girls bleed so easily
you are the roar, the scream. the howl, the distance between us, the invisible line, the first day, the last sunrise, the tomorrow of every lover, the forest of my memories, you are my grandmother, my birth, my age, my yesterday, my fate, my broken promises, my blessed tomorrows, my living and dying. you are the youngest girl, the oldest witch, the ugliest hag, the wisest crone, the infinite sage, you are my motherless infant, my empty breast, my holiness. my shame. my stillbirth, my unholy matrimony. you are the book of destiny. you are the first time, the last day, the first commandment of sorry. blood was on everything.
girls bleed so easily.
you are the soles of my feet touching the earth for the first time. for the last time. you are my crucible, my defence, my guilt. you are my madness, my benediction, my death. my living and dying. my meat. you are my terrible loneliness, the last breath, the hush at the end of the world. my purgatory. my ashes.
girls bleed so easily.
what red? what garden? what scream? what rage? what mouth? what body? what killing? what lies? what cruciform? what madness? what war? what rape? what dream? what lover?
and the music kept on playing and Joan of Arc kept on burning and the haunted world kept on breathing and the blood was on everything.
the facts aren’t written in stone, I say,
don’t make this into something terrible, he says,
death is a hole in an empty eye, I say,
I exist in this poem of incertitude,
life and death conjoined at the beastly heart,
I’m trapped in a dream where even blood speaks,
and nouns bleed and lines pour out in red.
and a poem is home to an orphan, and an exile. and a bleeding woman.
this poem is my claim, my crucible, my culpability, my remorse.
this poem is my innocence. my perfection, my deficiency, my defects,
this poem is my rectitude, my truth, my debt, my mother. my destiny, my root, my mother tongue. it’s my howling, my garden. it’s my Invisible lines, my journey, my inland. this poem is my ancestor’s dream, my defence, my witness, my blood, and my bones.
fuck the beast of gentle ferocity,
girls bleed so easily.
Paulette C Turcotte © 2023
(for the bloody speak that will never be, words censored before they reach the tongue, for the loss of woman culture, for a world in peril, for the penalty of blood. and for martyred women everywhere.)
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