natural functions. The celebration in Clifton’s poetics is a celebration of the body: the female
body: the black female body: the beauty born in the strangeness of her particular body (Johnson
1983, 70). There is no shame here. The body, in Clifton’s poetry, is transcendent.
This type of positivity could also be found in the writing of her contemporaries. For
instance in the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks (Holladay 2004, 70) and, of course, in Lorde’s
essays, in the Lordian erotic. Also at this time, author and activist and Pulitzer prize winner,
Alice Walker penned a definition of black feminism called “womanism” (Walker 1983). A
definition of the term womanist: from womanish.
“1.) The opposite of “girlish,” i.e., frivolous, irresponsible, not serious. A black feminist or
feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mothers to female children, “you acting
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womanish,” i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful
behavior. Responsible. In charge. Serious.
2.) Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and
roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless.”
(Walker 1983)
This definition of ‘womanism’ certainly speaks to the spirit we recognize in Clifton’s
poetry. The music is there. The dance. But also the seriousness. These are poems of a grown-up
woman who knows her mind and won’t accept any back-talk. Womanism defines a black
woman’s way of knowing, “a sense of agency and authority an insistence on truth-telling of a
history both painful and joyful; the power of the personal and collective history; a non-
sensational, mystic spirituality linked to a broader dysphoric understanding of the sacred”
(Harding 2014, 39). Womanist thought is feminism beyond the corporeal and into the feminine
divine. It is an elegance of thought, a deep practical wisdom. It honors the everyday mysticism of
the African American experience (Harding 2014, 37).
Both Walker and Clifton bring magical realism into their feminist discourse, a tool of
survival, agency, and empowerment for American black feminists. Magical realism allows
Western systems of thought to be replaced with matrilineal mythical/magical stories from
mythology and spiritual references with which black women can re-historicize and articulate
their communal histories by drawing upon myths, legends, orality, folklore, and other non-
Western, but important female practices (Yavas 2014, 247). Clifton uses magical realism
throughout her poems, borrowing heavily from The Bible, as well as African deities such as Kali,
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MawuLisa, and others. Many believe that when Clifton mentions Kali in her poems, she is
referencing menstruation (Lupton 2006, 101).
CLIFTON’S MENSTRUAL POEMS
Clifton transcends cultural limitations, challenging the dominant script of a woman’s
body. Is it any surprise then that she also challenges the typical perceptions about menstruation?
Poems concerning menstruation are replete through Clifton’s oeuvre, as replete as the menstrual
experience fills the life of any typical woman. And though flowers, fluids, witches, and moons
are frequent images in Clifton’s poems, there are also many poems where there is no euphemism,
no barrier between the menstrual experience and the poem. What these poems do is connect the
physical body to identity, as Clifton proves the integral role the body plays in a person’s sense of
self. Clifton uses many motifs of magical realism in these poems, evoking goddesses and
Biblical stories to represent womanhood. The menstrual experience in Clifton’s poems is like
that of Lorde’s menarche story; in most instances, the menstrual experience enhances a woman’s
strength, her feminine power. As in her other poems, the celebration, the beauty, and the magic
dominate any discomfort discussed, and it is the magic that lingers.
Some of these poems do depict struggle. Menstruation isn’t always straightforward.
Clifton suffered through illnesses and through losses. In her 1991, Pulitzer-finalist collection,
quilting, she published many of her most straightforward menstrual poems. Clifton wrote
quilting as she went through the loss of her uterus due to hysterectomy (Lupton 2006, 143).
Today, hysterectomy is the second most common surgery for females in the USA after cesarean
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section (AlSayyad, New Yorker 2023). It is a very real fact that the uterus is under attack in
America.
quilting is formed into four sections, each named for a different quilting pattern. Quilting
is used as a metaphor for a life “stitched together” (Holladay 2004, 52). The book begins with
her poem “quilting” and ends with one of her most famous poems, “blessing the boats” (Clifton
2012, 405). In the section “eight-pointed star” three menstrual poems appear one after the other:
“to my last period,” “poem to my uterus” and “wishes for sons.”
In “to my last period,” (Clifton 2012, 381) Clifton mourns the loss of something “never
arrived…/without trouble,” —menstruation: never comfortable, predictable, or easy. However,
the poet’s uterus ultimately ties to her identity as a woman in a very intimate way. This poem is a
sonnet of fourteen lines, two stanzas of seven lines each, and a strong turn exactly in the center
of the poem: the turn of the before, when the voice of the poem menstruated and the after, when
the menstrual experience is mourned and remembered.
Clifton carried six children in six years. It is rare that a woman has a body, a uterus,
strong enough to do this. Clifton writes, “well, girl, goodbye, / after thirty-eight years” (lines
1-2), acknowledging the immense amount of her life in which her period—a physical
representation of her womanhood—has been present. She continues, “you / never arrived /
splendid in your red dress / without trouble for me” (lines 3-6), which emphasizes the dual nature
of her period: both “splendid” and “trouble.” Reminiscent of Adrienne Rich’s menstrual binary,
this duality is often true for many women. The message from their bodies, and its almost magical
clock, conflicting with the message from society: “your period is nothing but trouble.”
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A short, bittersweet poem, “to my last period” finishes with Clifton reaching a place of
mourning for this often-painful/ but still wonderful part of being a woman. “Grandmother” in the
line “just like/ the grandmothers” (lines 9-10) sets the voice at a certain age, stage in life, but also
at an emotional/ physical stage: the period was useful. It created at least one child who also was
able to carry and give birth to a child. Remembering her menstruation is like the loss of a
beloved who was less than perfect. The metaphor Clifton creates is of a “hussy,” a woman who
didn’t get in line and behave. Yet here is this older woman “holding her photograph / and,
sighing, wasn’t she / beautiful? wasn’t she beautiful?” (lines 12-14). The anaphora of “beautiful”
connotes more than a perceived beauty. The repetition is love, the type of love that is awe for the
magic of the thing—a beauty that is otherworldly, almost unbelievable. It's here the poem
touches the erotic. That place where the poem becomes more than itself, something beyond the
poem, and becomes imbued with the magic of the erotic. Clifton’s loss at the end of her period
illustrates the important role her physical body plays in her sense of self; though menstruation is
almost never a pleasant experience, it becomes a monthly physical representation of womanhood
and of identity in general, a reminder of vitality in the face of struggle.
Clifton’s “poem to my uterus” (Clifton 2012, 380), which mourns her uterus as she
mourned her period, further explains the way Clifton connected her body with her sense of self.
This poem contains twenty-one lines, thinly set down the left-hand margin of the page. Some of
the lines are no more than a single word. This poem is ‘leaking out’ of her. “you” Clifton
addresses the uterus directly. Then a large space and on the same line “uterus” (line 1). That
space. Left there in its silence to connote the almost inability of the poet to continue, to name the
object, though the word appears in the title. The poem thus enacts a voice overcome with
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emotion at the very naming, the saying. “you have been patient/ as a sock” (lines 2-3). How is a
sock patient? And why a sock? The uterus is a round shaped organ with a long neck called a
cervix, which extends down into the vagina of the body. When there is an embryo present, the
neck becomes plugged. Later, at the time of birth, that neck peels back and allows the uterus to
open in order to expel the baby. Almost like a sock rolled down. Like a vessel that a foot can
enter and enter again. “while i have slippered into you” (line 4). Not “shoed,” which seems
forceful and hard, the poet “slippers:” an image soft and graceful and replete with comfort. Socks
and slippers. We are home. This uterus has held children, “dead and living” (line 5), but now
holds cancerous tumors, and doctors have advised a hysterectomy. This poem displays the poet’s
connection to her body; seems to say, ‘uterus, you are beloved, and I have used you well.’ Clifton
had cancer, but still did not want to part with this organ that was so essential to her, a part of her,
a part that allowed her, her family. Her uterus is metaphorically and quite literally a piece of her;
to part with it seems to be like leaving a constant, faithful companion behind. Again, as in the
previous poem, the perfectly set repetition “where i am going/ where i am going” (lines 9-10).
Cancer might mean death, and in death there is no need for reproduction nor a need for this
faithful companion: the “stocking” that is under attack. Clifton calls her uterus “old girl” (line
10) as well as other names: “bloody print” (line 14), meaning the way she specifically imprinted
her DNA onto the world through her children, “estrogen kitchen” (line 15), the place she
“cooked up” her hormone fueled energies and ideas, and “black bag of desire” (line 16), her
witchery kit of the erotic, desire both sensual and self motivating. That Clifton refers to both her
period and her uterus as a personified, feminine entities suggests a deep connection, and the
friendly epithet “old girl” brings to mind a comfortable camaraderie. Yet these references go
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deeper, to the seat of not just womanhood, but personhood; the center of the speaker's womanly
power. She expresses her bereavement in the final lines of the poem: “where can i go / barefoot /
without you” (lines 16-18). Without her uterus, Clifton feels unprepared, “barefoot,” without
protection: changed, skinned, revealed, reduced. And the final question: “where can you go/
without me” (lines 20-21). What is the uterus without a body to shape it, carry it, give it life? The
loss is irrevocable, and neither will survive without the other.
Directly after these two poems comes a third in the book, “wishes for sons” Clifton
2012, 382). It's clear these three poems together form a trilogy, a menstrual message that the poet
wants to impart. Finally, here, in this poem, directed to young male people (“wishes for sons,”
not “wishes for MY sons,”) is a litany not of menstrual “hardship,” (because there are so many
worse hardships within the female fertility cycle than these) but rather the inconveniences of
menstruation, the month to month, yucky parts of menstruation: cramps, lost protection methods,
hot flashes, clots. Clifton directs this message to the entire young male population. Is this poem
tongue-in-cheek humor? I think that might be the easy read of this poem, as other Clifton
scholars have alluded to (Lupton 2006). I don’t think that Clifton, who, despite often being
humorous in her poems, meant us to just write off this poem with humor. In the last stanza of the
poem, she writes, “let them think they have accepted/ arrogance in the universe” (lines 15-16). A
direct attack on the patriarchy. But the message is directed at “sons;” not the current keepers of
patriarchal culture, but the coming generations. Clifton is the consummate mother. The mother
nurtures, supports, educates. There is information within the everyday difficulties of
menstruation, and within that message is something these sons need to know. But what? What do
we learn from the inconveniences and discomforts of the menstrual experience? Fortitude? A
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connection to a body that betrays you at exactly the wrong moment? “let the clots come/” Clifton
writes, “when they want to” (lines 13-14). The menstruating body, and all of its small betrayals,
ultimately connects the uterus bearer to a magic within. The inconveniences remind a woman
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where the magic comes from. There is something to be learned within the menstrual experience.
Yes, fortitude and yes, creativity when faced with stains, cramps, or a lack of protection methods.
But more. A body connected to its magic. A body connected to nature. Connecting this poem
with the other two, what these sons need to know is the alchemy, the witchcraft, the imprint, the
beauty. Yes. The beauty. That is Clifton’s message to the patriarchy in the generations to come.
There is something that menstruators know, and it must be shared. Then, when the sons become
doctors, (or husbands, bosses, etc.) they will have more understanding for the uterus-bearing
body.
There is a fourth menstruation poem in quilting, in “The Catalpa Flower” section of the
collection. It is the “poem in praise of menstruation” (Clifton 2012, 357), the most beautiful and
straightforward poem about menstruation that I have read yet. This praise poem is Clifton’s true
goodbye to this ending hearkened by her hysterectomy. The motifs of this poem can be seen
elsewhere. There are whispers to other poets, other poems. For instance, the river from Langston
Hughes’ beautiful poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (Hughes 2002) with the line “I’ve
known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins” (line
2). Poets live in the world of each other’s words. We find worlds within their words. Our
In Period (2023, 173), Kate Clancy points out that it is the uncontrollable nature that often causes the most shame. We are
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expected to pretend nothing is happening as we modern women bleed. In this poem, Clifton wants to celebrate that
uncontrollability. The magic is in the body’s ability to do what it needs to do and perhaps the problem is in a society that demands
that we conceal this fact.
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creativity is based on theirs and theirs on ours. It is within the language of poetry, we all find
continued and expanded language.
In Clifton’s poem, the river is the menstrual flow. Again, this flow is “beautiful” and
replete with the clear mention of “blood,” it's color “bright” and “red.” There is no hiding in the
message in this poem. Clifton wants us to know exactly what it is we are praising. The word “if”
falls off the right-hand side at the end of each stanza like a spigot, allowing the ‘flow’ contained
in the extensive enjambment through the poem to continue throughout, and creating a deep,
resonant beat, which, again, like Hughes, sings with an old-world depth. The river begins each
stanza, each time introducing a different adjectival phrase that opens the river to a new facet of
its character: beautiful, faithful, brave, ancient, and powerful. One could say these adjectives can
each be found in the female fertility cycle: menarche (beautiful/ magical), menstruation (faithful/
cyclical), motherhood (brave), and menopause (ancient/ powerful).
Faithful: this river is “returning each month/ to the same delta” (lines 7-8). “Delta” is
such a wonderful word choice here. The delta of a river is its mouth, the place where a river joins
another body of water. As ‘mouth’ the vagina is the opening to the body’s emotional and spiritual
flow, as well as the place where menstrual blood drains. Delta, as the center. And reminiscent of
Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus, her groundbreaking, female-penned erotica. Delta as the ‘center,’ the
center-most and important part of the female body.
Braver: this river is “coming and coming” (line 11). Did Clifton intend this double
entendre? Certainly she did. This is clear as the stanza continues, “in a surge/ of passion.” Many
women experience strong sexual desire when they are bleeding. As we will see when we analyze
contemporary menstrual poems in the coming chapter, writing about the body’s desire during
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menstruation is considered especially verboten. Our culture doesn’t want to hear about
menstruation, but it will tolerate the image of a woman aching, curled around her heating pad.
American culture does not want to see the menstruating body as sexy. Leave it to Clifton for her
lack of fear and shame as she brings us the intended image of a body passionately spreading her
blood over her bed and her partner during the sex act.
Ancient: this river carries us back to the darkest place for a menstruating woman: the
mythology of the Hebrew Bible. It is in Genesis that we meet Eve, who, because of the sin of
eating from the tree of knowledge, is cursed with the pain that all women experience when their
uterus contracts, during menstruation as well as during birth. Clifton brings Eve as both daughter
and mother. It is continuity, the generations, the many, many generations of menstruating women
from which we are all born.
Powerful: this river is “wild” (line 19). Clifton has taken us white-water rafting on this
menstrual river. The poem returns us to that first, original shame in the last stanza, but now,
through the poem, has washed that stain away.
“Pray” (line 21) the poem continues. A turn to God even as Clifton hearkens us to our
animal bodies: “pray that it flows also/ through animals/ beautiful and faithful and ancient/ and
female and brave.” Clifton repeats every adjective here again. She switches out “powerful” for
“female” and that doubling takes us immediately back to Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic.”
This is a perfect example of women’s shared and repurposed language. In her essay “Poetry is
not a Luxury” Lorde describes poetry as “dark,” “ancient,” “hidden.” Did Clifton take this
language subliminally or directly? We will never know. Language clings like static electricity in
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the minds of great poets, and Clifton was certainly that. Female power. And the seat of the power
is at the center of the woman-body.
This menstrual poem is wholly positive. It doesn’t undo cultural misogynist attitudes
towards menstruation; it just completely ignores them. Even the word “if” becomes celebration
in this poem, so different from the famous Kipling poem “If,” here the “ifs” are without
expectations. They are instead complete affirmations. This is a river that connects all women, a
river that visits us every month. Instead of a hassle: ugly, smelly, embarrassing, and bad,
menstruation becomes a treasure that we all share. Even with all small caps, Clifton’s poem
speaks of and to female courage.
In her introduction to Clifton’s selected poems, how to carry water, Arcelis Girmay
writes about Clifton’s poems, “They discomfort as often as they bless, and they bless as often as
they wonder—bearing witness to joy and struggle” (Girmay, Clifton 2020, xiii). How clearly we
see this in the small sampling I present here. Even within the pain of loss, that wonder is evident
in her poems. “There is a ferocity in her clear sight” (xiii) This is the clear sight of a shame-free
existence. Clifton’s editor, Toni Morrison, attributed this power to her courage on the page:
The personal courage of the women cannot be gainsaid,
but it should not function as a substitute for piercing insight
and bracing intelligence. My general impression of the best
of her work: seductive with the simplicity of an atom, which
is to say highly complex, explosive underneath an apparent
quietude.
(Morrison, Clifton Collected 2012)
Clifton’s poems are able to connect to the erotic as she expands within each poem,
dilating the scale of the emotional impact to go beyond the simple senses, and to bring the reader
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to a startling new reality. “I write to celebrate life” Clifton told Chard de Noird in that interview
on the eve of her life (Noird 2010, 10). Clifton’s poems concerning menstruation invite us to
celebrate too, to celebrate our womanhood, to celebrate our female bodies, to ignore cultural
influences that ask us to shut down our truest power and to accept from Clifton the courage to
bring our own truths to the page.
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CHAPTER FIVE: THE CONTEMPORARY MENSTRUAL POEM AND THE 6-M’s
Lyric poetry universalizes human experience, communicating our common psychological
and social concerns (Valery 1958, 80). Poetry allows new ways of experiencing the world
through language. When new realms of subject matter enter poetry, then the psychological and
emotional vocabularies, even the literal words we use, alters and expands. Language embodies
and enacts the poem.
What is a menstrual poem? What is the nature of its poetics and its inquiry? How do
poets problematize the menstrual experience to explore their own personal experience and yet
make it universal; to subvert society’s values placed on the menstruating body and to create a
human understanding beyond cultural norms? How does the poet use form and language to
structure and interrogate the menstrual experience? Do menstrual poems introduce new words
and create new words? How do those poems, with either their introduction or creation of those
words, change our perspective on lived experience?
#METOO AND WHAT CAN BE SAID
As the years have passed, it has become harder to know what wave of feminism we are
in. Today’s work for gender equality is not so much a shift as the continued growth of the
movement. Intersectionality and interlocking systems of power, and how these contribute to the
social stratification of traditionally marginalized groups, have expanded the focus of feminism
today into “thinking about ways patriarchal oppression is inflected by race and class” (Srinivasan
2020, 81). Black feminist thought has become a powerful force, especially in the area of
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embodiment. The requirements of the LGBTQIA+ community has required that feminism
completely change its attitudes toward welcoming queer and trans women. The most recent
inflection point in American feminism, the #MeToo campaign of 2017, gained its motive and
force from social media as millions of women, in the USA and beyond acknowledged, many for
the first time, their experiences with sexual violence (Srinivasan 2020, 169). It was a powerful
episode of narrative activism. Not just powerful, but a true example of the female erotic in our
world. The slogan had been pioneered by Tarana Burke, a black anti-violence campaigner ten
years earlier, to serve girls and women of color in Baltimore. “#MeToo uses the power of stories
to raise the credibility of all survivors” (Gilmore 2023, xi).
When previously silenced survivors—including whose who are nonwhite, nonbinary,
trans, young, or male—were heard as both “me,” singular and authoritative, and “too,” part of a
testimonial collective of truth-tellers, disparate accounts fused into a shared story. This genre had
a new name—#MeToo—but its roots are in intersectional feminism, and explain how far and fast
it traveled (Gilmore 2023, 2). “#MeToo shifted the deeply ingrained response to women’s
accounts of sexual violence from doubting all of them to believing some of them” (Gilmore
2023, 3). This rise in credibility upended how women experienced their own reality and the
power they held in coming forward and being truthful about their stories, especially in social
media. These testimonies entered our personal space. For myself, I was extremely moved by the
endless array of stories. They seemed to be budding all over my social media pages. I began to
realize how many #MeToo stories I myself had. It was horrific when I began to line them up. But
it was when my daughters wrote #MeToo on their own social media pages that I realized that no
matter how hard we tried to create a better world for our daughters, to protect them from the
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worst of what we had experienced, I, at least, had failed. The feeling was both devastating, yet
empowering. We need each other, a community of those victimized and then blamed and
ashamed because of it. What can be more similar to the menstrual experience? The necessity and
the power of women meeting in one voice was really apparent. Ultimately, #MeToo encouraged
an unburdening. It was not the first time women had shared their stories, but when the stories
met with the immediacy of the internet and social media, the sheer number of women who came
forward all at once was galvanizing (Gilmore 2023, xi). We can speak out. We can say what
needs to be said. And in the saying we lessen our shame, even as we offer each other a new
courage. What was possible suddenly changed and within this new environment more and more
poets will write about their bodies, their deep bodies, and their menstruation.
THE NECESSITY OF THE MENSTRUAL POEM

