When I bleed, my modes self-expression stretch infinitely deeper than words can reach—my hands demand to speak; in sinew and string, in cedar leaf and soup pots. I stitch and stir in rhythm with the wind, and sway my hips in serpentine circles, conjuring a world beyond the one in which we live.
When I bleed, I dream of dark flowers, sun-drenched rooftops, and fragrant magnolias, beckoning. Time slips away, and I understand that this moment is good. I remember the pace at which my body was made to move, slow like honey. My skin glows golden, grows gilded like leaves which tremble with the hot kiss of the sun whose light is both the first and the last.
When I bleed, I am my mother, and her mother, and her mother before her. I am all my unborn children, and I am my children’s children. Both ancestors and descendants breathe, speak, live through me; through us. I dissolve into the entirety of the time and the place which holds me and see beyond its boundaries, which are flimsy in fact.
Within us all is this power, for boundless is our blood in its ability to return us home to ourselves and our instincts; to return us home to the Earth, which beckons.
