Menstruation is a topic of particular interest for feminist research, because women’s experiences of it are so overlaid with myth, rumor and hearsay. It’s very strange to be studying and writing about something we can’t bring up in polite company. It’s disorienting, edgy in what can be a truly creative way. The powerful taboo against speaking of our actual menstrual experiences contributes, I think, to the fuzziness of our knowledge about it. It’s almost as if we are discredited by the genuine thing. We must distance ourselves, regard it “objectively,” as if we were men.
What if we write about it from the inside out, instead? What does our actual direct experience of menstruation, of menstrual cycles, contribute to our knowledge of life, our approach to other aspects of our experience? I’d like to start this exploration with a poem I wrote while I was working to finish my dissertation—during one of those dry times when what I knew I wanted to say seemed stuck somewhere.
Writing/From a premenstrual perspective
Just start
separate off a piece
cut it off and let it go
Nothing ever finishes
only rolls on and on
over and over
My womb is rolling over
a promissory note that comes due monthly
beginning a new cyle of borrowing
It is not an organized process.
Lysis: each cell a broken grocery bag
spewing out its contents
a release of energy
Flowing is letting go
of something you don’t need anymore.
I want to flow like a mountain stream
crackling cold and clear
hurling myself in a delicious slide
meeting each obstacle as merely
another angle from which to flow
But I am a woman
Sometimes I flow tears and sometimes blood
so fucking slow
It is not a process I have learned.
I have only learned to inhibit it.
The memory of indescribable humiliation is programmed
into my muscles to reinforce the habit of holding back.
I wonder what it does to them to experience each month
a slow leak beyond their control?
I have been taught to compose, to be composed.
Approval given to those forces in me that maintain order
A horror of decomposition.
But I carry in me a time for that, a time to discard.
I need to let it happen/ and catch it on the page…