Imagery is the doorway to poems. All images in poetry connect the poem to the reader
through the physicality of our five senses. This is how an image is formed and as the poet
presents the sensory experience, the reader joins in that experience and thus enters the poem. The
embodied experience is the first point of connection between the reader and the poet.
Whatever image or emotion is formed in the lover
of poetry has value and sufficiency if it produces in
him this reciprocal relation between cause-word and
effect-word. As a result, such a reader enjoys very great
freedom as to ideas, a freedom analogous to that which
music allows to the hearer, although less extensive.
(Valery 1958, 157)
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When we read a poem, we feel what the poet is feeling. We are given language for our
sensory experience in the poem.
Embodiment in poetry is something else entirely. When the body becomes the place
where the interrogation happens, rather than thoughts or feelings, the poem expands into whole
new territory. Suddenly this most hidden part of ourselves is exposed. The body, as the conceit of
any poem, helps us recognize the real site of experience. Images formed in and out of the body
help the reader to feel and recognize and therefore express her own body.
When a poet writes a poem through the lens of the menstrual experience, she is ultimately
engaging with the question, “Who am I in this body?” How do menstruators from various
cultures, classes and races find themselves within the menstrual poem? Certainly, individual
experience would preclude there being one poem that would suffice for all. Most women feel as
disgusted by their menstruating bodies as does the patriarchal society surrounding them. The
silencing of the menstrual experience “others” a woman’s body not just from society, but also
from herself; a normally functioning body is rejected (Clancy 2023, 174). To fit the leaking body
into cisgender male spaces demands constant “workarounds” (172). Even the simple yet
ubiquitous action of tucking a tampon up your sleeve when you make your way from your desk
to the bathroom at work, is a process that non-menstruators never need to think about. In this
way, menstruation functions like disability when presented into an everyday world not designed
for it (173). This has caused over time widespread body dysmorphia. Most women, when asked
about their menstrual experience, will make a face of disgust and then share stories that range
from discomfort to aversion to illness.
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Since no study to date has been done about the menstrual poem, I need to look at other
forms of embodied poetics to find comparable examples. I have studied the poetics of the
“othered” body, the body viewed as different, “less than:” the queer body, the disabled body, the
black body, and it's there I began to think of how to define and analyze the menstrual poem. I
looked at disability poetics as well as trans and queer poetics to get a sense of how embodied
poetry works. Navigation of the corporeal self through a physical and emotional world that
sometimes is accepting, but more often is contemptuous. How to accept this body, even find
beauty in it?
The difference between these poetics and the poetry of menstruation is that menstruation
poetry deals with the inside of the body as well as the outside of the body (Clancy 2023, 51). The
body is opened and exposed in the menstrual poem in a way nowhere else. We saw this clearly in
Lucille Clifton’s, “poem to my uterus.” Clifton offers the image of a slipper in the lines, “while i
have slippered into you/ my dead and living children.” Her uterus becomes a slipper, an image
we can see. Into it she “slipped” her babies; she carried them there, in her deepest body. This
body, meant to nurture. Yet some of those babies didn’t make it. Devastating to any parent, but
for the woman the impact is doubled when it is her body that fails (Clancy 2023, 43). When the
inside of the body is presented in the poem as well as the outside, a flux is created. The internal
body informs the experience of the poem, as well as the outside. A reverberation is generated, as
both speak to each other. This is a new form of the embodied poem. When a woman is asked to
consider her fertility it speaks directly to her sexuality, her feelings of desirability, her health and
wellness, her acceptability, the depth of her body in afterbirth, fibroids, even the strange colors of
discharge. Each of these informs the other. Flux.
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The poet willing to write this experience asks herself further questions: “Is my body ‘less
than?’ What is it in this body that makes me, me? Am I comfortable in this body? If not, how
does that discomfort carry me to the poem? It's the engagement not just with the mirror, but with
the deep body, the deepest organs, the internal body, the deepest self.
When we bring that self to the page, we engage with “the deep experience of the textual
body, how the author takes up and inhabits and imbues space” (Tolbert 2013, 9). The menstrual
poem undoes agentic subjectivity; the stigma of menstruation limits women’s behavior and
compromises her well-being. Erasing the stigma releases each woman to choose for herself how
to feel about her beauty. When the poet defines herself as well as her experience in the poem at
the breakage points of cultural constraints, she is tackling her shame head on. This doesn’t
always mean representing the shame in the poem. It's when the poet recognizes shame, questions
it, that she can step away and examine it from afar. Without that distance, the poem can’t happen.
It's there that the menstrual poem is born.
How do we define the menstrual poem? After reading hundreds of poems concerning
menstruation I have formed a list, a series of markers that I use to identify the menstrual poem:
• Menstrual poetry is always about the stain: its place, its color, its scent, its story, its indelibility.
• Menstrual poetry asks, ‘where is the body in the poem?’
• Menstrual poetry looks inside/ within the body to find the poem.
• The menstrual poet rises out of society’s strictures to recognize herself as part of a natural
process that allows for the propagation of the species. The menstrual poem not only negates,
but turns the critique of abjection completely around.
• The menstrual poem can be an exploration of form on the page as an interrogation of the body.
• How is the menstrual poem separate from the menstruator?
• Aside from narrative overlaps, what are the syntactic, stylistic or imagistic themes to menstrual
poems?
• What is “menstruation poetics.” A genre? A form? Can I find a definition for this?
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• Inside Out/ Embodiment/ Spectrum of positions around embodiment/ how many ways can a
body be othered?
• The menstrual poem displays the degree to which poetry can be constituted by and within ideas
of embodiment.
• The menstrual poem is experiential, both for the reader, as well as for the poet.
• How does voice act in and enact the menstrual poem?
• The body as history, the epigenetic nature of inheritance from mother to child, and how that is
depicted in the menstrual poem?
• The menstrual poem is the body as history, a woman’s history, her battle lines etched into a
poetics.
• The menstrual poem is often a dialectical flux: unpredictable, unfinalizable, indeterminate
nature of the body. Relationships, complicated and intertwined with dialectical tensions:
between a woman and her spouse, her children, her mother, her friends, her lovers, herself.
Spiraling inversions, compartments, complications.
• This flux exists within the body itself, the experience of the inside of the body as it's expressed,
the uncontrollable nature of the body, the strangeness of menstrual concealment.
• The menstrual poem is not only breaking the silence, but making menstruation visible in the
everyday world.
• The menstrual poem is words made of flesh.
When the poet steps out of societal demands for silence and shame and instead chooses to speak
her true lived experience, the menstrual poem springs to life. Poetry, with its music, its
discursive, dreamscape nature and deep human breath, is the perfect place to reveal the menstrual
occurrence in all of its emotional, psychological depth.
The menstrual poem is able to offer the reader a valuable personal account of a woman’s
struggle. It flies in the face of what is acceptable in our culture. Trans poet TC Tolbert writes, “to
silence a person or group is the first violent act” (Tolbert 2013, 11). The very act of writing the
menstrual poem has the potential for radical transformation—to transform how menstruators live
and move in the world. The poet’s transparency on the page can create empathy and change the
culture. It is through radically transformative perspectives that menstrual poetry provides a lens
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into experiences throughout the life of a menstruator. The poems can shift how we think about
bodies and how practices can be revised, including changes in attitudes towards menstruation in
day to day life, in the medical field, in protective methods and how they are affecting the
environment, but mostly cultural changes around silence and shame. What if carrying a tampon
in your hand was no different from carrying a hair clip (Clancy 2023, 172)? Menstruators can be
released from an old-time girdle of oppression that women have lived under for centuries.
Different from prose accounts, the poem usually brings the experience to the page in the
form of a question; a question the poet is asking herself (Valery 1958, 146). The poem is never
“research” and does not usually seek so much an answer as an examination of the question itself.
This aspect of interrogation allows the reader to enter the experience with the poet. But it also
opens a door for the reader to interrogate her own experience. This is how poetry changes us. It
is an invaluable aspect of menstrual poetry because menstruation has been and continues to be
silenced in our culture. In creating new images that haven’t been written before, through
delineation of experience through the freedom of thinking, writing and questioning through the
lens of a bodily experience removed from history or society’s demands for shame or silence.
More and more poets are writing the menstruating body. No longer frightened nor
disgusted to look deeply into their own body. No longer afraid to examine what comes out of the
body, to look at it completely and intensely into the experience and write about it, acknowledge
its magic. These contemporary poets bring the abject, the blood, into their poetry. While they
admit that the outside world might see their experience as disgusting, as prohibitive, each also
brings the magic of menstruation into their poems—the magic that is poetry.
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THE SIX M’S AND THEIR POEMS
“And why don’t you write? Write!...Your body is yours, take it” —Hélène
Cixous
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This section begins where all writing begins, at the crossroads between poetry and human
experience. There is no one poem of menstruation but a glorious chorus of experimental song.
The menstrual occurrence, from menarche to menopause, varies widely due to a myriad of
factors including education, socio-economics, religion, and the family relationship, especially
with the mother. No two women experience the same cycle (AlSayyad 2023). Poems allow these
poets to bring their most personal experience to the page. Until recently, menstruating women
“separate out reproduction from the self by describing menstruation as a process, menopause as a
stage, birth as a series of signals sent from the body to the self and labor as something to get
through—all terms we still use today” (Clancy 2023, 172). The only way for the uterus bearing
body to move beyond the power structures that want to degenerate its experience is to probe the
many ways the menstrual cycle becomes a site of sexualization, objectification, abjection, of
shame and shaming, of medicalization, disability, and dysfunction, self-objectification, and even
a source of moral confusion.
Here I offer you six poems written since the inception of #MeToo (2017) by
contemporary poets who are writing poetry of the deep body with special attention to
menstruation in each stage of the female fertility cycle: menarche, menstruation, mating, malady,
motherhood and menopause. I hope that through an examination of the poems I will reveal the
eighteen points above of what constitutes, for me, a menstrual poem. I hope to compare them to
“Laugh of the Medusa,” 876.
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each other, as well as the poems of Lucille Clifton and Lorde’s concept of the erotic and to
answer a few questions:
1) How does the poet problematize the presentation of menstruation?
2) How does the poet use language and structure to interrogate the menstrual experience?
3) How do these poems offer the reader new language to express themselves when talking
about their own menstruation?
MENARCHE
Menarche is the onset of menses that occurs in the uterus bearing body at some point as
the body transitions from childhood to womanhood, which is a period of growth and change
often linked with sexual maturation (Hawkey, Ussher and Perz, Palgrave 2020, 99). This can be a
time fraught for any young woman. It is a transition especially informed by culture, education,
closeness to a parent, friendships or lack thereof (Hawkey, Ussher and Perz, Palgrave 2020, 100).
It happens more often than you would think and especially in certain cultures that there is a
disconnect in the communication between parent and child and a girl arrives at her menarche
completely uninformed. This is a direct result of the malignant silence surrounding menstruation.
So much can go wrong for a young girl going through this monumental event. The new physical
discomfort of menstruation, mixed with sexual awakening can bring strong feelings of shame,
and can be confusing and terrifying (101). The poem about the experience is by I. S. Jones, a
queer, American/Nigerian poet.
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Mark of Cain
First, a voice called my name
from the deep loom of my legs,
a soft ache of the interior
which grew many eyes and switchblades of claw.
What dam in me that kept the beast in the dark—
opened.
The voice renamed me
into a red fulfillment
and I knew I was unable to stay a girl.
The blood came onto me the way a flood
looks down on a village.
Such primordial knowledge
stained all my dresses.
Baba said this is my gift instead of death:
The Mark of Cain.
That every month my gift would return
with a pain more dazzling than the last.
Said He did this because He loved me
despite a wicked heart:
Suffer in My name and salvation will reach you.
I understood what I was becoming:
bestial before His immaculate eye.
Unclean in holy spaces. Unable to touch my sultana
unless a man satisfied me.
Carnation heads cleaved from their stems.
You claim to be a god of mercy, but hear me:
My God, you have no idea how well I see You in the dark.
(originally published in the September 2020 issue of Hayden’ s
Ferry Review.)
This poet understands that she has been convicted with a lifelong sentence, a primordial
knowledge of the “stain,” a mark on “all her dresses.” Indelible, this blood almost unsurvivable;
so dangerous it might sweep her away.
The blood came onto me the way a flood
looks down on a village.
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(line 10-11)
This punishment will be doled out each month.
The body is felt from within. The poet offers us two sharp and terrifying signifiers,
“switchblades of claw,” (line 4) to represent not just the pain itself, but the sharpness of change.
Not a kitchen knife, but a switchblade. Something hidden, sudden and dangerous. And a claw.
The image carries a wildness into her body. She is attacked by an animal, some animal (God?) or
the animal with herself awakened? This is body changed—animalized by pain. Whatever has
kept this animal-self in check has been released with the onset of menses. The body is now
“unclean,” “wicked,” “bestial.” The intergenerational sharing here is with the father rather than
the mother, who usually appears in a menarche moment. “Baba said this is my gift instead of
death” (line 14). The father, referred to here via his intimate, African name, becomes convoluted
with a God who promises the poet that she, like Eve, can survive. The father becomes “He,” with
the capital “H” often used to refer to God in monotheistic religions.
Said He did this because He loved me
despite a wicked heart:
(line 18-19)
The love of the father and the love of God are intertwined. This male figure is complicated via a
dialectical flux as he morphs from Father to God to a lover who later, by satisfying this new
“bestial” body will bring the “sultana.” (line 23) The girl’s life will be “marked,” stained with
pain and shame. Here is the next surprise of the poem. A sultana, according to the OED, is either
a small, yellow raisin or the female concubine of the sultan. I believe Jones is referring to the
second meaning. A male lover will hearken to the ultimate gift: the female lover. Gender roles
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are as dialectical as the God figure, whose first initial changes from capital to small: he is judge,
he is able to gift life, pain, to behead the woman like a flower (carnations are a common
menstrual image). The poet brings a mythical voice to this poem. Menstruation is not just the
Biblical mark, (The Koren Hebrew Bible, Genesis 4:15) but in carrying the subject back to the
first mother, Eve, the language takes on the mythic as well. Language choices with words like
“loom,” “flood,” “village,” “primordial,” “beheaded,” “immaculate,” “sultana,” and “cleave” all
carry us into a mythic space. They complicate and interrogate menarche. This process is as old as
time. This language also offers the reader a way to connect to and talk about her menstruation. Its
an enormous change, but one that every woman goes through. Yes, you are marked, but there is
strength in the changes.
What I find especially interesting in poetry about menarche is that, as I have read poem
after poem, each menarche poem has come with a mythical level of magic. I have read menarche
poems from women who haven’t menstruated for many decades, and yet their stories are
remembered in enchanted detail as if they happened yesterday. And each of them were changed,
just as the poet is “renamed” and changed in this poem. The onset of her menstruation gives her a
new knowledge, “you have no idea how well I see You in the dark” (line 27). The implication
that menstruation has thrust her into darkness where she actually has a clearer view of not just
the male God, but a male focused, patriarchal culture.
The erotic enters this poem in a number of places, but especially in two lines, “Such
primordial knowledge” (line 12) and the irreverent “My God, you have no idea how well I see
You in the dark.” (line 27) It is in these two lines that knowledge in the poem goes deeper than a
mere bit of bleeding, or even a ‘scarlet letter’ type of stain. In these two lines, one at the middle
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of the poem and the second the last line, we understand that yes, this girl has gained new
knowledge, a new understanding of her father, of God, of herself. But in these lines the poem
suddenly moves the poem beyond itself. All women gain a new knowledge at the time of
menarche. The poem is not limited to the story of one woman but becomes all women. There is
power there. It is the erotic in action.

