Rubyfloetics: A Period Poem Mixtape

I wrote the poem Ruby Flo one summer during my undergraduate years. I was staying at my boyfriend’s family home because my mom and I were steady fighting. His mother didn’t really want me there. I was holed up one evening in their guest bedroom on this amazingly tall queen-sized bed overflowing with the most pristine white sheets. Here comes Flo, and I nearly freaked out with fear of flooding and slept on the floor. But alas, there was poetry between the sheets. I may have been wearing two pairs of pants when I wrote "Ruby Flo" that night, but I found the anthem I needed to sleep without shame.

I became a serious collector of the period poem in 2009, when I was seven months pregnant and hadn’t set eyes on Flo in many moons. At the time I was in Virginia attending Furious Flower’s Tell Me Your Names seminar about the work of Lucille Clifton. As I started working on an essay about Clifton’s work that had inspired my own, mainly her majestic “poem in praise of menstruation,” I came across other menstruation poems, some good, some bad, sometimes that obligatory moon reference and sometimes a bloody tampon or two. Period poems can run the full gamut; they can be life-affirming, spiritually grounding, overly sensational and catechistic. They are often misunderstood and sidestepped. But I dig them and celebrate them all because writing a poem, creating art, and speaking up and openly about menstruation continues to be a radical, subversive, and necessary act.

I’m still collecting period poems, always looking for a new take, a different voice on the most ancient of subjects. In fact, I’ve decided to make a period poem mixtape for your menstruating pain and pleasure, for your elective courses on the menstrual phenomenon in modern poetry. Press PLAY.

Day 1:

1. “poem in praise of menstruation” by Lucille Clifton. For me, this is the mother of all menstruation poems. Both sparse and rich, musical and visual, Clifton’s words are a prayer for this auspicious river, the “daughter of eve/mother of cain and of abel.”

2. “All blood is menstrual blood,” an excerpt from the poem, women are tired of the ways men bleed by Judy Grahn. Grahn goes in on blood hypocrisy. She compares “the blood/of warning, of wounding, of threat; the danger/attached to the blood of AIDS; the blood of life, of/transfusions, of redemption; the blood of Christ;/the blood of martyrdom, of St. Sebastian, of the prize/fighter depicted in the movies” with menstrual blood only seen privately and shut away “in little rooms” by women.

3. “My First Period” by Stacey Ann Chin. Not technically a poem since Chin is reading from her memoir, The Other Side of Paradise, but this is so hilarious about what it means to be ten with no clue about what to do with a maxipad that smells like “dead flowers.” Starts at 1:30 and ends at about 7:30. I love the moment when Chin’s aunt, after hearing her big announcement, just stares out at the banana trees: “I follow her gaze to the young fruits hugging themselves in a bunch.”

4. “Connecting Medium I” by Dorothea Smartt. Oh, the simplicity of this one, and the way in which Smartt gives tired moon symbolism a new coat: “reflecting in a winding river below/guiding me/thru’ sets off t.v. cop shows.”

Day 2:

5. “Menstruation at Forty” by Anne Sexton. So much has been written about this poem like an opera solo, playing all the chords of loss. As I come upon forty myself, I understand the magnificence of the phrase “November/of the body.”

6. “Cyclamen Girl” by M. NourbeSe Philip. The audio of this poem feels like a gift. Philip juxtaposes catechism with coming of age and the haunting image of a “black girl white dress.”

7. “The End” by Sharon Olds. This poem, like Smartt’s, captures the onset of a period, but this accompanying moment is anything but mundane: “Cops pulled the bodies out/Bloody as births from the small, smoking/aperture of the door.”

8. “Menstrual Hut” by Opal Palmer Adisa. Adisa flips the restricted area of the menstrual hut into a desired gathering space for women who crave “relief from work/break from men,” where they can scoff at and “squash his fear” associated with their bodies.

Day 3:

9. “Ode on Periods” by Bernadette Mayer. Mayer waves “the bloody sponge” and shuns the conventions of period poems, saying “I won’t call on the moon like in a real poem.”

10. “The name—of it—is—“Autumn” by Emily Dickinson. It seems that Emily has a poem for everything, depending on how you read them. How could anyone think that the “Scarlett Rain—/It sprinkles Bonnets—far below” was just about the Civil War?

11. “we need a god who bleeds now” by Ntozake Shange. This poem was among the first I found as a teenager, alongside Indigo’s menstrual adventures in Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo. Shange writes: “i am/not wounded i am bleeding to life.” And let’s not forget the poem “and she bleeds” in the volume Nappy Edges: “my visions are my own/my truth no less violent than necessary/to make/my daughters’/dreams as real as mensis.”

12. “She Shall Be Called Woman” by May Sarton. A long-winded, serial meditation; jump to section 10 where you discover: “There were seeds/within her/that burst at intervals/and for a little while/she could come back/ to heaviness,/ and then before a surging miracle/of blood,/relax…”

Day 4:

13. “Something to look forward to” by Marge Piercy. This is of the “suffer through it” variety but I dig the humor: “My friend Penny at twelve, being handed a napkin/the size of an ironing board cover, cried out/Do I have to do this from now till I die?”

14. “Cut” by Sylvia Plath. So many others to choose from (“Maudlin,” “Moonrise,” “Poppies in July”), but I like Hilary Holladay’s take on the bloody finger in her essay on Clifton and Plath in Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton (Louisiana State University Press, 2004). Plus, the title and subject gave me a new take on Kara Walker’s “Cut.”

15. “The Period Poem” by Dominique Christina. Like Shange, Christina was thinking about her daughter when she wrote this, “to offer her language that lifts her up and keeps her up.” Inspired by a shaming/shameful tweet, this unapologetic slam poem has gone viral.

16. “A Period Piece” by Jamilla Woods. This version won’t cling to everyone, but I dig the lighthearted tone and the wondrously delivered imagery. I also like the piece of history she includes about drug store boxes.

Day 5:

17. “to my last period” by Lucille Clifton. The fact that she likens her last period to a “hussy” in a “red dress” is just too much.

18. “Menses” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Okay, Millay...I had no idea you rolled like this. It’s a curious little thing, this poem, especially the line, “To tedious Hell this body with its muddy feet in my mind!"

19. “Tampons” by Ellen Bass. This poem is what happens when you take down the sanitary product industry: “Our blood/will neutralize the chemicals and dissolve the old car parts.”

20. “After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed” by Rita Dove. I have a new appreciation for the color pink after reading this poem, as the speaker and her daughter declare, “…we're in the pink/and the pink's in us.”