Many-Storied House: Poems

Night of the Mysteries

70 Upstairs  My Room Night of the Mysteries 1. It’s April and I’ve just turned eleven one spring night when pain wakes me. I get up and see blood in the bed. Shaking I wake my mother who says it’s nothing. She fishes in a drawer for an elastic contraption then takes a bandage from a turquoise box I have seen in her closet. In the bathroom she threads thin ends of the Kotex through the fastener then has me take off my clown pajama bottoms and step into the future. She can’t say this is nature’s Upstairs  My Room 71 way of preparing you to have a baby someday. She can’t say welcome to the mystery. She can’t even say this will happen again every month in fact until you are older than I am. No one gave her the words. She just says “It’s all right. Go to bed. You’ll feel better in the morning.” 2. I can’t sleep, the sheet cold and wet, the center of me knotting and throbbing. I get up and take a towel from the bathroom cupboard. I spread it out and climb back in, bolt awake. This isn’t my body. It isn’t. That’s why it hurts. And why isn’t Mother worried? If my brother woke up bleeding, I think, she would call Dr. Foley, who would tell her 72 Upstairs  My Room to meet him at the hospital or who’d come by in the morning with his black bag and pills. (I am right about this, but not for any reason I can imagine.) 3. Cold with fear, hot with pain I go back to Mother’s bedside. In the smoky room, radio voices splinter into static. Daddy rolls over, interrupting a snore. Mother opens her eyes. “You’re growing up, “ she says. “Take two aspirins and come get in bed with us.” I do. That’s the worst. She puts me in between where once perhaps was comfort, but now shame is red clotted with jewels and I am trapped in my body in their bed. ...