As the year draws to an end, I’m thinking of other kinds of endings. Victoria Redel's “Ode to Menopause” was first published in SWWIM on November 7, 2022. And Lucille Clifton’s poem “to my last period” is from Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton.
Ode to Menopause
Victoria Redel
I miss the blood.
The plush, thick insistence. Lunar declaration, my flag.
Then years living together, mysterious reconciling,
not that we were always a sister nation,
didn’t bitch, get bitchy, blame everything
on a knot that bellied down, rumped me to my knees.
& those gym passes, Coach too embarrassed
to challenge how it stretched on for weeks.
Now I’m missing cash registers where I averted my eyes,
the rectangle box a public admission, & yes,
let’s bless the shyness of teenage boys bagging,
handing back change & what happened
between us, a moment, electric—what was it?
—cringe, tease, apology, brag—
that we were actually bodies walking around
with the whole screwy, beautiful, damaged
human history of bodies. & bless too,
the anti-corporate, vinegar-cleansed sponges
& menstrual cup years I bannered to take back
body and night. & let this be praised:
how his cock looked crimson sheathed,
how his face came up smeary & I tasted iron on his tongue.
Destroyers, we were—sheets, mattress,
my own sticky fingers—our carnage, &
oh, that muscled relief of coming.
& then the just-after, cleaned-out days,
follicular, ovules burst, dropping luteal.
Call this bat shit nostalgic, but here’s to the crazy-making
late months, that haze of calculation & fret,
stalled in doorways practicing conversations I didn’t want.
Once, on my knees in a summer field, I prayed.
Then the stain of forgiveness, like blessing.
Here, right now, an official thank you
to every public library, office, gas station, airplane,
restaurant, concert port-o-potty, state park bathroom
where, behind latched stalls, I angled in
smooth cardboard & also, too, to strangers,
ladies who helped when I was an empty purse,
not a scrounged coin to turn the metal dispensary
for this nest I shed month after month
after year after decade like it was nothing,
a tag-along, the occasional phew, other times the rebuke,
fertility failure, but never once did I acknowledge
did I really consider, what it gave the rest of me:
brain, skin, bones, tissues, memory, sleep, mood,
until it was gone. For months. Then back.
Back out of whack rollercoaster of a coda,
odd day, whole month wallops uncontainable,
dinners or meetings unfinished before torrent,
final rampage, this sorcery of woman
the ancients believed could stop lightening.
And then it stopped. Really. Forever. Period.
You can read Lucille Clifton's "to my last period" here:
https://poets.org/poem/my-last-period
Wow. That is a blast of a poem.
Posted by: Terence Winch | December 17, 2022 at 10:13 AM