MENSTRUATION
Menstruation here connotes the month to month to month experience of most women
who bleed over and over again for half of their life. This bleeding is the stunning reminder each
time a woman pulls down her pants, disposes of her tampon, washes her menstrual cup. A
woman spends a quarter of each month thinking about the possibility of creating a “stain;” that
someone will see her blood on her clothing or some place she has sat down; that she will create a
mess. That someone might see. Shame. Throughout her day, as she moves in the world, she is
hyper aware of her own bleeding (Clancy 2023, 173). Over time this feeling of concealing,
suppressing, hiding, worrying ultimately forces a woman to accept that she carries the stain with
her always. She herself becomes the stain.
The bi-lingual Irish poet and memoirist, Doireann Ni Ghriofa brings us right into this
moment with a poem about a visit to a used clothing store in County Cork where she lives.
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While Bleeding
by Doireann Ni Ghriofa
In a vintage boutique on Sullivan’s Quay,
I lift a winter coat
with narrow bodice, neat lapels,
tight waist, a fallen hem.
It’s far too expensive for me,
but the handwritten label [1915]
brings it to my chest in armfuls of red.
In that year, someone drew a blade
through a bolt of fabric and stitched this coat
into being. I carry it
to the dressing room, slip
my arms in; silk lining spills
against my skin. To clasp
the belt is to draw a slow breath
as a cramp curls again
where blood stirs and melts.
In glass, I am wrapped in old red—
red pinched into girl cheeks
and smeared from torn knees,
lipstick blotted in tissue, scarlet
concealed in pale sheets, all the red
that fell into pads and rags—
the weight of red, the wait for red
that we share.
In the mirror, the coat blushes.
This pocket may once have sheltered
something precious: a necklace, a love letter,
or a fresh egg, feather-warm, held gently
so it couldn’t crack, couldn’t leak through seams,
so it couldn’t stain the dress within.
(from To Star the Dark, Dedalus Press, 2021
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The poet brings us into a single moment in time. She is trying on an expensive, antique
coat found in a used clothing store. The coat, as it's described in the first stanza, is a personified
metaphor for a woman’s body, “neat,” “narrow waisted,” and “fallen.” This poem interrogates
female beauty, especially when it comes in contact with the stain of menstruation. As soon as the
coat is bundled in the poet’s arms, red, “cut,” or in other words—bleeding, When she slips her
own menstruating body into the body of the coat, she feels a cramp as a ribbon of blood escapes
her body, exactly as every menstruating woman has felt—the menstrual experience. Bleeding in
the everyday world. Then the poet shares a list of red “stains” she has endured through her life:
bloody knees—to lipstick, until we get to stained sheets and “pads and rags:” protection
methods:
the weight of red, the wait for red
that we share.
(line 23-24)
This is the menstrual experience. Every month. Did I get it? Did it come too early? Too late? Too
heavy? Too light? And even the coat, personified again, is “blushing” with shame. The poet is
stained and stained and stained. The list of stains is indented in the poem, the form of the poem
enacting the mirror view, a woman in an old red coat. That indentation also mimics the stained
body, off kilter, no longer in line. In the last stanza, the coat itself becomes a menstrual
protection method. It shelters what is valuable (necklace), what is important (a love letter), but
then an egg. Have you ever carried an egg in your pocket, so delicate, knowing if it breaks you
will be covered in a stinky sticky mess? The egg. Yes, the body too shields the egg, prepares for
it. The sloughing off each month is the egg’s remainder: a sticky, stinky mess. The menstrual
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mark. The stain that we all fear; that causes stigma within a patriarchal culture. Stigma,
according to Erving Goffman (1963) is “categorized into three types: ‘abominations of the
body’ (for example burns, scars, deformities), ‘blemishes of individual character’ (for example,
criminality, addictions), and ‘tribal’ identities or social markers associated with marginalized
groups (for example gender, race, sexual orientation, nationality) (Johnston-Robledo and
Chrisler, Palgrave 2020, 182). Menstrual blood is a stigmatizing mark that fits all three of these
categories.
Here, as in the previous poem, I see two places where the poem vibrates, dances outside
itself and sings with the erotic. The first is early in the poem, where Ghriofa grabs us with a
succinct style, violent in its intensity: “someone drew a blade/ through a bolt.” Yes, the blade is a
scissor and the bolt is of fabric, but just in that small space, broken by a line ending on “blade,”
Ghriofa has beckoned to an electricity that powers our entire experience of the poem. Again, as
in Jones’ poem, another blade. Sharp pain.
Ghriofa brings the magic a second time, delivering the erotic later in the poem. This time
it enters not in a zing, but in a heaviness.
all the red
that fell into pads and rags—
the weight of red, the wait for red
The play of two words that sound the same but are spelled differently, have two different
meanings, yet, for the menstruating body carry the same meaning and experience: the long
history of menstruating bodies. “All the red.” Then the weight of it, “that fell into.” Anyone who
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has menstruated has felt that fall of blood. We have no control over our menstruation. As Kate
Clancy points out in her new book, Period,
With menstruation, I often feel like part of the shame is
the complete uncontrollability of it. Unlike voiding your
bladder or bowels, unlike feeding your body, menstruation
is something that happens that you cannot stop or start.
It gushes, it wells. Chunks are sometimes slipping out
of our bodies, creating significant sensation. All the
while we are expected to behave as though none of these
things are happening to us in real time.
(Clancy 2023, 173)

The weight of that concealment, whether it is as Clancy has described, or what Ghriofa takes to
the next step with several questions: when will it start? Will it happen when I least expect it,
causing a stain? Am I pregnant? The heaviness the poet offers us in this section takes us beyond
the poem or the story of one woman menstruating during a day of shopping. This woman’s story
has taken on the burden of all women. It carries their voices together into the erotic.
In this poem, Ghriofa uses the verb to drive the poem. This is what Charles Olsen, in his
famous essay from 1950, called “projective verse,” or, in other words, a poetics given body by
the subject matter at hand (Gillott 2018). Due to the intimacy, the secret nature of the menstrual
poem, we often see that the poem is formed within the strictures of its subject. Verbs are action
words and are considered the ‘muscle’ of a poem. Verbs drive energy into a poem. They give a
poem motion, power and tone. In “While Bleeding,” Ghriofa allows the verb to function with a
second job. In this poem they create a double entendre, both moving the action of the woman
trying on a coat, and, at the same time, offering the reader language to think and talk about
menstruating. The verbs are “slip,” “spill,” “curls,” “stirs,” “melts,” “fell.” And the shame:
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“blushes.” These are all verbs of bleeding. This follows the doubling which Kate Clancy refers:
as the woman tries on the coat, she is bleeding; ignoring the blood, but bleeding. And, all the
while, going through her day. In reading that doubling, a woman will see her own experience
reflected. She will also gain a way of talking about this doubling, as well as talking about her
menstruation.
MATING
When we think about ‘doubling,’ and flux, we can add to the confusion we encounter
when the subject turns to sex during menstruation. Whether it's masturbation alone in bed or sex
with a partner, period sex may be the final sexual taboo for the menstruating woman. There are
negative connotations attached to period sex, that it is messy, dirty or disgusting. Many cultures
from Western based religions or distant tribal cultures believe that menstrual blood is dangerous
and that touching, eating food cooked by, and especially sex with a menstruating woman is
completely prohibited (Buckley and Gottlieb 1988, 11). There is a dearth of research about the
menstruating body, but there is surprisingly little research on how menstruation has influenced
women’s sexual lives (Fahs, Palgrave 2020, 961). Building on the onslaught of negative
messages that a woman receives, that her menstruating body is ‘disgusting’ the concept of
sharing that body, whether with a partner of the opposite or same sex becomes a heinous act.
Oral contraceptives are often used to suppress menstruation in order to meet a partner without
the problem of menstruation (Clancy 2023, 171). Despite all the social signals women must
contend with, many still do feel aroused in the hormonal surge of menstruation. Some will
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suppress this urge, or hide it with masturbation. But some women will act of their desire and
engage in sex while menstruating.
Nashville based, award-winning poet Kendra Decolo is a poet of wild swagger. Her
poems are at once irreverent, playful and prayerful. She is wholly willing to take on the most
difficult subjects as she interrogates patriarchal narratives about childbirth, postpartum healing,
and motherhood. The poem below is a perfect example of how she complicates these narratives.
I Don’t Like to Have Sex While I’m on My Period
by Kendra DeColo
even though my husband is the kind of guy
who isn’t afraid
of a woman’s fluids
who might even go down
if the flow is light
a real man
you might say
if the logic wasn’t steeped
in toxic masculinity the way
the sheets are steeped in blood
after making love on day three
the rasp of stain beneath us
like a bat fluttering its wings
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in a puddle of Robitussin
I can’t help but think
it’s crude
to put down a towel
before we begin
the way a man sticks a gloved
finger up his wife’s vagina
to assess if she’s done bleeding
clean you might say
if that language wasn’t steeped
in violent misogyny
because isn’t my blood the cleanest
part about me
fuck a towel
if you want to go deep
you better be willing to draw blood
my husband is a real man
isn’t afraid to smell
the shed lining
muffle his face in the spasm of cells
wasn’t afraid to watch our daughter
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emerge and split me open
crowning
which means my body
concussed around her like a crown
which means
there was so much blood
I had to touch it
to remember where I came from
the hot and pulsing corona
ruckus of DNA
metallic and stinging
Love, forgive me
I do not want to be touched
while my body
orchestrates this unraveling
as much as I love
the bouquet of clots
rioting around the base of your cock
bright as a truck stop souvenir
to own a part of you
where the blood remains
dried
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and hissing
a dwelling
of dank perfume
as the body
travels back to its source
and I am answerable to no one
not even my own name
(from I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World (BOA Editions,
2021)

