Wednesday 12 June 2013

Episode Nine: Menstruation




We played an extract from this 1947 Walt Disney film:




We also played some of this Mooncup versus Tampon rap battle:




We didn't have time to play Christian Drake's poem, Bloodbath:




And it came in like the barking of dogs in your belly,
the lunatic dogs that bark every full moon on the dot.
The clock in you unwound, the little room collapsed,
and the blood trickled out in a thin red ribbon,
licking the white sheets.
They call it a period, but it’s really a run-on sentence
babbling on all week. It’s the definition of womanhood
reduced by repetition to the tedium of tampon commercials,
punchlines, and the day-long math test of cramps
shooting through you like swimmer’s stitches
while you’re in the middle of the river.
And I watch you fight to swim to the other side
of the bed, kicking, gasping hard between gulps of chamomile tea.
But when the blood is calm, it is beautiful
as a bone-handled knife. It dreams, and as it dreams
it drools like a baby. It’s the drip-drip of a faucet
as we go to sleep, it’s a bee beating itself against the glass.
It’s a presence, not like a ghost but like a memory
in your skin, changing the pitch and timbre
of your body to my ear as I pull my fingers across
your belly and you find my lips in the dark like a magnet
and I slip my fingers through your hair as gently as thoughts
and you say,
“Baby, not tonight. I’m on my period.”
And I say,


Baby, I will make love to you until we look like a war zone.
Give me the sweet murder of your body
until they string up crime scene tape across the bedroom,
because period sex is awesome.
I will love you like surgery and I will transplant your heart.
I will love you like a horror movie,
’cause it’s about to be a bloodbath in here.
Because I need a hot transfusion of your love, type A-positive
because you can’t B-negative when I’m giving you my O, O, O…
I want to surf your crimson wave,
and invite your Aunt Flow for a threesome.
I want to reverse your curse, because the Red Sox are in town.
I want to make this a “special time.”
I want to put my submarine in your Red Sea
and hunt for Red October, and do not hesitate
to ask me to go snorkeling down there.
Because if I’m going to order the finest steak,
I’m going to eat it rare.
Yeah, because I crave the taste of blood,
and I want your nerves raw like a bullet wound valentine.
And whether it’s hard or sweet, we’re going to leave
skid marks on the sheets
and handprints on the walls.
So throw that tampon in the air like a cotton Sputnik, just lob it,
’cause in the end, I want to be bloodier than John Wayne Bobbitt.
Your time of the month has perfect timing
because you open like the elevator doors in “The Shining.”
I like some ketchup when I’m dining,
but I want to taste copper like I’m dying.
So let the woman in you make a man out of me.
Let’s get unclean. Because this lovemaking is no less perfect
than the moon rising in you, and this lovemaking is the gospel music
made by the rhythm of flesh and blood and flesh and blood,
and this blood is the closest I will ever be to making love
to your insides, sailing through your veins and arteries.
This blood on my skin is the photograph I take
when I visit your heart

1 comment:

  1. http://www.thefrisky.com/2013-01-08/10-completely-outrageous-facts-about-menstruation/

    some amazing facts about menstruation!

    Most depressing is number 10. Wow.


    Hope any of our readers currently on their periods are menstruating happily and painlessly.

    ReplyDelete