Christa Forster
Jeanne Bessette
(REVELATION)
Last month, as I was changing my tampon,
about a half a cup of my menstrual blood
fell from me to the faculty bathroom floor.
In the stall next door to where this revelation
occurred, one of my colleagues sat and shat
(I could hear her snips plopping into the bowl,
smell a dusk rising from her inner dark).
Checking beneath the partition, I eyed
her black flats, solidly squared, cleaned
up my mess, wondering if she witnessed.
Though the scarlet lining of my uterus still
sheds, now it defies the rules (la regla
it’s called in Español): suddenly bloody one day,
then nothing for months to follow. My womb’s fruits
are two tweenagers now, frightening in their ripening.
As if a chalice inside me accidentally smashed,
the applicator must have sucked out substance
as I shot the cotton in. No one wants to see this:
rogue roughness gushing from a woman’s sex,
despite that we’re here because of it—when
it works like clockwork, ticking neatly—the
grossness transformed into tongues and ears
and eyes, a mess become flesh, bones and breath.
It’s nothing to fear, this apocalypse inside me.
LETTER
It’s winter. I’m sick, naturally.
A kind salesman tried to sell me a kumquat,
but I don’t think he arrived in time because
there’s a war on, eking out another champion.
The mothers shouldn’t be disturbed, so I walk
quietly. Perhaps their dreams will occur
to me: I hear them in their famished forms.
I know the world won’t end this time,
but I’m a little scared, and I’m never clean.
In a week, the streets will clear.
Change is uncomplicated. I can put
your stuff in storage and walk around.
Christa Forster earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, where she studied with Edward Hirsch and Adam Zagajewski and served as poetry editor of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. She has won multiple Individual Artist Grants in Literature, attended the Tin House and Naropa Summer Writing workshops, and written for and performed in live bands and theater productions, including several original one-woman shows. Her literary work has been published in print anthologies and in online literary journals. Additionally, her feature work appears in Bluestem, The Broken Plate, Cite Magazine, ellipsis... literature & art, The Houston Chronicle, The New York Times, The Round, Sanskrit, and Sculpture Magazine.