This poem interrogates everything about the menstruating woman, her desire, her
relationship to her partner and herself, and her feelings about her body. Like Lucille Clifton,
Decolo takes shame and just tosses it away. Shame is not a part of the equation in this poem. The
only questions in this poem have to do with desire, first and foremost, not just for the poet, but
for her sexual partner, her husband. The body in this poem is a reclining body, an orgasmic body,
a birthing body. The location of the poem is centered right in the vagina, what enters it (a gloved
finger, a mouth, a penis) and what comes out of it (a baby crowned, clots, uterine lining). The
form of the poem is strongly separated short lines with a double space between each line of the
poem so that the entirety of the poem stretches itself luxuriously over three pages of Decolo’s
collection. No punctuation. No capital letters. This form is juxtaposed with the high rhetoric
gallop of the poem, intense music that romps though a couple of sexual encounters and even a
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birth. Decolo doesn’t shy away from a battle for sexual and menstrual freedom. In fact, she is
happy to step “cleanly” into all-out war with the patriarchy.
clean you might say
if that language wasn’t steeped
in violent misogyny
because isn’t my blood the cleanest
part about me
The stain in the poem is alive and everywhere. It is the color of cough syrup, and it
flutters like ‘bat.’ A bat. Not a starling or a finch. A bat. The bird of darkness. So animal, so alive;
simultaneously ugly and magical. There is nothing sharp. The animal has been completely
integrated into the body.
Right at the beginning, in the title, the poem interrogates menstrual sex even as it
interrogates itself. According to Breanne Fahs, nothing divides menstruators more than menstrual
sex. Women are completely polarized between those that embrace menstrual sex and those that
reject it (Fahs, Palgrave 2020, 962). Decolo actually presents us with a flux, a back and forth–not
an indecisiveness, but both sides presented. She coyly suggests in the title that she is just not that
into it, though her husband is happy to oblige. The poet claims she doesn’t really enjoy sex
during menstruation, even as we are offered many examples not only of the couple having sex
while she menstruates, but also of her pleasure in it. This flux is the most important aspect of the
poem. “I am answerable to no one,” (line 62) the poet writes. The permission is in accordance
with her own desire and nowhere else. We are in the sex act complete with “sheets steeped in
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blood” (line 10). Woven into the sex act are the interrogations: a towel that leads to questions of
touching the bleeding woman. “Fuck the towel” (line 27) she taunts the patriarchy, “if you want
to go deep/ you better be willing to draw blood” (line 28-29). Sex has become a battle, and the
war will lead to bloodshed. The blood of menstruation becomes the blood shed in battle. It is the
weapon that will finally bring the patriarchy to its knees, and that war is waged right here in the
poem.
Sex even becomes childbirth, where the vagina is “concussed” around the head of her
daughter. There is pleasure there too. All prohibitions have been questioned. The man who
examines his partner with a glove to ensure there is no blood versus the husband, who is willing
to enjoy every aspect of this union, is “a real man.” his phallus covered with “rioting” clots
“bright as a truck stop souvenir.” The music of this poem is riotess, the rhetoric irreverent. This
poet has moved beyond societal norms. And it works. One can say this entire poem sings with
Lordian erotic fervor, and it wouldn’t be wrong. But I do think that one question, “isn’t my blood
the cleanest/ part about me,” that line right after the gloved husband checking his wife for the
slightest stain, ending on “cleanest” is the true sucker-punch to the Book of Leviticus and the
whole long, sad and silent history that has come for menstruators since.
MOTHERHOOD
In a complete departure from the last, we have a poem by Brittany Rogers, poet, mother,
educator, and native Detroiter. As with menstruation, the discomforts and problems with the
body after birth, the cramping as the uterus returns to normal size and shape, the healing of any
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incisions or tears, and the lochia after birth are usually not discussed in society. Usually, a
woman bleeds for a month to six weeks as the body sloughs off the lining that has built up to
support the baby during pregnancy. Postpartum is today called the “fourth trimester.” A woman
needs special care and a special diet to come back to herself in the healthiest way after birth. The
body is usually very uncomfortable. The uterus contracting. The milk arriving and the time it
takes to regulate (Hazard 2023, 165). The quick and sharp hormonal fluctuations as the once
pregnant body works to return to its normal self. The mother also often has little sleep as mother
and baby get used to each other and a regulated eating pattern. After birth is a disruptive and
difficult time. Without proper community and personal support, it is easy to fall into depression
(Clancy 2023, 142). What is interrogated in the poem is the silence surrounding the postpartum
state. I experienced it myself. No one told me what I would be facing after birth. This silence is
emphasized for women of color. This is represented in the relationship with the mother and the
cultural references the mother carries with her.
Pantoum for Postpartum
Brittany Rogers
I birth a child, and the wet wound never closes.
My mother diagnoses postpartum casually
as if saying — mail is here, and your name is on it.
Explains the drilling is nothing I asked for, overripe nerves happen sometimes.
My mother announces my postpartum casually,
says in her day, black women ain’t name the rusted death.
I did not ask for the drilling. Postpartum makes for overripe nerves,
takes it claws and plucks the mama up out of you.
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In my mother’s day, black women ain’t announce the blood rust.
Lord willing, the death passed before anyone else could see.
Postpartum takes its claws and plucks the mama up outta you
and if you ain’t careful, the baby dry rots too.
Lord willing, the wet rust vanishes before anyone else can see it.
If not, your voice is a snatched wisp of air and
if you ain’t careful, the baby disappears too.
Mama just means keeping someone else alive
even if your voice is a snatched wisp of air,
as if saying — mail is here, and your name is on it.
Mama only means keeping someone else alive.
I birth a child, and the wet wound never closes.
(originally published in Tinderbox Review Volume: 6 Issue:
2, December 2019)
In this poem the bleeding of afterbirth, the lochia, and even the mother-body itself,
becomes “a wound that never closes.” (line 1) and a “rusted death” (the stain) (line 6) The poem
has been formed into a ‘pantoum.’ A pantoum is a poem of repeating lines according to a very
strict pattern, where the second and fourth lines of one stanza become the first and third lines in
the following stanza. What Kenneth Keating calls "A tight, mesmerizing chain of
echoes" (Keating 2020); the result is a swirl pattern.
In this poem, that swirl feels like emotions running down and down a drain. The voice of
the poem is unspeakably sad as the new mother is silenced by her afterbirth bleeding and how
that silence is affecting her relationship with her mother, with her new child and with herself:
“your voice is a snatched wisp of air” (line 17). Her mother is rather cold and matter-of-fact. She
tells the poet that this is the way it is with women who have given birth (line 9). In other words
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—the poet needs to ‘suck it up.’ But the poet is “wounded,” her nerves and emotions are
“overripe” (line 4). Her good feelings about her motherhood are gone, “clawed” away by
postpartum blues (line 11); even the baby is at risk (line 12). Here again we have that animal
‘claw’ that we saw in Jones’ menarche poem.
In using the term “the wound,” Rogers gives menstruators another view of bleeding.
Especially bleeding in what should be a very happy time: new motherhood. That open wound
allows other menstruators to explore their own true emotional reactions to menstrual bleeding. In
the poem the blood, as well as the depression, must be kept completely hidden “before anyone
else can see” (line 15). This is more important than helping the mother to recover and feel better,
so she can nurture her baby properly.
The silence around menstruation and childbirth in communities of color is very real, very
devastating, and must be discussed if this reality is going to change. I have read many poems
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by poets of color where the girl was told nothing about menarche, nothing about menstruation,
about birth control nor autonomy over her own body. These poems are vital for changing the
reality for girls growing up in this cultural silence.
This poem contains the bravery of silence broken: that silence that feminists have tried to
break for decades. The success of Rogers’ poem is that the wound will never close until
intergenerational healing can occur: the new mother’s people, her community, will join her,
allow her to express her true feelings without judgement, to talk about and receive healing,
especially from the mother.
I searched for references on this matter, in the many books I own, in the library system, on the internet. I know the problem
13
exists, but can find no study that examines the silence that exists between parent and child around menstruation in communities
of color in the United States. When I search for this material, I find many articles dealing with period poverty (the lack of money
to purchase protection products) or studies done in various third-world countries. I plan further research in this area but decided
that, despite a lack of reference, I would keep this thought in the work.
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MALADY
One of the most troubling aspects concerning female fertility is the lack of medical
support. There are a significant number of people for whom their period is more than just a
hassle. Millions of women around the world are in near constant pain, and not just during their
periods, from endometriosis, fibroids, or adenomyosis. Others suffering from heavy bleeding can
become so severely anemic that it affects their every day activities. Those suffering from
premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) experience debilitating levels of emotional upset
ranging from anxiety to depression, even possibly leading to suicidal ideation in the days leading
up to and during menstruation. None of these sufferers are currently getting the support they
need from modern medicine (Clancy 2023, 167).
Women's medicine is sadly lacking and far behind in research, “femtech (feminine
technology) gets a fraction of the investments into med-tech” (Haaretz 2022). Israeli biotech
engineer Hila Shaviv had an impossible time raising money for a tampon using sound-wave
technology to relieve women of menstrual cramps.
In cardiology, you can’t put your finger anywhere
without running into an existing patent. In contrast,
when I started researching period blood flow, I found
a lacuna. No patents, no innovation, just an empty
space. It’s also hard to find researchers focused on
periods, because research today takes place at the cell
level, the micro. I deal with systems, mechanics,
cramps, flows. When I set up Galimedix I realized
that it didn’t make sense that in 2007 nobody could
explain why half the women suffer from menstruation
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pains.
(Haaretz Online, 2022)
Eventually, Shaviv had to close the company down. As I mentioned earlier in this work, The
New Yorker published an article on menstruation and medicine in April 2023 that emphasized
not only how little research has been done, but the incredible lack of knowledge that women
have about their own bodies. Research into uterine health continues to center around
contraception and infertility (Hazard, 2023, 1). It isn’t enough. Today, poets are only just
beginning to write about menstrual illnesses.
Endometriosis is a uterine disease in which tissue similar to the endometrium, the tissue
that lines the uterus, adheres to and grows around structures throughout the body, from the
nearby bladder, to the bowel, the lungs, the liver and has even been found in the eyes (Hazard
2023, 180). Aside from causing extreme difficulties with infertility, the pain before and during
menstruation, as all of this tissue, wherever it is in the body, swells and contracts, is excruciating.
Whether written in prose, as in Emma Bolden’s new memoir, The Tiger and the Cage, or in
poetry, as in Abram’s poem below, the endo experience is of unspeakable, inarticulate pain.
Beginning with a first period and lasting through menopause, having endometriosis means a
lifetime of misery.
k Abram is a poet and collage artist based in Brooklyn, NY .
endometriosis ode
by k Abram
how did this elm
end up in my lakeing
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body, or am I
meant to be a grass
land, should I have grown
out not up, blade
not trunk, mown not
hedged–or, why are roots
hissing my famine–
fled feet like, who’s this
willow writhing
my Anatevka
hair–or when did fir
start to feeler my bready
basket, did I just hear
a woodpecker
furrowing
my kidneys, or what
heights did I drop from
all this wooly seed, I have
reached up my open
trunk, haven’t found
nut, I grow
my own gauze, bruise
my owned bramble, how
to seek my selves
shade, wake up
maggoty
with ectopic tubers
draw myself
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open
corpse
flower, I am
drawn, eat
my rot
nectar, woody
hearse–if I halved
my ribcage would
there be rings
(originally published in Tupelo Quarterly Online, November 14, 2021)
Sometimes when a poet is working around the ability to share an occurrence using the
discursive language of poetry, they will bring image after image, looking at a thought or feeling
from a myriad of directions to bring the full experience to the reader. The images Abram gives us
in this poem are all based in the natural world. We get image after image to try to express the
pain of endo.
The poem is titled “endometriosis ode.” What is an “ode’? In ancient Greek, an ode was
simply a song. In modern usage an ode is a poetic form, a praise poem where the lyric is usually
formal in tone and meant to praise something or someone of great importance (Greene and
Cushman 2016, 225). The formality of an ode is echoed in the structure of the poem. Set in neat
couplets, the actual arrangement of the poem on the page connotes an orderliness that flies in the
face of the images of disarrangement Abram has given us in this poem.
We are in the natural world in this poem, but it is a nature that has gone awry. The images
are of being overgrown, invaded, infested, pecked at and dropped from a height. From the first
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image, a tree in the middle of a lake, the normal has been displaced. This tree is invading the
lake, moving and rearranging the natural order. The poet also demonstrates this by using the
word “lakeing” (line 2) and we, knowing that this is a menstruation poem with ‘endometriosis’ in
the title, are thinking “leaking.” This type of word manipulation is another way the poet writing
about menstruation can offer new words and new ways of saying things to the muted
menstruator. Abram does this again in line 14-15, “start to feeler my bready/ basket.” The tone in
this line is Shakespearean in its strange grammar. A ‘bread basket” is often a euphemism for a
woman’s belly, her uterus where a baby can grow.
The poet asks “or am I”—one image follows the next, questioning what am I? Or rather,
showing the reader that the poet doesn’t know what they are. That there is no understanding and
no answers in how to live in a body without pain. “Grown/ out not up” (line 5). Out meaning laid
out and open. Open. The inside open and revealed to us. And here again—the blade (line 6).
Their “roots” are hissing, roots that lead to the poet’s “Anatevka” (line 12). Anatevka is a city in
the Ukraine, the same city described in Joseph Stein’s famous story Fiddler on the Roof. These
are Jewish roots. “Anatevka/ hair” meaning wooly or kinky Jewish hair. This is how Abram
builds surprise, double entendre’s and multiple meanings in this poem: they use a poetic tool
called enjambment. Clifton also used enjambment, but not quite as heavily as Abram does.
‘Enjambment’ is a poetic tool where the line ends with one word and the next word
begins with a word meant to modify the first (Greene and Cushman 2016, 99). The effect is that
the first word give one impression of thought or music and the next word brings in another
impression completely, leaving the reader surprised. In this way each word can bring in multiple
impressions and nuanced meanings. Abram does this throughout the poem: “lakeing/ body”
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(lines 1-2), “famine/ fled feet” (line 9-10), “bready/ basket” (line 14-15), “corpse/ flower” (lines
32-33), “rot/ nectar” (lines 35-36) and “woody/ hearse” (lines 36-37). These breaks empower the
poem. The result is that the reader never knows what is coming. Exactly as the endo sufferer
doesn’t know when the next pain will come or whether they will end up in the hospital. The pain
from endo is so bad that often sufferers throw up, pass out and are hospitalized because of it.
(Bolden 2022). To exemplify this pain, the animal in this poem is a woodpecker (line 16)
pecking away at the poet’s insides, at their kidneys. The body is deeply buried (“tubers” (line 29)
yet open. Open and invaded. Infested (“maggoty” (line 28).
In time, a deeper understanding may lead to therapies or even a cure for endometriosis.
Right now people who suffer from endo have absolutely no hope, and that hopelessness is
exemplified over and over in this gorgeous and moving poem.
MENOPAUSE
Often treated like an illness that requires heavy medical attention, reproductive aging is a
phenomenological experience of perimenopause and menopause that is “the lived, embodied,
day to day experience of reproductive and life course transition to its end” (Dillaway, Palgrave
2020, 253). This process, which can last up to a decade, is the body’s transition out of fertility.
Menopause is a condition that can only be definitively diagnosed retrospectively. You are
considered to be officially in menopause when you haven’t experienced any menstrual bleeding
for an entire year. Again, doctors really don’t understand this process and are often overly
