bloodletting.

on femicide and my exhaustion.

noomi rapace in you won’t be alone (2022).

i’m being emptied of blood.

My cunt aches and blood is pouring out of me.

To lessen my discomfort I switch positions: fetal, on my back, and now my stomach. I shift with the weight of my dog curled atop my pelvis, my heart echoing steadily if I press my ear to my pillow.

My period has always been a raw event. It’s just so intense. It is akin to the Macedonian witches of You Won’t Be Alone (2022): curling your fingers into your soft flesh to tear it open and place someone else’s heart inside.

I study the blood clots that slip gently out of me as if they are apologizing for the pain that’s destabilized me through every moment before this one.

I can’t lift myself out of the bloodletting fog I find myself in. Everything makes me cry. I feel strained and unmoored, floating aimlessly through my routine so that I can at least feel productive and therefore of value.

Normally this is just the first day and then the second is softer, just a more fervent loss of blood but devoid of either the familiar hands of headaches or cramps. I have three more days and I count down and find that they overlap with the day I leave home for my third year of university.

Normally this is just the first day. Lately, it has been every day minus the menstruating.

Every morning, I shudder awake from convoluted dreams I write down and analyze later. I steadfastly avoid my phone. I just can’t take another headline. Every morning it is another woman who is brutally murdered, assaulted, abused, etc. Every morning it’s thoughts and prayers. Every morning it’s a new story that is twisted into a learning lesson for women on either how to make ourselves smaller or how to rehabilitate men.

It takes everything inside of me not to spit in the average man’s face because that is not fair but I am just so angry. Even in my anger, I’m aware of men’s feelings and how I must conduct myself to make space for them and the violence that can come with them.

When the man is in the room,
you are not a woman.
You are stew. You are tea.
Your place, it is inside his palm.
You trickle out.
Like water,
you trickle out and around him.
But when you are with women in the room,
your mouth, it should never stop opening.
When you are with women...
You are a looking-glass.
When her eyebrows lift up,
yours, you lift them up, too.
When her eyes go wide,
yours, you make them go wide, too.
To the woman, you are glass.
To the man, you are water. — You Won’t Be Alone (2022)

irving penn. nude torso, soaping (detail), 1978.

I’m not sure what broke the dam: the woman whose husband drugged and enlisted men to rape her or the Ugandan Olympian who was burned to death by her boyfriend.

Even now writing this I’m tearing up. It’s not fair. It’s not fair that there are a million vicious ways my life could end because I came out of my mother with a cunt between my thighs.

Cunt, cunt, cunt. I keep saying it over and over, the sickle shape of the ‘c’ cutting my tongue. I push it out and I love how ugly it sounds because I want to be ugly and hard and difficult. It’s not like being nice and beautiful will save me. I’m damned either way.

I write constantly about being a difficult woman because it is my last defense against the world. I am so angry, do you understand?

I ranted to my mother in the kitchen about how part of what keeps me out of love is being terrified. I felt as though the world had split apart, right down the middle, when my mother said, “Don’t let this convince you that every man is like this. There are good men in the world.”

Maybe she is right and she is trying to keep some hope in the world. My mother is always right about things, but sometimes it has to come back to me for it to be true. Right now, this statement feels far away from me because I don’t know that for sure.

These days almost every man I meet has been indoctrinated by incel rhetoric or extreme alt-right rhetoric. I have lost all trust of them and I fear I am losing empathy for them. I read the words “male loneliness epidemic” and all I keep thinking of is the young girls slaughtered in their dance class. Did he do that because he was lonely?

What is it about me, about us, that incites violence? What is it about us that inflames the urge to violate and descrate? I know the answers everyone gives: submission, control. I know but that can’t be only it. I brush away the “they want our ability to create life” excuse because you hate me even more if I don’t have a child.

To be a woman in this world is to be a wasteland. Even from the beginning of time. Lilith was a demon because she refused to lay beneath Adam. Eve damned us all because she ate the apple, though it was Adam’s responsibility to “protect” her from sin.

I just don’t understand the entitlement and the hatred. I just don’t understand. I just—

We are policed constantly. We live in a state of brutality and we must drag life and joy into us from beneath the earth so that we can live through it.

pinterest.

My first experience of being loved was through my mother (and father) and no one will ever love me like she (they) can.

My first love was my best friend slotted in between the large halls of Catholic school, the echoing expanse of the chapel every Friday and the velvet-crushed silence of the confession vestibule.

My first thought of desire, one not instilled into me by the Bible, was linked to the curve of a woman’s breast and the crease of her thigh as she bent and twisted over herself to get ready for bed. My first heartbreak was a text crafted by the elegant fingers belonging to a woman the color of soaked earth who I forgive every day because I loved her.

I envision two wedding days, two versions, and I know in the version in which I have a wife she loves me more than he ever can. When I picture trust it is in the shape of my best friend’s throat as she swallows down what I don’t tell anyone else. When I picture birth it is a daughter. When I picture heaven it is Mary, Eternal Virgin. When I picture death, I see my grandmother.

I am losing the battle against loving men. It inspires shame, curling hot and deep in my gut. I am ashamed and I don’t know why but I know it’s because I’m angry at myself for trying to be kind and hold out for better.

I’m angry that my feminity is difficult not only because of how I remain firm and offer men no excuse but also because I still leave space for the good in a man because I have seen it and I cannot help it.

I’m angry that I still experience attraction and picture myself in relationships with them because they can hurt me. I’m furious that I still want to trust them.

And I don’t know where I’m meant to put it down.

What will I do when my dad dies? What will I do when I no longer can find any good men?

The answer is to be on my own, as I came into the world and how I will end. I’m grateful that I was split into two by God, and that I can love a woman just as firmly—sometimes more deeply.

Because I’m exhausted, I am tired of waiting for men to be good, of being told not to let myself be rightfully afraid of who men can be because of the anomalies.

I am in pain constantly, whether it is my menstrual cycle or the news one.

I made the right choice, I think, in not having children. Because what if it’s my daughter coming back to me burned and violated beyond recognition?

I will implode, softly and violently.

I think of a dream I had in which I had a child and she looked up at me, wet with my blood and fluid. She smiled and I knew what I had named her. We were in the water together and I was naked, my legs spread as she wiggled between them. The salt of the ocean stung and I let it. And then I pushed her out, further into the foam and she disappeared. My final act before waking up was peeling my uterus out of me and pushing it out too.

I got up and walked, empty and tender and free. I was a vision in the sun: bright, wet, soaped with pink water-diluted blood and whatever was left of me. When I woke up, I still knew what I had named her.

Do you understand? I don’t care about the good men anymore.

---

“Good morning,” I whisper, forehead pressed to my dog’s old, worn body. “I am difficult and strong. Do you love me?”

He raises himself to kiss me. He is warm. We breathe together and it lulls him back to sleep. Good morning, I say again silently.

I touch my breasts, thumb at my sore nipples, and then slide my hand down to the small of my back where a small sun of pain radiates.

This is me: Woman Still Alive.

I reach down further and go into myself, then pull my hand back up. In the light, it glistens.

It’s damp and bright red. Second day. Less agony.

And life goes on.

THREE WOMEN: a poem for three voices (sylvia plath)

wounds of the earth by xis.lanyx.