my moon-time
I bleed between my legs today and ruin my clothes. I worry that when I sleep, the blood will cover my sheets and leave a child's scribble of a stain on my mattress. Every woman I know has placed this mark on mattresses, sheets, panties, and favourite pairs of pants. We fear moving, lest someone see what comes from our bodies. I remember sitting in gym-class, huddled and hiding, hoping no one would see what had happened. I remember waiting in math class in white pants, feeling blood pooling, and knowing that once I stood, everyone would see and I'd don the Scarlet Letter of shame. Someone long ago made the bleeding shameful, and we drank this bitter milk and pasted another label of self-hate for what it is to be a girl onto ourselves.

I carry an ancient pain in my womb. My mother carried it before me, and her mother, too. My father's mother bore it to bear him. The blood is an endless chain linking every woman--yea, every person--to a mother. Men are arrows, shooting forward into the future, while women are keepers of the past and holders of histories.

We spread these flowers of blood onto the places we rest, love, and heal. We pray that someone will find our wild, hungry mood swings and premenstrual tears lovely. We're afraid that we're too much to love with our heads full of smarts and dreams and our hearts lonely and ravenous in our chests. We're brave and hopeful as we plant patches of pumpkins, hoping one will grow into a coach and grand us all our wishes, our secret desires.

We dangle healing crystals from our earlobes and throats, dance in tattered denim and lace, and arch our swollen bellies to the moon. Gravity clings to our wombs to make us mothers and nurturers; the moon controls the water in our bodies, like the tides. Our wombs will always cry free to the moon. To be a woman is to be of the sky and land, to be an animal and child, all at once.

We are not arrows. We are the keepers of the quivers that shoot the arrows. We bleed sometimes because the hunt can never happen without the bloodletting. Our songs are the tales of our lives and of the love of those we've birthed unto this dirty, beautiful world. And I, with my crooked smile and hands worn smooth from work and fighting, have found someone to hold me long and fast as I bleed, to bring me soothing balms and words, and to love me all the more for being the woman that I am.

Jewel