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connected to that twelve month timeframe (Dillway, Palgrave 2020, 256). It is a long and usually
confusing process, as the body changes first to longer and more irregular cycles long before there
are any of the well known symptoms of menopause, such as hot flashes or cessation of menses.
The usual age for menopause is the early fifties, though this can vary as women enter menopause
for many reasons, including illness or hysterectomy (Hazard 2023, 211).
When perimenopausal bleeding begins to get out of hand, many Western doctors are
quick to turn to hysterectomy, with the thought that the uterus is only important to the female
body for the sake of reproduction. Once a woman is older, or the uterus has become
dysfunctional, why not just cut the organ out (Dillaway, Palgrave 2020, 258)? As I have said
many times in this work, we don’t know very much about the uterus because there has never
been money to support real research into women’s health. (Hazard 2020, 2). We don’t know what
service the uterus offers the body, before, during or after fertility.
The upcoming poem is by non-binary, lesbian poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi. She has been
very public with the story of her uterine malfunction. She has bled non-stop for over a year. Her
doctors have not decided about a hysterectomy. The result: some of the best perimenopause
poems written.
My Perimenopausal Body Cistern Disappointing How Surprising
by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Bled all day. Stopped bleeding. Bled some more.
Went to the doctor who reached inside the woman
body I try to live with: make peace with: but also ignore.
Sad tenant, my uterus. One day the tenant turns
out to be the landlord. All day I wonder what
it means, a clock I know as well as I know anything
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but also never wanted. And also won’t give up.
In the history of my light body it will show I could
have been another. The shots, the surgeon’s
blade. That freedom. But I hold on. Not out of fear.
Well maybe, but also: this body I fought for. Timid
skin sack that grew into a kind of magnificence I’d
not expected. I tie my bow tie around my neck that’s not
quite the neck I want. But still: the neck survived:
hours on the floor begging for my life: bent
head crying in the bathroom: bent head walking
by the boys yelling, hog and dog and ugly as an animal.
It’s confusing. I protect the breasts that I live without
in my mind’s eye. I look for hours
at men’s trousers and kimonos and bleed all day.
My mind says: take it out. And though
it’s one step closer to one true self I wanted, also
I’d miss it in ways I can’t explain. Burnt off scroll.
I’m a mirror of a mirror. When I was eight at daycare
my friends pulled me aside to talk about a “sex change”:
all of us in our Catholic uniforms: Meg, Emily,
Nadine, and Brian who got kicked out because of me.
That’s later in the story. We drew me in the sand.
We planned and wondered how much it cost
to be another body. But now? I know my body.
I pull up my pants and feel the lack of one thing
as the muffin top reminds me of the persistence
of another. Me who’s with me always.
This pillow that looked over me. Pillow
of skin and fat that I’d call Rubenesque.
It tried its best. To cover me. So I worry over it.
Strange companion. This body that covers me.
And bleeds all day without ceasing. I say, Come on.
I say, Stop. Like I used to when I’d get too scared
of one thing or another. God comes back
to find me in the most confounding ways.
Me and my body. Who are often not the same.
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This poem bleeds and bleeds and bleeds and bleeds. It doesn’t stain; the blood flows. This is
perimenopause. In the title, the poet offers us the problem encountered in the poem. This body is
a ‘cistern.’ In the Oxford English dictionary there are quite a few delineations for cistern, though
all had the same meaning. It is an ancient word dating back to the 14th century. A cistern is an
underground container to hold water (OED). However, in one variation the OED offered another
meaning: “applied to a cavity, or vessel in an organism; formerly esp. to the fourth ventricle of
the brain.” A cavity in the body? Perhaps. Or another waterway to thought?
Like so many menstrual poems, Calvocoressi’s carries a duality. The body is bleeding
and neither the doctors nor the menstruator really know what to do. As this unfolds, the poet
begins to interrogate her own feelings about her “woman/ body I try to make peace with: make
peace with: but also ignore” (line 2-3). In a brilliant move to use punctuation to create form,
these lines indicate a feeling within a feeling. At each juncture of the colon, the poet goes deeper
into what it means to have body dysphoria. Dysphoria is, according to the OED, the opposite to
‘euphoria.’ Dysphoria is “a state characterized by feelings such as unhappiness, dissatisfaction,
distress, and uneasiness” (OED). Current psychology uses the term dysphoria to connote when
there is a disconnect between mind and body (Clancy 2023, 129). When the mind is so disgusted
with the body, for reasons self-hatred or of gender displacement, that it can no longer accept the
body as it is. As I said earlier in this chapter, this feeling can become so severe that it leads some
to self harm (129).
Back to the title: the poet is disappointed that her body is female, but, as we will see in
the poem, she is also surprised that, despite her disappointment, she is not willing to allow the
doctors to cut out her problematic uterus. The voice in this poem is plain-spoken yet plaintive,
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arguing gently back and forth with herself. Has she been too fearful for gender reidentification?
Well, maybe (lines 8-11). “Timid/ skin sack that grew into a kind of magnificence I’d/ not
expected” (lines 11-13). The poem meanders into memories, stories of difficulty and pain. It
rambles over the aspects of what makes this body a woman’s body: breasts or muffin top, talks
about dressing the body. As she dresses the body, she misses male parts that aren’t there,
recognizing female parts she wishes weren’t there. Along with this are a few stories from her
past: being bullied and called terrible names, or supported in a group of children who are
planning her future transition. And still the body bleeds.
“I am a mirror of a mirror” (line 24), Calvocoressi writes. The thought within the thought.
The emotion within the emotion. And I think of how many women feel just as the poet does.
Body dissatisfaction, especially for women, is a central aspect of Western culture. Much of
Western philosophical thought expresses a profound ambivalence toward the body (Scarth 2014,
1). Yet, in the mirror, the poem opens and expands. Yes, the details of this body, this life, are
personal, but the feeling expressed are universal. This poem carries a dialectic flux between the
body as female and not, between the body discarded and the body magnificent. Calvocoressi has
written the questioning body by taking control of that flux and working the poem between the
many points of view. And through all of this she bleeds and bleeds, “bleeds all day without
ceasing” (line 38). Yes, this flux is a confusion, and this poet comes to it as non-binary. But the
emotional confusion of perimenopause and menopause is very real for many, many menstruators.
Part of the confusion comes from biology. The body’s hormones rise and fall as the
ovaries keep firing, even as they begin to shrivel and disappear deep into the body. Some of these
feelings come from emotional questions: when will this bleeding finally stop versus who will I
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be without bleeding? Feelings of a loss of sexuality, beauty, health, life can make the step into
menopause really fraught for many women. Calvocoressi brings the duality of the embodied
experience of perimenopause into the poem: these questions, this fear. “I'd miss it in ways I can’t
explain” (line 24). This is the experience as change approaches. The body unwanted; the body
long loved. “I’m a mirror of a mirror.”
Finally. Women are telling their truth and offering permission to others to speak theirs.
The menstrual poem, in every phase of a woman’s cycle, reaches out to menstruators, to share in
every way, with understanding, advice, commiseration, and language. These poems offer images
for pain, relationships with family, body questions; they allow for the happy, the sad, the
embarrassing and the wild. These poems set the stage so that anyone reading them can find new
ways to think about or possibly even express their own embodied experience. To ask themselves,
what do I need. What do I desire?
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CONCLUSION:
As I grew from girlhood into womanhood, from motherhood to grandmotherhood, I
watched the struggle for women’s equality through the second, third and fourth waves. Women
burned their bras, Diane Keaton dressed in a tux. The pill. Abortion. And through it all no one
ever turned to me to ask, what do you desire? Our choices were so limited. Still, there is not a
critic or poet whose feelings I haven’t felt, whose thoughts I haven’t had myself at one time or
another. Beauvoir really had it right—over seven-hundred pages of confusion, so much of it her
gaze reflected in the male gaze. As poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi wrote, “I’m a mirror of a mirror.”
At twelve, the stain I found in my underwear shocked me. I knew what was coming. My
sister had started to menstruate just two months before. But in my body there was no warning.
That brown stain. I can see it still today. And feel the shame that washed over me. I told no one,
stuffed my underwear full of toilet paper. Shame became my constant companion for the rest of
my life.
What do you desire? This was a question beyond even my imagination. What do you
desire? The question I wrestled with as I entered my life as wife, as mother; the sublimation of
self necessary to get through my life. Is this why the writings of Annie Leclerc, Audre Lorde and
Lucille Clifton are so exciting to me today. Certainly this struggle is in every voice here, poets,
thinkers, activists.
What do I desire? In the world I grew up in Connecticut, we kept our secrets. No one was
allowed to be queer. There was no fluidity. No intersectionality. Our world was so prescribed. It
was considered wild if you weren’t a virgin. Today as I read Zami I am so taken with the courage
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to step outside of society and forge your own path. Lorde’s productive years in terms of thought,
1977-78 and the concepts she was able to forge then are so important to who we are and what we
are thinking today. Her concept of the erotic is like a vine, moving through feminist thought.
Still, menstruation was fairly inconsequential to her. Or was it? The only place it appears in her
writing is that mortar and pestle scene in Zami. Her menarche. A very important place.
What do I desire? In the years I was married I was no activist. I had no voice. No voice?
No sense of self. That strenuous effort. Hide. Hide. For the thirty years, in my marriage, my
menstruation was highly regulated within the strictures of Judaism’s family purity laws. The
family was kept pure if, from the moment I saw the first hint of blood, I would separate
completely from my husband, our beds pulled apart, not sitting on the same cushion or passing
him a plate at the table. At the end of bleeding, there was a week when I was expected to swipe
my cervix with a small cotton cloth called a “witness.” These were “days of counting.” We
young, married yeshiva wives would whisper to each other how we were keeping ourselves safe
from cervical cancer because we swiped. This menstruation was hidden and silenced. We went to
the mikveh after dark. The entryways were complicated grids, unlit. No one was allowed to be
seen entering or leaving the mikveh. You could never touch your husband in public, even when
you were allowed to, so that no one could gauge when you could touch and when you couldn’t.
There was this idea that all eyes were watching your every move. The play was a patriarchy
using our human shame against us. That was the leverage. That was the grift. Shame. The game.
And it kept us all in place.
Today I read Lucille Clifton’s poems. Her irreverence. Her boldness. Her four daughters
and two sons. Just like me. Her large, caftan-covered body. I think this is the poet who I should
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be able to relate to. Instead, I am filled with envy. The way she was able to pour all of her
womanhood and her entire life vividly into her poems. How was she able to just leave shame in
the dust and just get on with it? How do I learn to do that?
When I was twenty-four years old I fell pregnant with my third daughter. I had a baby
aged two and another who was eight months old. The pregnancy was accidental. I was using a
diaphragm prescribed by an Israeli doctor that didn’t fit and fell into the toilet the next morning. I
went immediately to get a morning after shot, threw up the whole next night, and fell pregnant
anyway. In my tenth week, while visiting my in-laws in New York, I hemorrhaged. There was a
tear in the placenta. It was a tear that never healed. Within a month, I started to contract. The
doctors put me on bed rest. I lay with my head near the floor, my feet in the air and an infusion in
my arm for the next six months on a woman’s ward in Jerusalem. What do I desire?
It was 1988. I had no computer or cell phone. Not even a TV or a telephone next to my
bed. Even that technology was outside what one could ask for in Israel in the 1980s. Instead, I
talked to the women around me. It was a stark white red tent. I met one woman who begged a
doctor to remove the fibroids from her uterus, so she could have a seventh child. And she did. I
met a woman who had had twenty-three miscarriages. One who had twelve children, all by c-
section. I met women who had just learned that the child they were carrying had spina bifida or
tay sachs, saw them age to old women overnight. One woman threatened to kill herself if she had
to have one more child. One doctor told me that women are allergic to sperm, and only develop
an immunity if they only are with one man in their life. Otherwise, they will develop vaginal
warts. It wasn’t until many years later, when there was a vaccine for HPV that I put two and two
together and realized what the doctor told me was crazy. Women from my community came to
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see me and told me that the more children you have, the stronger your hormones and the younger
you will remain. There was information, some true, some made up. No one knew why the tear in
my placenta never healed. They never even looked. They just kept me in bed, feeding me drugs
to quiet my uterus. We shrugged our shoulders. We chalked these things up to God.
What do I desire? What if girl babies were born all over the world and their fathers held
them in their arms and gloried that someday their little bodies would menstruate. What if at every
bat mitzvah, every quinceañera the mother of the celebrant would come into the party with a
sheet that evidenced the incredibly strong bleed of the daughter? The baby I gave birth to that
autumn in 1988 was a little girl. The birth was an emergency, midday on a Tuesday, the day after
the holiday of Simchat Torah, the celebration of the cycle. The baby was delivered from my
blood full uterus, already dead. The medical team revived her, pumped her full of blood over the
next few days and handed her to me. With a warning.
At three months at her weekly check up (yes, weekly) they felt the tone problem in her
muscles that signaled cerebral palsy. An MRI scan revealed one side of her brain was a river, the
other a lake. Her father, in his Orthodoxy, thinking only of those myriad eyes always watching,
told me to tell no one. We welcomed silence into our home. I raised my children with no words
to talk about their sister; no words for my daughter to understand herself.
As she grew, my husband began to worry and gripe over what would happen when she
would menstruate. She was a clumsy girl, but smart and very pretty. For the most part, she was
able to ‘pass.’ But my husband was convinced she would leave blood some place in public and
shame him with the greatest of shames; that she would stain him. When finally she reached her
menarche, I sat in the bathroom with her, breaking down menstrual hygiene into the smallest
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actions and teaching her slowly and carefully what to do. I thought I was such a good mother.
Patient. Kind. Today my daughter is 34 years old, and still she follows those strictures I gave her
that afternoon we spent together in the bathroom. She carries bulky pads with her wherever she
goes, wears two overnight pads at a time, no matter how heavy or light the flow. She sleeps on
top of a towel from the day her menses start until they finish. She never errs from this formula. I
watch her and I see how I allowed the patriarchy to burden her and, no matter what I say, I
cannot undo what I set in motion. What do I desire?
What if there was money for research into women’s health? If menopause wasn’t treated
like a disease? What if every public bathroom had protection products available, as they do toilet
paper? What if menstruation was something you could talk about freely? What if your body
never disgusted you? Would we need less hot water bottles and heating pads? Would we be
stronger? Healthier?
We women exist in a type of “diaspora.” Like people of color outside of Africa. Like
Jews wandering the desert. Our diaspora is our silence. In our ignorance, in our silence, we
women are like pine trees growing in a desert climate… We can take water, keep growing, but
still the very soil of patriarchal culture under our feet will never feed us. We will grow, some
with strange branches, too long or too short. Some will remain dwarfed by the elements. The rare
woman will become who she needs to be despite the strong winds and mean land. Women like
Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton. They spoke out. They broke silence. How do we
transplant ourselves into a more nurturing environment? I.S. Jones, Doireann Ni Ghriofa, Kendra
DeColo, Brittany Rogers, k Abram, Gabrielle Calvocoressi. And the many women who are
writing and reading menstrual poems today. Still, our voices are whispers. I hope this project can
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join with the many voices greater than mine. I hope we can build a culture who will listen and
hear us.
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HOMESICK FOR MYSELF
Poems
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“ To the journeywoman pieces of myself.
Becoming.”

