Menstruation In May - Erica Jong

Deaths & betrayals,
a friend having her breasts cut off,
a friend having his heart re-wired,
a husband lying,
a lover never writing,
& all this in the middle of May.

I walk out in the green wind of Spring.
The air whistles at my calves
like silk stockings—
my grandmother's silk stockings
kept in a drawer—
& whispering songs of the twenties.

My breasts ache,
my heart skips over cracks,
my womb pulls earthward
with its heavy blood.
I seem to be attached to those I love
by chains of flesh.
Perhaps the mind lacks empathy enough;
the body has to bleed as well.

                        ☙

I can't imagine them cutting you apart—
I with my endless dreams of torture,
who lay awake nights with my eyelids screaming
all childhood long.

I never saw your breasts
yet I can't imagine you without them.

All week I have been fondling my nipples,
half in terror, half in pleasure.
Stay, flesh, stay.
If it is all we have,
especially,
stay.

                        ☙

Is there a poetry of blood
where lines are arms lopped off
& stanzas are whole bodies opened wide?
Is there an art which pains us
just like life?

I squeeze my breast
for the invisible ink of milk.
I bear down hard—
no baby's head appears.

The poems keep flowing monthly
like my blood.

The word is flesh, I say,
still unconvinced.

The flesh is flesh.
The word is on its own.



[From:
Jong, E. (1973) Fruits and Vegetables. London: Secker and Warburg. p72 - p73]



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Martha - Audre Lorde

Martha this is a catalog of days passing before you looked again. Someday you will browse and order them at will, or in your necessities. I have taken a house at the Jersey shore this summer. It is not my house. Today the lightning bugs came. On the first day you were dead. With each breath the skin of your face moved falling in like crumpled muslin. We scraped together the smashed image of flesh preparing a memory. No words. No words. On the eighth day you startled the doctors speaking from your deathplace to reassure us that you were trying. Martha these are replacement days should you ever need them given for those you once demanded and never found. May this trip be rewarding; no one can fault you again Martha for answering necessity too well and the gods who honor hard work will keep this second coming free from that lack of choice which hindered your first journey to this Tarot house. They said no hope no dreaming accept this case of flesh as evi...
Read more

Vespers - Louise Glück (from Wild Iris)

You thought we didn't know. But we knew once, children know these things. Don't turn away now—           we inhabited a lie to appease you. I remember sunlight of early spring, embankments netted with dark vinca. I remember lying in a field, touching my brother's body. Don't turn away now; we denied memory to console you. We mimicked you, reciting the terms of our punishment. I remember some of it, not all of it: deceit begins as forgetting. I remember small things, flowers growing under the hawthorn tree, bells of the wild scilla. Not all, but enough to know you exist: who else had reason to create mistrust between a brother and sister but the one who profited, to whom we turned in solitude? Who else would so envy the bond we had then as to tell us it was not earth but heaven we were losing? [From: Glück, L. (1992) The Wild Iris . Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, p44]
Read more

To My Daughter The Junkie On A Train - Audre Lorde

Children we have not borne bedevil us by becoming themselves painfully sharp and unavoidable like a needle in our flesh. Coming home on the subway from a PTA meeting of minds committed like murder or suicide to their own private struggle a long-legged girl with a horse in her brain slumps down beside me begging to be ridden asleep for the price of a midnight train free from desire. Little girl on the nod if we are measured by the dreams we avoid then you are the nightmare of all sleeping mothers rocking back and forth the dead weight of your arms locked about our necks heavier than our habit of looking for reasons. My corrupt concern will not replace what you once needed but I am locked into my own addictions and offer you my help, one eye out for my own station. Roused and deprived your costly dream explodes into a terrible technicoloured laughter at my failure up and down across the aisle women avert their eyes as the other mothers who became usel...
Read more