by Susan diRende
History of My Relationship with My Reproductive Tract
1. Menarche, the Technicolor Version:
Age 11. No one told me about periods, about an inner space of blood. I was wearing white pants. When it started, I had been sitting on the ground waiting for the bus for 30 minutes. I don’t know if anyone saw I was splattered red as a Rorschach card but when I noticed, I walked home. I was terrified that I would be discovered. Shame and blood and death.
2. When the Sisterhood Goes Wrong:
the tampon is a strange contraption, cotton inside cardboard inside cardboard. The tampon and holder resemble the Apollo rockets we watched on TV: long cylinders that jettison pieces and spend most of their time in darkness. I can’t find where to fit it. My Auntie tries to help, finds no path to the vagina, “maybe you just don’t have the right hole.” Now I own another reason I am defective. A sixth grade girl asks if I am excused from gym because Aunt Flo is visiting. I blink repeatedly; I don’t have an Aunt Flo. The girls laugh.
3. When the Sisterhood Goes Right:
With my daughter, we talk about periods and why they happen starting a few years ahead. At her menarche, I give her a present: a silver necklace of The Goddess held within a crescent moon. Celebration toast, just the two of us: I welcome her to a long line of women stretching through earth’s history and tell her even if it hurts sometimes, her period shows she has a miraculous body that can build a shelter for another entire human being when needed.
4. Adolescence, The What the Fuck Years:
Everyone seems unreasonably interested in Down There, including me. Most of my interest is confusion with some loathing there but excitement and arousal come around on the carousel, too. I take my Lust out to long tea times, with my dear friend, Dissociation. People worry about the way I stare off into space and don’t seem to hear them.
At sixteen, I was date raped. He dumped me out of his car at a Zoo. I belong.
5. Twenties, Perception of Pollution:
Restless sleep:
I dream
a man’s gigantic hand
thrust down
from night clouds
seizes my naked form
imprisons my pale-skinned frame
I gleam like a pallid firefly
the hand becomes a fist
squeezes me
like a lemon
effluvial river
pours out
from the inverted V
of my limp legs
a cascading red-brown flow
menstrual blood body parts
bones mud
I dream-recognize my odor
estuary at low tide:
smell of decay salt/semen
rotted sea creatures
watery muck
I am a bog monster
corrupted
an entropic smear
of soiled flesh
When I awake,
my body
hollow
polluted
emptied
walks by hard concentration
conscious signals laser-beam
from my brain
“raise legs alternately
push yourself forward
work the marionette
of the body”
I
smile
when required
and daub pink crescent lips
onto my papier–mâché face
6. Age 30, Gratitude for My Female Flesh:
My daughter sheltered in a flesh home, made of me.
A red sea inside myself, your realm.
At nine months, you and I and the animal of my body struggled together
Salt, heat, blood, pain
you emerged, cried
we knew each other
the first moment, deep sync of recognition
nothing mattered before
now everything illuminates
because of your unique breath
nothing will ever matter as much as you do
my body’s cells feel yours
like I feel my own body
7. My Prime Years – Strange, Mad and Bloody
when my divorce came through
I perched on my back porch,
slugged champagne, dragon-exhaled cigar smoke
Oh, you pink-purple sex parts, where you led me!
I had a younger ‘blues singer in a band’ lover
we blurred ourselves with intoxicants and sex
into moments of oblivious peace
selfish trance
I woke up
when I spun out my car
I had a steely gray-haired captivator-lover
always intensifying sensation, always trying a new dare
but his touch had
aggression and deterioration
hidden in the hand bones
he threw my cat
I threw him out
My body rebelled
strange and mad
I should have had another normal period,
but cramps worse than labor
for days I doubled over,
pain to near-blackout
then, in the toilet bowl
a ghost echo of my uterus
a triangle of gelled blood
a sangria colored clot
trailing a flesh rope
like a beige-pink string
threaded into a crimson Jello heart:
a decidual cast
decidual, from the same root as deciduous
a tree shedding leaves
my body pushed out
my entire endometrium
at one go
My uterus’ communique:
This whirlwind of men
is not for us
I am not the whole of you
let go, let go.
