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…

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