—-Audre Lorde
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THE JOURNEY
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Waiting
--in conversation Allison Benis White

What we give ourselves is failure,
ash in a receptacle meant to hold
ash and the last leftover
stagnant cigarettes, crushed, leaking,
brown. How does a cocktail glass
that once held tomato juice find itself
clear at the end of an evening that ends
on the bathroom floor? Where
does the red stain go? Clear
as a mirror, mirror in the bathroom,
mirror behind the bar. A little girl within.
Not me. I want to ask Allison, but she
is elsewhere, as elusive as ash. A mirror
can reflect any lonely girl. My first
memory is more Rembrandt: a door opens,
a triangle light creeps closer and over
me until I am washed in glitter, the kind
that jewels any sunny window in an undusted
room and now too I am the mother outside
a door, watching a baby girl
who still stands, brown curls seeped
down one eye, mouth open to swallow light,
a hand holding on, holding a landscape
to step into. This, Allison says, is somewhere.
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Eggs
My daughter, the one who never entered
the birth canal, the labor many days
until her blood mixed with my water
to sweep her out, now says she can’t
eat eggs, not after living so close to the coop,
not after watching birth after birth
or smelling the sulfur scent
of chicken skat and sadness. Though
chickens have no after birth, no placenta
to freeze dry and swallow. Another daughter,
the one who came easy, a quick hour
of excess, hands under my knees,
turtled into breathe-stop-breathe-now
stop-stop-stop--not even a tear, but,
instead, her clavicle broken. She
loves eggs and her own daughters too,
their velvet skin warm from the bath
of her body; she can’t stop kissing
the soft, wet pucker of them.
Of course, too, their oldest sister,
my first born, who was caught
behind a full bladder
for too many hours, even after
she cried out in the green slush
of meconium, so that still today the terror
of her first moments are evident
in her eyes. Does she even eat eggs?
We don’t talk enough now for me to know.
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And last there is the little one.
Well not littlest, nor the youngest—
the one who eats her eggs hard boiled,
sloughing off the ceramic shell
and throwing the yellow moon
to the cat. She once swam
in my balloon of blood, many months,
slowed in a viscous soup,
the only light seeping through
a glow of red and purple and black.
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Wife Daily
I lived unburied but dead, my corpse did not rot, children never cried, hands still peeled carrots,
folded towels into perfect thirds; my feet walked behind the wheels of baby carriages, pushed on
the gas as I circled our town in the family car, tires following the tracks from the day before, the
week before, the years…. I faked my orgasms early, my husband’s face always tilted away.
Perhaps he could smell the stench of death. Who knows? After I cried out, sex would end. He’d
move to his own bed. I would then close my arms around my loneliness, rock my body back and
forth and whisper from my dead mouth into my dead heart,
It’ s OK.
It will be OK.
You’re OK.
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Pierced
Half memories absorbed, the ritual world—here/ now,
yet lost to forgetfulness. Watch: him: a look of love
caught on film; us, under the maypole, the unmarried girls
each holding a crepe-paper strand, yellow, green,
braiding in and out of each other until we are caught
in the weave, that perfect image: marriage. Watch: later,
in the blue air of midnight, sounds of nocturnal
echos or merely heartbeats in a too quiet room?
A wedding dress crumpled
at the end of the bed. A new husband
so quickly asleep. And me, wandering
a strange hotel room unsure whether to cover
my nakedness or embrace it. It’s a scene
that will repeat through the years:
a whisper of thought--perhaps
love is beyond me? Though my despair
always more comfortable linked
to blaming others—
I crack doors never expecting a thief;
I open my body never expecting hope. Once
the glass of every double paned window
of my skyscraper shattered and there I lay,
completely open, the wind shrieking, the fragments
sharp in the blue light, spikes clinking, but I
remain open—waiting, not for something
to save me. Just for the shards.
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[the vagus nerve causes trouble]
a needle sunk
or more than one
tap tap
medulla obligata
superior ganglion
inferior ganglion
go deep
a finger down the side
of her neck, nerve—
when there was a baby she
was always happy
so baby followed baby
the sky stretched out
like a soft cotton skirt
flowers a cascade
morningside nothing
broke the spell
today the needle
a silver sparkle
the 10th cranial nerve
pierce tap tap a bite
of moksa
scentweed and
aphrodisiac unmasked
remember
her beautiful face
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An Interrogation of These Limbs
Ten fingers, ten toes: quotidian, normal, the sum total to carry me
through school and out into marriage and motherhood, a home,
backyard full of old growth trees, cocktail parties, Holoweens,
children asleep in lawn cotton, vacation homes in sunny locales,
tennis. Room never left for bleeding cuticles, fingers
that by age five would hide a straight pin in the deep tweed
of the playroom couch. How do I write this body? The shame
within those fingers that pushed the pin deep into the flesh
of my heel, rip away the outer level of skin while my sisters
next to me watched Tom & Jerry duke it out on Saturday morning TV .
Was I old enough to know how to stem the blood, to double sock
so I could walk the next day? How I hated my face, my knees, my toes.
Through my father’s constant punishments hours to stand next to the tree in the front
lawn, through rain, even snow, nights to sleep on the bathroom floor,
each night with my pin my skin could at least open to release
like a valve that might unlock steam inside an engine. Soon
I saw no one was watching. My pin no longer hidden, great sheets
of skin rising spongy white after a bath, yellowed and thick after a hike,
carrying me into a life, the tearing, holding me in a marriage
and its own multivalent cruelties, becoming.
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Speaking of Women
After Victoria Redel
Your daughters, their sisters, the Nana
who ran with something sewn
into the collar of her good wool coat.
The neighbor girl who on every trip
to Target must pocket a lipstick
with names like “Cave Gray” and
“Animal”. The young waitress
who drags a needle across
her ankle to see what exists
when wound becomes Wonderland—
The hunted girl. The lost
girl. The middle aged woman,
face just beginning to crease,
who can’t look in the mirror
to see her father’s reflection. The
starved woman. Forgotten woman.
Skittish woman. Friend. The girl
who comes home alone every afternoon
to an empty fridge and no TV . Strapped
down girl, electric girl, the girl who
can’t stop dancing. The one so alone
she splays herself along the back seat
of a Chrysler for the entire hockey team
to visit. The one who never stood up.
The one who never cried out.
The girl with a rust colored stain
to tell her who she is.
135
Sisters

We knew enough to know that if
you laid the body of Ken flat
on top of the body of Barbie, Barbie
would eventually fall pregnant
and then Ken would need to carry
Barbie splayed over his outstretched
arms, carry her everywhere to protect
her delicate state. Our father would butt
in just long enough to let us know
that no man needed to bother
with a woman after conception,
that no pickles or ice cream
would be sought after midnight. He
never understood those hours,
the thousands of hours we spent
sewing our Barbies clothes,
building our Barbies places to live,
to act out the scenes of their lives,
to be more than plastic. We knew
that Ken’s arms would never tire,
would remain erect as long as Barbie’s
stiff yet growing body would need support.
And no one tired of Skipper,
who was small breasted, flat footed,
but could still drive a hot, pink
convertible. She was just a sister.

136
Her belly would never ever grow
and she had no place ever in Ken’s arms.
137
Rowing
There is no escape from the place you were born:
city hospital, upstairs bedroom, a field near where
the corn grows tallest, a maze you’ll never escape. Not
who raised you or the food you ate together, fries or
fried chicken or that glutenous spaghetti straight
from the can, each piece of pasta shaped like a mouth
open in surprise. Escape bike rides to the beach
under a summer sun that burned till eight or bonfires blazed
beneath the stars, parties you were never invited to. What
did Sexton say? "The awful rowing toward God.” You think
someday a page will turn in a book that weighs in kilos
where the writing is minuscule, square. Ancient. Escape
the mistakes. The embarrassments. This whole human
body you drag along as you spiral through every day.
138
Second Grade
Crooked teeth, chipmunk cheeks, all ears—your mind
is the mirror, and the mirror is the
gap you can step into, a place to hide—
Gary Nadir beneath you on the slide.
He lifts your skirt: your panties on display
as you fall through the breach, a cave of shame—
Morning toast confined in your mouth all day
[so you don’t have to swallow what you hate]
Gary Nadir stretched underneath your swing,
under your desk, behind you on the slide—
Gary Nadir follows you through the school gate—
He lifts your skirt, your panties on display.
The nurse says lice, lines wrong in the school play—
you fall through—you fall through, you fall through
a catalog of shames—
You beg your mother to wear slacks to school.
Gary N.’s rage when he raises your skirt
to uncover the shorts you snuck from home.
At recess you bolt through the trees
that surround the playground. He’s after you,
ultimately shoves you to the ground—
On your back in the pine nettles, he rips
away your shorts, even your panties with
surprising ease— and he sees, and he sees,
and he sees—

139
Someone Else's Livid Day
The headline doesn’t mention epigenetics, but
startles with words like trauma
and holocaust, and a bright picture
of DNA Chagalled in space, curlicued
in dots of protein held
magnetically on their given lines,
like a corkscrew of music, or the barbs
on an electrified fence,
the fence behind which the children
stand, each tied in a dirty rag
that covers their ears against
the freezing Polish wind. You can see them,
striped clothes sized for someone else,
bellies distended, even the tendril
of a girl, who sways near the others,
eyes demanding to be held,
arm open to the number tattooed
there, and on her son, years later,
whose vicious fists will writhe
against ‘yid’ and ‘sheeny’
or later, her grandson,
against ‘jew-bag’ and ‘zog’—
each printed in rope-bridge code
deep within the children
of those lucky enough
to survive their own ravenous
seasons, displayed in crisp reality

as each DNA is unrolled like a Torah scroll,
read out loud each shabbat, memories
that drag a language into the marrow,
140
into the bones, into the savage
hand of someone else’s livid day,
spread generation to generation.
Look deeply
into the DNA of my own children.
There you will find me, a little girl, dark
hair too long and torn underpants, unconscious
on a tiled floor because I couldn’t
remember my times tables.
141
In Springtime
How long does it take to groom a little girl? Two little girls, aged 8 & 10?
As long as it takes to take a walk, 20 minutes after dinner?
Or a whole day, sunrise to sunrise? A month? Or a lifetime counted
from the time I pulled them in vernix-white slime from my body?
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
Tonight is the third night of The Omer.
There are forty-nine
stone steps to reach
the World to Come,
and somewhere Moses and Akiva still
hold hands.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
The upper deck of the George Washington Bridge
is a cathedral above me, spires of light
inside a wave of night and to my right Manhattan
in all her glory. I move in the stream of traffic, power
under my foot, mirrors flash, nightwind in the windows,
when I suddenly feel the weight of the steering wheel
fallen free from its moorings and loose in my hands.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
Shabbat guests with two strange sons.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
Bristled Hollyhocks.
Alcea Setosa.
Khatima or Harvest Rose.
Occasionally also called Khotmit Tzifanit.
From the Malvaceae family. They ripen
in springtime from Crete and Turkey to
Israel and Jordan. The flowers bloom,
142
one above the other, climbing
up the stalk like fingers moving up a back.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
Sometime between 80-1037 CE, Rabbi Akiva had 12,000 pairs of disciples from Gabbatha to
Antipatris. All of them died at the same time, a plague passing in a yellow fog over the land. The
molecules of virus are invisible: Only certain eyes can see their sparkled crowns. The world
remained desolate until Akiva came to the rabbis in the south and taught them Torah. These were
Rabbi Meir, Rabbi Yehuda, Rabbi Yossi, Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi Elazar ben Shammua, and it
was they who revived the Torah. The Tanna teaches: all the students died in springtime, between
Pesach and Shavuot. Rabbi Chama bar Abba, or maybe Rabbi Chiya bar Avin, said: All of them
died a cruel death, drowning in their own lungs.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
When they should have been sleeping
the girls are jumping on their beds,
What? I ask them. Stop jumping! What
happened? They laugh, fall back,
their giggles wild like the yips of rabid dogs,
something bitten by sickness and changed forever.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
A five-lobed goblet, the five pink triangular inverted petals are pierced at the head.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
I look down at the empty column,
the steering wheel detached and still
in my hands. I lift my foot off the gas,
but cars are coming up behind me
at speed and I have no way to pull off,
and no shoulder to rest upon—
I push down on the gas, keep moving forward.
And as I do, I smell the faint odor of mothballs
143
wafting up at me from behind.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
Tonight is the eleventh night of The Omer.
There are forty-nine
stone steps to climb,
covered in hollyhock blossoms.
They rise before me,
the pink marred by flecks of gray.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
Alcea setosa grows to a height
between seven and ten feet tall,
leaves smooth and dentate. As spring nears
a tall, inflorescence stalk grows, sessile leaves
with magenta blossoms in their axil, all
covered with a bristle of hair.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
Akiva’s students number twelve thousand, twenty-four thousand, forty eight thousand..
each writhes alone on a straw mat.
Is this too for the good?
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
It is the eighteenth day of The Omer.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
The siren sounds,
announces all
the soldiers have died,
and the birds swoop
out of trees,
and disappear
in a flock of wings.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
144
There in the rearview, right in my backseat
sit two rabbis. Bottle-cap glasses with thick black plastic rims
rest under the brims of heavy black hats, bristled
black beards salted in grey, framed by graceful, soft sidecurls
that drift down wide lapels of suits, reeking of mothballs.
Nu? asks the thinner one, while the heavier one burps,
and onions join the mothball scent in the car. Vas tut zikh?
The shtetl rests heavy on his tongue. Vas iz nisht rikhtig?
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
They tell me.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
Once even I was loose-limbed and thin. 1976. Bathing suit
suited to a bicentennial, fashioned from an American flag,
my only work to hold my legs together, toes and arms pointed
and off into an aquamarine world where my hair
would soften into seaweed, dead man’s float. Melanie, you are fresh
as a new penny, and feeling it, copper-eyed and moist.
Dive me from the highest height.
I’ll be your cliff diver, if it will make me yours.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
I know.
But this story is just so hard to tell.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
Tonight is the twenty-fifth day of The Omer.
Blessed are you, O God..
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
It was the redheaded son, eighteen years old, who lifted
their pajama tops away from their bodies
or maybe said, You show me. Made them complicit
145
so they would never again trust their own beauty.
He touched their bare torsos with his red-headed fingertips,
inspected them with his red-headed eyes.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
One night in a storm the snow blew over this bridge sideways
and I couldn’t even make out the lanes of traffic.
That night there were no lights. The city disappeared.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
I thought: for once my husband’s anger can serve a useful purpose,
that he might bellow these people and their evil son out of my house.
I find him already stripped to his underwear, head sandwiched
between pillows. No, he tells me. It’ s no big deal. It’ s nothing.
Stop being hysterical.
You can’t ask people to leave on shabbat.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
Blossom, pink sinking to a magenta center. The yellow stamen erect.
Sometimes grouped together like flamingos standing one legged in a lake of grass.
In folk medicine, the liquid of the plant is used to treat injuries, burns, coughs and inflammation.
The flower buds are edible, cooked and raw, and are considered as medicine for illnesses in the
airways.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
Akiva had another nickname: “Ish Gamzu.” Whatever the outcome, he always said, was for the
good. Once when he could find no place to sleep, he passed the night outside the city walls,
traveling into the desert with only a donkey, a rooster and a candle. In the darkest part of the
night his donkey fell down dead, his rooster flew away. A wind rose up and extinguished his
flame. Destitute, the Rabbi murmured, ”All that G-d does is for the good,"
As morning dawned he saw that conquerors had fallen upon his city. From his hiding place
behind the dunes he watched as his neighbors and friends were bound and carried into captivity.
146
“This too is for the good,” he whispered
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
I hold up the steering wheel, show these two strangers
exactly what the problem is. The skinny rabbi strokes
his beard; the fat one grumbles, well, you are a woman.
Even in Yiddish the meaning is clear.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
Gray sun. Red-headed fingertips. Make a stain. Walk home through the dark scent
of blood. Touch your fingers to it, then touch your mouth. Lips suddenly red, the red
that runs down your skirt, left behind on a chair.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
I am sentry outside my daughters’ door;
it is the thirtieth day of the Omer.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
The hollyhock sometimes stands alone, ripening.
She signals her end, her dry season,
her blossoms folding in on themselves,
twisting into the color of a bruise,
falling away.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
On the thirty-third day the plague finally passes, like storm into sunshine,
and on every hilltop in the land, then and now, bonfires blaze on the thirty-third day.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
We never ask them to leave. Through kiddush and lunch and havdalah.
Through the Sunday afternoon backyard barbeque.
I watch over my girls, don’t let them sing or dance or even talk too loud.
147
Appearances kept intact.
⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶ ⇶
We never reach the forty-ninth step.
148
Walking in Circles
let me
back, go back go
just for a moment
just to reach
in, into me up
to my wrists my
elbow my—to get
[to] you, that blood
cave, grab you,
retrieve you, give
me [just] a
moment to watch
you, experience you
undistracted
by groceries or money,
[your] father, my
youth, and you
unburdened too by
adulthood, i just,
i just—want
to look at you just
once just one [more]
time again.
149
To Mother

I chose not to mother
like my mother mothered
and still I got it wrong,
chose not to cut
off the chicken’s right wing,
or was it the left? That
Mama story, the minhag
passed from hand to hand
from kitchen to kitchen. No,
I bucked the trend. Kosher.
Not kosher. I’ve been both
and still, I’ve been wrong.
I loved them with soapy water,
with powders, with sticky
tabbed diapers, with afternoons
at the playground and rainy
days when all the neighborhood
kids would crowd in
to our two-bedroom
and I would set them to play
“wheelbarrow”—one kid
holding the legs of another
who would walk on his hands and
then bench press himself
to the floor and grab (with only his mouth!)
the Bamba I’d scattered
all over the living room carpet.
Cause my baby needed to build
her arms and chest muscles
and the tone around her mouth,
150
to train the plastic of her brain
to breach the oceans and lakes where
her gray matter was missing. Why
shouldn’t the whole neighborhood help? But,
no, I got it wrong. I kissed
their necks and their backs,
their toes and their tushies
and at night, when I finally sank
into the couch with exactly
three books settled on,
they all always gathered.
Big and small, verbal or not,
science homework and telephone
calls forgotten, all six of them
gathered together and I thought:
this is love. But I was wrong.