8. Age, late 50’s, This Seed is Different:
Menopause
Nearly 500 times, 500 periods,
my uterus
told my ovaries,
“Not this time –
I am dissolving the garden
that waited
to nurture the fruit”
In my early 50’s
I go beyond menstrual cycles
my uterus is retired
doing its version of sipping margaritas poolside
I am a stranger to Sister Moon
but sometimes
a Jackson Pollock spatter of blood on a panty liner
sometimes rosy water in the toilet bowl
like being 40 again.
I was supposed to be
DONE.
I thought the pink flesh burrow
dry as a bone
yet showers of blood
bloom scarlet blossoms
on the desert of me.
Like an émigré back to the homeland,
I revisit heating pads and Advil –
then doctors, ultrasound, biopsy,
(instruments travel painfully up a One Way –
the uterus invaded by
crazy drivers steering wrong-wise
up the off-ramp)
the pictures show
my endometrium as
silhouette of a mountain range
the biopsy shows evidence
insurgents are proliferating,
making base camp
in my cave of cells.
Surgery.
They find an endometrial tumor –
size of a grapefruit seed, an almond,
a Necco wafer
they were not specific
other than the cancer
was not in uterine muscle
or other reproductive parts,
nor lymph nodes,
not in the dark void spaces
of the abdomen,
only in the plush lining
hiding there in
my later, distorted version
of that red uterine blanket
that cradled my sleeping baby
before her birth.
Post-surgery
Tired, sore
I feel like I am at the bottom
of an escalator at an airport
my uterus, ovaries, cervix and fallopian tubes
have gone beyond
a secure perimeter
I cannot breach, and as
I turn to walk away
I feel an eerie twinge
of turbulence
like when my daughter moved to a city
on the opposite coast
I felt excited – a new chapter!
I missed her
like my ribs
wrenched out
from my chest
but felt relief, too –
the responsibility for care, aid and rescue
lightened
but also afraid, because
we still need each other
in our deepest down selves
in another way I felt
no strong emotion
because I knew she would always be in me
and me, in her
I waved
numb confused
goodbye
I am afraid
if I let myself feel
I might
get tangled in a net
of nots
9. The Last Decades – Light, Fire, Ashes:
I am the breath that created generations – I gave life
but I am more than what was removed
Uterus cervix tubes and ovaries
flamed in an incinerator
I exist I am always hot
I am a burning torch
O Seeker, I am the
mottled embers
of the fires
that foretell
the future
Look, my
smoke
drifts
still
into
our
air
Deborah Rosch Eifert (@EifertPoetry) is a Pushcart-nominated poet, clinical psychologist, and the author of the newly released chapbook Sewn from Water, from Uncollected Press. Her work has been published in several anthologies as well as in Whiskey Island Quarterly, Constellations, Cathexis Northwest and The Gateway Review, among other journals. She has won an Editor’s Choice award from Formidable Woman Sanctuary Press, was named Poet of the Month by Flying Ketchup Press, was a semifinalist in the 2018 Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition, and First Runner-up in the 2018 Esthetic Apostle Chapbook Contest. Deborah’s poetry explores trauma, healing, transformation and empowerment. Deborah’s current obsessions include seals, feminist poetry, her Italian heritage and trying to find decent cannoli in Maine.
Author/artist Susan diRende travels the world with no fixed abode. She has won awards for her writing including the 2017 Special Citation for Excellence by the Philip K Dick Awards. Her artwork has had exhibitions in New Zealand, Belgium, Mexico, and the US. Most recently, she has had writing and artwork published in The Dewdrop, the Pine Hills Review, and The Gaze Journal.