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Blood

A Poem About Menstruation

By Cicely BlainPublished 7 years ago 2 min read
Top Story - August 2017
4

I bleed.

It’s not quiet.

Not a pitter-patter of summer raindrops on gossamer rooftops.

It is not shy.

It is a raging fire than burns through oppressive cloths that marks its territory with crimson coughs. It is a river that flows and flows and rests only for life to grow.

It is loquacious, it is unapologetic. It yearns to flood between my thick black thighs but instead is held captive by whiteness; soaked up by violent insertions, perversions of the beautiful lunar melody that sings like a siren on the rocky shores of femininity.

I am purposed by the moon to drip this liquid gold yet my blood is only acceptable when drawn by your blade.

You can worship the thirst for blood in white washed representations of mythical manifestations yet you cannot respect the blood that gushes from my life-giving warmth.

You can smear the blood of poor children in desert landscapes in the name of patriotism yet you cannot love this sanguine regularity that races like fiery celestial bodies into a black and soundless abyss.

You laugh at the chainsaw gore; the fruit seed spatters of scarlet on walls of fake basements and arrhythmic F sharp violins and chaste breaths in bleak forest yet you cannot acquiesce to the molten rose petals that form sacred bouquets.

You yearn for the first blood of a veiled woman, pierced by your phallic colonisation, for it to stain your white embroidered sheets on the day she has given her whole self to you, yet you cannot appreciate the silky fluid that dances like star beams on woven fields.

You are jealous.

It is more punctual than you, has seen more intimate places of my carnal entity than you will ever touch, connects me in infinite and unfathomable ways to sisters who I’ve known just days.

Fuck you.

Fuck you for all the times you made me bleed when I wasn’t meant to.

Fuck you for all the times I didn’t wear white pants.

Fuck you for the shame and secrecy, for the twelve years of shackles on my lips when I wanted to say the word ‘period’ and the ivory soap with which you washed my tongue, replacing my own fragrant vowels with stinking lies and apologetic sighs at pharmacy counters and in gym class and behind bike sheds.

Fuck you for…everything.

I am not your sterile, fluidless doll…

I am human. I breath air, I bite apples, I am a mosaic of chemical revolutions and when I cut myself I am strengthened, I find serenity in the swift swimming of cells, once jailed up in this brown body I have been taught to hate.

I bleed a manifesto of raspberry revolutions, I summon gods and banish demons with chestnut aggravation, I write poetry, I sing anthems, I rhyme alliterations, I’ve solved war and poverty and hyperinflation,

Yet I am injusticed for one thing:

ovulation.

slam poetry
4

About the Creator

Cicely Blain

queer, femme, writer, artist.

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  • Nicole Caldwell2 years ago

    Damn, that's good. 💜💜💜

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