151
THE PIECES

152
the birds,
my girl,
the birds
153
You know the shadows that cut
across the earth—
the display at day’s end, and
the way we bow to sunrise. Still,
there are days wild
with dust, blind
to the dunes

and we have no
shadow to reflect
in the chrysalis of your eye
154
First light—Tuesday—
Child of Grace
Membranes broken—
eat
the yolk, a future— life
magnetic in your hands
155
White days
when dust abandons you—
fists raised,
and you dance across a shadowless afternoon
to the songs of children
who might have been yours
and the birds, my girl, the birds—
156
My face held in the bracket of your hands,

part me
with tar, resin, the smell
nascents me to sleep—
you say, watch
over him, you say, I
am going and it will be your turn, say,
my navel still raw, my fontanel not yet closed, the smooth skin of my shoulders
will never
grace your cheek
157
When your father called the pink of his tongue told me he needed to see a world still spinning
Now he guards his face away from me and I fade into the dark matter of your hands
158
I think I died when we weren’t looking. We traded places and I took your unicorn slippers as my
own and you grew to lay your head on a brown chested man and listen for a heartbeat, to uncover
your breast and feel the relief as the milk runs warm. Infant swallow. Bloom of bud. Pucker suck.
Black handed.
We traded places and you
grew to pull his beard—
a fox in the weald of olives, dear one
159
The black on your hands—magnetic—
pulls the souls from our bodies
stores them
in that feathered breath—shadow & dust—
leaves us blind
white
160
I told him I was willing to die—
I was willing to die—
He doesn’t remember and doesn’t know
I was happy to trade
your life for mine.
And we know
don’t we
your beseeching—
we know I mourned you even before you were gone.
161
I hate to grow old
all those years I plain forgot to live
mother
wife
only smoke inside my shadow
and the bell’s silent aftermath
162
House of cotton and tufts of hair
that fall from those who hold their heads
in their hands and can’t let go.
We twine those walls together with bits of twig
we pluck with weakened beaks and let
you thread jasmine inside
like a string of summer nights,
purple suns opened into bodies
ready to birth, palms
bared before the moon’s luster.
163
In the back corner of this empty lot
your life ground down to patches
of wax, petaled,
the day, white—
Harmattan—Hamsin—wrap me
in a blanket, set yourself in my lap and
we will both be
wrapped together. Listen.
I will tell you stories
about the smell of flowers or a trickster who sets the world backward
to a place where children die.
Sleep your head
under my breast and I will stroke
the silk of your cheek, the shell of your shoulder,
the hoop of your ear arresting against your neck.
Sleep well, child, under the olive’s silver leaves
164
Sea of the World—
fox river blue and flowing backward
165
You fed him sweets to mark the time,
three hours of wind and the thousand colors of beige
—in the moments of your visit we count the years in days
166
How you took the black,
rubbed it on me—wiped it
on his eyes, black torn
from black holes, magnetic, beyond
anything legislated in this world or the next and you and you and you
set it
upon his eyes
like coins
feathered breaths—the torn sky and
red dirt
under our feet
167
You blossomed into a sea, warm, blizzard’d
into being, your hair coralled
into the fine molecules of breathable
air.
How did you die, ocean girl?
Was your mother holding you? You came—
a skiff of other people’s dreams, but
don’t all children know
the color of silence? The charcoal
on your hands—
and how you left us
to smolder and wreck—the choke
hold of salted water, green
and need, the valve of you,
waving
goodbye— come
eat
from my hand, release
me, release him, release
your mother
back into a whole world,
where knowledge of you glows—
black coral from
the center of the sea,
buffed
to the luster of an unknown deep.
168
Tonight, she
tells me
the moon is black
and aligned with the sun.
Sun, moon and you, dear one.
169
What’s
on your hands? Ponds Cream—tar black?
So gentle, the backs of your hands— dimpled—let me kiss each crease, even
as your eyes
catch me—
—eyes, opium and large
as a moon, dark as sun, your eyes, my ocean, ribbon
me to every element, the whole periodic chart, each
tectonic plate,
every molten surface, your eyes
are core
and I drop them into the burn
of my own singed skin.
170
A gypsy, a storyteller, a bandleader, a monk—
In the dust across these white
nights, echoes spill
everything
correct.
the spill
dear one
the spill
171
The old age of your eyes, open in darkness.
Can you see into my daughter’s heart? I left her. Did you
know? It was she who came at my breast

with an open mouth, voracious.
172
Then the dream, fingers
in my hair, a whisper in my ear—Rachel.
I am lost. I am lost. I am lost. I am lost.
173
They tell me, maybe Dead
Sea mud
meant to sooth? Your eyes gentle; your heart the
waning moon. Of course,
you would only bring us relief.
174
Your father’s sobs against my neck, on
my shoulder, my shirt, wet, the salt
pearl of your toes & finger tips, the creases
of your palms. Gather his tears in the perfect shells
of your hands—his face
so wet, his tears—toss them
across the desert, blue
the sky, water this world green.

Isn’t Eden
there in his tears, dear one?
and the birds, my girl,
the birds
175
The nachlieli and the crow
and Tristam’s starlings, wings on fire,
shrieking
across the dunes
Dance the poems across our palms
the way those who have
brush coins to the needy
176
Tuesday, Tuesday Child
Of Grace
Wave the sand aside. You are the afternoon’s surge, dappled, dark
to light, lips
kissed to accept even algae
as nourishment.
and everything
that moves over reef
is edge, is grief: is loss:
love that arrived like a small bird resting
momentarily in the ocean’s palm,
then the dearness of him
carried away, out to sea—
In centuries
you will return, crest the desert, a wave blue and wet,
your wind and water morphed
to the delicate design of your face.
177
THE WOMAN

178
Turning 60
Let there be some curvature
some space time, some refracted
instant where we stand unlimited
by any vicissitudes, body breath
into freedom, let it pour
forth, feel
the sparkle, no old aches, no
years of stiffness, no
mornings before coffee,
the stammering, stuttering cough
into the day. Let the breast expand--
this body doesn’t need to bear fruit,
but can’t it just run, tipped
toward sunshine? Or at the very least
remember names or dates or what
it read yesterday? This blank
emptiness, a space once
racing in place,
the mirror slanted
away, the extra pandemic pounds
a new gravity--cheeks and arms, brows
squeezed as never before, still
still
still the mirror
reflecting someone,
not me, not who I see,
this brokenness finally--
this body I tenderly tended
179
telling me it too will leave
me someday soon.
180
Impacted
—Live in the nowhere/ that you came from --Rumi

It’s late. The house sleeps as I strain,
in the bathroom alone. Aren’t these the days
I dreamt of, days I wanted? Didn’t I let myself
get here? Please G-d, please. So alone,
my stomach aching, my body burning.
O please, pushing, pushing
60, wanting to take this body,
"created with openings, with hollows,"
with a cell structure so sensitive,
each talking together, though mine
more like bitches at a cocktail party
seeing who can be bullied and who ignored—
a digestive system that never works—
"If one should rupture. If one
should become blocked" Then days
of discomfort, even days of pain. Throw

this body away. The dark outside.
The quiet. Open me, I pray,
remember these words, this burn.
A teenager, I never wondered
what a man of 30 wanted with a high schooler.
Loneliness was my true north.
Any attention, yes, and a sexual awakening.
Wasn’t it already long overdue? How he laid
me across his lap, reddening my ass
with a pink hairbrush, bringing it down
with all his strength. Harder. Again.
Daddy's girl has been so bad. Then the burn.
One finger. Two. He prepares me.
Prepares for the night I will take the whole of him
inside me. That burn. No voice to say no.
I lie very still. Please G-d, please.
Open, I pray. Please.

*with lines from the Ashar Yatzar prayer
181
The Year of the Snake
The smell of weeds, strong
from their shorn ends, that sweet
scent of grass billowing
from the sharpened
blade into a lulled sky,
strong as the metal tool used
to shear them. Why?
Is there a concern about rodents,
about snakes? It’s all too cultivated
here. Give me the snakes, the year
of the snake, his rattle, his silent bite,
to be suddenly touched
by that forked tongue, held
firm in a cold, muscled twist.
Ask me: what are my pronouns,
my orientations, my desires: ask me
and I will answer: open, so open--
like the snake an unlocked jaw
to take it all in: move my lips
over the widest part of life:
the rough-cut edges, the stifling
air: the lover who called today,
after six years of silence to say
he’s sorry. Or maybe to woo me back.
Is there any truth anywhere? Why
can’t the weeds grow wild? Why
do the grasses need to be plowed?
Isn’t it their deep green that keeps us safe?

182
Cranes
—with a line by Czeslaw Milosz

I wander past the furniture store: stiff brocade,
slick cherry wood, overstuffed ottomans—I could sink
myself into any seat just to think about that line,

I am a woman held fast now in silence.

How betrayal makes me quiet, as unfinished
as the etching of cranes here on a side table, not
their white wings fanned across the clouds,
but long necks carved to slump toward the simple wishes
of water, snapped-back legs set before ferns,
whose many shades are chiseled in green
leaves sequined to sunlight. And, of course,
at the plowed edge of everything,
great gray stones, each cut heavier than the next
in accordance with the molecular weight of sorrow.
183
After Viola Frey’s “Untitled (Backside of a Standing Nude With Extended Arm )”
Blackbird, no backside
or reside or step away—
back, no back but backside,
the naked back and yet still
blackbird or blackcat or
black shadow of her—selfhood,
her shame, perhaps
throwing on a black dressing gown.
Perhaps slipping it off.
They say backside. Vashti,
they say, had a tail.
Take off your clothes, woman,
show my friends how I wear
my kink: how I wrap
myself in the droop of you,
how I take you, dip
my end into you. Woman
with tail who, when commanded
must pretend shamelessness,
unfold her midnight wings.
So what is shame? Can we
name it? Overcome it?
A black shadow erases
me. Please don’t see
my naked ass. Stop sending
me away so you can see my tail,
my crawl, my hot cheeks,
my rumpled sheets, my
phobias of appearing visible
to others. What does it help, then,
that flashed image—Adam—Eve
their arms snaked across their
private parts, fleeing?
184
Separation

