The Blood

She had the blood, too. Bathtubs filled

to enameled lip and her body

pouring. As a girl, I thought being

a woman meant your life spilling from you

like a cup of juice you kept knocking over.

I was young enough to think anything

that bled was a wound. The moon

waited like a round-faced witness

in the window each month, steam

erasing the mirrors and the walls

weeping. All night the tap running

and running. I wanted to know

how pain made a woman

curl like a pill bug poked with a stick.

I wanted to know everything about suffering

so I could avoid it. I was young enough

to think things like that, seven years

small, when calamity was skinned knees and little

brothers and an upturned sundae

crashing to the floor like a chandelier.

All I knew of disaster was Hollywood

movies where houses were swallowed

easy as bubblegum and spaceships

hovered like gnats out of reach—ruin always

at a distance—and you could press your face into

your mother and everything would be all right

once you turned on the lights.

Sometimes, now, when the ache comes

and I am coiled in dark water, I remember

that distant self like a daughter

I gave up or lost in a bustling

food court and never saw again,

the remembering painful.

And sometimes I wonder if she knew

why her blood came angrier

than any other’s, blood like my blood,

which now seethes and conspires and appears

on MRI scans like a black eye or a crop circle

or the earth’s eager void.