—“Rubbed from the world’ s hard rubbing and the excess of everyday”-Ruth Stone

Perhaps this is all I will ever have
or what I should have held on to
this rag flushed
into a bucket
water grey with the dust
that aged our life.
How the soft cotton sinks
like a woman into a ritual bath
the last strands of hair succumbing
to the water’s pull, and my own hands following
taking, squeezing, watching the water fall back on itself,
my hands kneading the cloth
into some form I want:
clean floors, folded clothes, spices
lined on a rack. This house has lost its heartbeat
even as I unfold, flatten, run
this wet cloth over the floor again and again.
185
Younger Men
—After Robert Hass’ “A Story About the Body”
The first man who shared my body after my husband left was thirty, never married; young
enough to see in me something trouble-free. He worked hard: weeks of texting before I let him
pour me a glass of wine. As he undressed me I asked, what do you see? and he chose to
compliment a shoulder, a thigh; not my stretch-marked belly nor my breasts, drooped with age . .
. until I realized he had never met a bowlful of bees, fig pollen heavy, a teardropped plum with a
center a thousand drone strong, and ready to fizz and just like that I squirted an arc of honey like
an alabaster wave above the bed—mine to harvest, mine alone to take back to the hive. After we
dressed, the young man piled the bedding into a bag and asked me to throw it in the dumpster on
my way out. And I did. Not unhappily. I was tended, after all, overfull with the knowledge that
my old body would still manage magical things; I laid that bag next to empty pop bottles and
rotting fruit that buzzed—still—with bees.
186
Eight Sides; Life
Break away or break on—a wave
breaks and us? Like a two-fisted
dance, like the movement of wind,
like a kindness so gently shared
it takes a moment to realize
it was kindness. The body and what
it brings: dawns that yawn
into a cluster of ruby clouds, the pillow
of your lips, kind each time, and just
as pliant, the cat who cleans her paw
with her tongue, crisp
as a surgeon, each eight sides
licked slowly and with precision,
and then whir of your hands, your
touch—lush, yes
lush, this lushness, this day—
scratch of whiskers and an ocean—
yes—
187
Ambergris Caye
Did whales once live here near these shores? Impossible. Impossible this island, sand bar poor,
the water table just two feet down and a barrier reef right offshore, the water tepid as tea all
aquamarine and green. a see-through wavy mirror. Watch the fish under dive for your hook.
Watch them over, whole schools jumping together like a lame cape glinting in sunlight. Wind
enough to pull a girl’s sailboat home. Our house right under the tallest palm, the one that grows
in the mangrove. We never visited that tree. Why would we explore the jungle when it was so
easy to remain dormant on the lip of desire, beauty spread before us as our own quiet demise.
Ambergris, amber grisea, ambergris or gray amber found in the belly of a whale and set aflame
like candlewax. The smell fecal, of sex, of a newborn head blood spattered and perfect. Did
sailors once think this island stunk? A scent that called them, a siren song, the nighttime cries of
whales, that other mammal who survives her own fertility? The acrid scent of rotting fish.
Seaweed gathered onshore. Ambergris aged into a fixative for perfume. Like desire. Age. Our
changes. Like a sun setting behind the tallest palm.
188
Innocence
Each tie pulled tight against breath—
the maid laces up your stays. And with each tug
of fingerloop, do you, Sarah Pearse’s mother forget?
Rape of a virgin.
Can a girdle keep these thoughts contained? Do the curtains
around your bed stifle your dreams? Do you bury
your head in your pillow, as I do at the recall of every crease of flesh
bathed in water tested with an elbow, towelled and powdered after?
An arm around a waist, holding a toddler from running in the street--
the sight of bloodied garments seems to have been a factor
Mama Pearse, I see you—the small buttons of your dress bridling you
from throat to where your hips splay east and west, and Sarah,
your daughter, only twelve, twelve years old, a case particularly harrowing,
with the child so badly injured, she blooded all the Stairs as she went down,
and my own daughter just fifteen but innocent as any, her childhood still intact,
entering a Jerusalem apartment with nothing but her Speedo and the slap
her father left on her cheek--
Me in caftans that flow from shoulder to floor, no bra, often not even panties,
and my daughter roofied, used and left crumpled on a couch,
carried home by a stranger. I did nothing but stand in the hall
as she tumbled through her bedroom window, saw nothing but her spaced and slurring,
saved nothing, held nothing, offered nothing--
For Sarah you saved it all: stored the child’s bloodied petticoats and bed linens
even her Shift he wash’d and hung it to dry, and a sanitary cloth
he fashioned to absorb the blood, all shown in evidence.
You proved your girl was not yet menstruant
though some lengths were exerted to cover up the crime,
and as mother you stood before the men, unfolded each one,
until guilty, guilty, guilty.
(with lines from the case Cristopher Samuel who was found guilty of the rape of Sarah Pierce in
1721)
189
Self Portrait With Antlers
A jackal can brand the night as his howl
reels like a comet across the sky, but how
often do we hear a jackal during tent building
and the gathering of wood? A family trip
to Cape Breton, an island of tidal bores where water
rushes in and, just as suddenly, disappears,
nothing but a thicket hint of privacy and firesmoke
shrouding the evening in ash. I always loved
the campfire: luck of light and warmth,
the bittersweet bicker of bark, a stick baked
until its end caught flame, and then used to paint neon
against the night sky, and me, still velvet antler’d,
spots only beginning to fade, body chemistry
emitting signals with configurations of who
I might become. The night silent
but for the crackle of blaze when a single word
rumbles across the campsite to slap me: slut.
My head comes up and turns to the sound like
eyes to light, caught: slattern, jade, jezebelle, whore,
My father’s litigator-voice deep as a tidal bore
whose first wave carries a deluge after it: trollope, bike, tramp.
A father who found out I’d lost my virginity without him:
bimbo, quean, doxy, skank. Cyrano in the mirror. Not
the siren before the earthquake, but the shock itself.
Roundheel, slag, saddle. I look up to see myself hanging
upside down from a high branch, my antlers suspended in space,
my forelegs nearly touching the ground, sliced
from anus to chin, as the words settle around me
like starlings falling dead from the sky, or bandicoots
arriving out of the darkness to peck at my hair and skin,
190
echoing every word with their nocturnal noises:
slut, saddle. The surge continues on: strumpet, tom, scrubber, bawd,
hooker, poule, malkin, tart. People from around the campsite
gather in to watch the show. Trull, shack. chippy, brass nail.
My mother, my sisters and tens of strangers, silent. Harlot,
hoochie, minx, cocotte. A jackal lopes out from between the trees,
stops to stare at me. I am hanging upside down, antlers removed,
four legs tied to the spit, skin to flame, just beginning to crackle and crisp.
I am still there.
191
It’s Like That
Lust is a middle toe you never think about never
thought to think about until once walking through
a garden in a backyard you’d not been in
before, the grass a field of green so green it lulls
you into unexpectedness. Odd. You. Suddenly
a princess running from a pea or towards three
certain wishes, a forest where its possible to forget
all you need to remember, to trip, to fall, to find
yourself supine in the cool of grass, a scent of tenderness
born somewhere in the neighborhood, the gardner’s buzz
and huff disrupting what might have just been a walk
through some grass--so queer, how that lovely light unlocks
the green into a wide and open sky. And, of course, the toe,
throbbing suddenly, reddened, awake and aware, blades
of fresh cut grass spread across your thighs and a smear
of mud pointing like a finger right at your right breast.
.
192
Prey
after Gerald Stern
In your child voice you ask about the rabbit, so small, so brown, the one we interrupted
on his way to the lettuce. Or maybe to the carrot stems, pale and just new against the overturned
loam. Why, you ask, doesn’t he run? Or bare his teeth, claws held up to protect himself? After all,
doesn’t every animal carry some form of protection: fists or color or ink, a sound or a fragrance?
What can I say, knowing the girl I was, like the hare, like the hare, like the hare—a rabbit rooted
on the sidewalk, too dumb to understand my own changing body as the reason for the cat-calls
from cars, whistles from passing trucks. I simply understood that they saw the real me. Rabbit,
rabbit waiting to be skinned, ready to be braised.
193
Milk
The baby popped into this world
at 6 lbs, at 8, at 10. A daughter shining
me on—teenage noisy, bite
of guitar, base pumped up through
my feet. I can’t feed this child—
a daughter who shines. I can’t
lift her up. Daughter whose bright
smile blankets both secrets & lies—
Solo cups, side looks, laughter. Baby, baby,
empty breasts and bottle fed—
doesn’t look too big there on the carpet,
but heavy, heavy as a bathtub, heavy
as a safe. The music so loud,
I know I’m missing something in-
side that smooth smile. She glows, knows
her pretty. Baby, I can’t lift you. Can’t
you see? Your face not yours,
inside out or some other girl’s—
the milk, a thick white line receding.
A daughter succumbing to breasts that transgress, cells mutating,
ducts plugged beyond the sounds of sucking,
louder than the music. The baby
who needs me, will need me, always
need me. Trying to hold her, hold her
early—the weight just too heavy to bear.
Unruly child—I can’t lift you.
194
Scream
She says we need to go together to an appointment, a date, a time, a room where a professional—
crossed legs, slight forward tilt—can mediate her anger so it won’t destroy me. That this anger
will pass by my head like hot wind coming up from a subway grate, a wind filled with filth
rushing from an earth warmed by some devils-fire blaze: a wind I need to feel, but not make my
own.
There is never an appointment. We never go. She says she needs to tell me, open her mouth, let
out the scream of a woman, a teen, a child, an infant, cold and hungry, new from the womb. It
doesn’t sound like something we can do in a cafe, I say.
Let’ s try the beach, I offer. Where wind, salty off waves, might carry away the grey rage—offal
rising like dust. Its scent dank, its scent dry and empty as a subway: the clank of the wheels, that
scratch around unseen curves through soot-ridden tunnels. The sudden open bathroom brightness
of each station.
Can any Mediterranean wind whisk away such a scream as this? I am reminded of a house in
Gush Etzion. You need to sign up months in advance. The Jew sits quietly while the Palestinian
spills his grief, a torrent of sounds forming around generations of pain. Where, I ask myself, is
God? I am sorry, I tell her. You are right.
You entered the world cold, naked, afraid. My milk never warmed down to your toes. The mirror
never reflected enough of you. The sting of your father’s hand on your cheek. Yes, the world is
scary and sick. Possibly ending. Yes. It is my fault.
Open your mouth, I say. Open and let it out.

195
A Moonless Night
Chugging for home
to the boat-engine’s dying
cough and sputter,
five of us alone together,
in the deepest part
of a moonless night,
18° North of the equator,
under a milky-way so thick
you could pour it into a glass;
my father, his loud
black shadow haloed
against the night,
ranting at the stars:
his shitty boat, shitty life,
shit on by everyone,
the thief mechanic,
incompetent wife, his three useless
daughters, each respectively renamed:
the dumb head, the saddle,
the power–hungry bitch—
And underneath this heft and punch
the sounds of soft water
lapping against the boat
and hundreds of sudden
rain-like splashes
as schools of small fish
rise wave after wave
as if from an underwater explosion
trying to escape what we could see
lit up perfectly in its own radiance:
a shark's suave body swimming
with its mouth wide open.
196
Forgiveness
starts the moment your foot pushes off,
carrying the sandy shore
caked between your toes. Find it
as you attach plastic shackles
to the headstay, pull the jib’s formless shroud
higher until it inhales like a nylon lung. You
can try to run: tack the wind
to your back, your mainsail billowed
portside, genoa, stretched in flight on your right,
and you, the beating heart
at the center, trying not to tip over.
Head out—boat cresting
over breath, spray
in your face, each sheet cutting deep
into your hands until the boat rides high
up under you. Feel that pontoon between your thighs.
Now—step off, hike out, tiller’s wand
in one hand, toes tipped
on the very edge—
wind whipping
you, your back parallel
to the water, just one hand-hold, hold on,
your voice shouting over the waves, up
into the slap and slurp of the sail, up
into the wet, uncluttered sky.
197
Aubade
just as pink seeps
into a pre-dawn sky
my mother wakes me, asks me
to change, change her right
in the living room, no
one else awake, the sky
dropping its glimmer on-
to the hundreds of gray
tongues of daylight
and I lift her from her recliner:
her last flight deck, the very fabric
of our eventual goodbye,
kneel to slip away all her old-
lady protections: panties worn
through from washings,
a diaper underneath (both
a bit damp), her hand
on my head, then not
steady on her feet, I
lower her, bare butted,
onto the seat of her walker. Oh no!
Oh God!, she cries, I’m leaking,
hand over eyes, yes true
small rivers slipping, rivulets
on her cheeks, between her thighs,
puddle of sadness steeped, one
last shame of the many female
shames gathered over a lifetime,
her head a folded star, her hair
matted white, light on her bald
spot in the back, that one blemish
always, her beauty, her scent--dupion
silk and velvet, dressed to go out
for the evening, filling our dark
bedroom where we three girls
in bed where the nanny has tucked
us to kiss us— this one last goodbye,
her wet face and thighs to dry,
pat with powder, a fresh diaper, then
198
to bend, scrub the carpet, to clean,
this time, what slips and slips
and slips away.
199
vantablack

water over stones trickle in dim night stones vanish
into stones muscles under skin an upper arm dark
as daylight drenched and held I whisper “hurt me’
a stone in my palm old pictures of him black
hair swept across his face like Elvis now
shimmied down his back the snake still
I run my hand across the molten surface of his voice
oversized in stories never prince nor savior
just a black streak of oil across a puddle
one that explodes into rainbow when the sunlight
is right, still leaves a smudge impossible to remove
with soap and water that awful cry
in the night a moaning sex/ pain a lowing
a lowering a boundary crossed again and again
200
Insomnia
Once I loved a man, loved his body. Our story played no where but his room on hot summer
nights in some nondescript suburb, an apartment mirroring all the other socialist era apartments.
As unremarkable as fighter-jets low over the Carmel or driving up the hill from El al Roub to
find myself looking down the barrel of a M16, the boy holding it sleeping the deep sleep of
childhood when the body is ravenous for renewal. It was 1925 when Nathaniel Kleitman, who
left Russia for Chicago started a sleep lab where he could study circadian rhythms, but it wasn’t
until 1980 that a guy named Sullivan would relegate the sleep deprived to wear full face masks
to alleviate apnea. I always wondered who could sleep in those contraptions? Can you lie on
your side, as I sometimes did with my lover as he entered me from behind barely waking me as
we swayed together in slumber, only the waves inside me—pitched, gravity-less, vapored with
nighttime breath. How can anyone have nightsex in a CPAP? Or does one become practiced in
the art of ripping it from the face, like the seduction of a bra slipped away to unfurl the secret
release of breasts? We would whisper I love you in the darkness, but it wasn’t true. He liked the
conquest and I still needed to unsaddle myself from men who wanted to rein me. Men always
have purposes, don’t they? Like fighter jets or guns, missiles and skyscrapers, war and its
symbols. Its about the closed walls of thought, territory shut off, families divided, but mostly its
about ego. It was in England in 1845 when John Davy, who was a doctor, decided to study the
connection between temperature and sleep. Did he too intend those hot nights between the
sheets? I wonder how many of his subjects were women, women who have been left, women full
of heat who never sleep, even after a long soak in a cool bath of lavender and mint. In Israel/
Palestine, where fighter jets move through the dark sky and our sons are all gone to war we drink
lemonade and mint ices to keep us cool. My lover never offered food or drink during those hours
together. Instead we exhaled into his airless room a chorus of sound, but none that quenched
thirst or increased sleep or brought peace to any land or people.
201
Searching For Gold
—Hanoi, Vietnam
When I leave the city
where so many people
sport missing limbs,
where I sit in endless
meetings with men
whose breath pulses
from blackened teeth,
and where the women
on the walls have long
faces, and even longer hair that falls
straight to the floor,
or the women on the backs
of motorcycles, hair blowing
out behind like curtains
in a storm, and as I drive away
from the motor bikes
and stacks of roasted dogs,
the countryside opens, cartoon lush
in front of me, and here are live
women bent at the waist
up to their knees in rice water,
conical hats on their heads,
and our hired car drags
in the muddy hills, and my husband
rushes off to search without
me, and I’m alone
with some aggie-eyed oxen,
and girls whose hair
is plaited and tucked away,
and I watch the day trickle by,
until I start to wonder
if my husband’s been rolled
into a ditch, his two passports
removed from his wallet:
the dollars, the euros, the swiss franc, the yen,
even the gold coins
all gone, plastic cards scattered
near his face like the flower petals
202
in our hotel bathtub,
and there’s no cell reception—
but a buzz in the distance
brings a boy in what I recognize
is the first sharkskin suit
I’ve ever seen in real life,
and as he brakes his bike
and rushes up the hill
I call to him in English
and luckily one of the older women
translates as he shouts his price:
two million dong—
and I know it is sixteen thousand dong
to the dollar, and I am canceling zeros
in my head, when over the crest of the hill
comes my husband,
his chest puffed
as he empties a bag of rocks
at my feet, his eyes shining
crazy green and I see those rocks,
mostly the milky white
of unprocessed gold,
and he tells me everything
I ever wanted to hear.
203
Witch/Hysteric

—After Carson’ s “The Gender of Sound”
Always evenings, naked, unafraid, glass pitcher on my shoulder, goat’s head severed under foot,
a fist—amputated—resting, aback my neck. The crowd behind me like a crowd behind me
always behind me, jeering, whispering, fielding all I say, even the sound of my voice. Escape me
I escape you: words tattooed across my body: left breast; right, my belly—a mouth: open,
painted in blood: menstrual or goat--does it matter? If I crouch, let whatever wants to run from
me run; if I contort, head, arms, shoulders between my legs, throw myself—acrobatic—from the
highest board or cliff, will the apology be enough?
My incantation is clean. Enough the usurper, the thief. We banked the tampons, the extra-strong
deodorant. We drank the perfume. We covered our hair with cotton cloth. There was no more
space. Just the dark bush before me growing darker, disappearing. A symphony of cicadas to
mark the way. Join me. No eye teeth, no rusted knob. No more champagne. Pear-assed and
perfect, I am your wet dream, my voice stolen; my violence intact.
204
Letter To My Children

Sand between our toes and pockets full
of sea glass—you sparkle, each of you.
The smallest ones fuss, though

the moon continues to pull
the tide out to where it can’t
be reached. Is this what

we are searching for, the blue
that haunts us? Once we believed
it was G-d who eluded us. Now we know

better—the cycles nothing
more than gerbil runs to next year
and the next. Yes,

there will be more of you, but
you will never swarm around me—
not in the way I had hoped. Just

as you never squeezed
yourselves out from between
my legs the way I had dreamt

you would. Never gentle, no low groan
as a head is released—an infant cry
rising into a room. Everything

with us was rushed, too much, wrangled
inside sirens and scalpels. I just wanted
it all to slow down. To sit and watch

each of you, just as I might watch
the sun expand into day, a red
reflection—another moment

in my one imperfect life. But
it never really worked
that way, did it? And now
205
I sit glad, at least, that you have
each other. Glad that you gave
me little ones still willing

to search for sea glass— that milky
glisten between shells and sand,
to trade the pieces: a perfect white

triangle for a jagged piece of turquoise.
Because we all know, in the end
it’s the blue, isn’t it? The blue we search for.
206
Or,
my back to the ocean,
a sneaker wave envelops me
infused in sun & saltiness,
oxygen bubbles, sand, body corpse
straight and sucked miles from shore,
or,
ice cracks, opens under my feet—
immersed suddenly—
cold so cold it burns,
and a current that offers no choice,
or,
dangled inside a well, fingers
clutching the stones above
perhaps dry and dust covered or wet—
slime and mud. The stones that graze my face,
moss, damp green going black;
I know I need to let go—
to be water
abdicate to gravity—
to fall until I flow.

207
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Creator Neve-Midbar, Rachel (author)

Core Title Breaching the labial lips: thought and new language in the menstrual poem and Homesick for myself (poems)

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Degree Conferral Date 2023-08

Publication Date 06/30/2023

Defense Date 05/24/2023

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Audre Lorde,Female,French feminists,Lucille Clifton,menarche,Menopause,menstruation,OAI-PMH Harvest,poetics,Poetry

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Language English

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Advisor St. John, David (committee chair), Johnson, Dana (committee member), Lemon, Rebecca (committee member), Wellwood, Alexis (committee member)

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Format theses (aat)

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