Ode to Menopause
By Victoria Redel
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s preview coverage of Miami Book Fair (MBF) 2022! The poets whose work you’ll be reading every weekday from October 15 through November 15 are just a few of the many authors from around the world participating in this year’s MBF, the nation’s largest gathering of writers and readers of all ages. They all look forward to sharing their work, thoughts, and ideas both in person and online. Between November 13-20, new poet conversations and readings will be launched and available for free on miamibookfaironline.com (in addition to other content). For more information, visit the website and follow MBF on Instagram and Twitter at @miamibookfair and use the hashtag #miamibookfair2022.
I miss the blood. The plush, thick insistence. Lunar declaration, my flag. Then years living together, mysterious reconciling, not that we were always a sister nation, didn’t bitch, get bitchy, blame everything on a knot that bellied down, rumped me to my knees. & those gym passes, Coach too embarrassed to challenge how it stretched on for weeks. Now I’m missing cash registers where I averted my eyes, the rectangle box a public admission, & yes, let’s bless the shyness of teenage boys bagging, handing back change & what happened between us, a moment, electric—what was it? —cringe, tease, apology, brag— that we were actually bodies walking around with the whole screwy, beautiful, damaged human history of bodies. & bless too, the anti-corporate, vinegar-cleansed sponges & menstrual cup years I bannered to take back body and night. & let this be praised: how his cock looked crimson sheathed, how his face came up smeary & I tasted iron on his tongue. Destroyers, we were—sheets, mattress, my own sticky fingers—our carnage, & oh, that muscled relief of coming. & then the just-after, cleaned-out days, follicular, ovules burst, dropping luteal. Call this bat shit nostalgic, but here’s to the crazy-making late months, that haze of calculation & fret, stalled in doorways practicing conversations I didn’t want. Once, on my knees in a summer field, I prayed. Then the stain of forgiveness, like blessing. Here, right now, an official thank you to every public library, office, gas station, airplane, restaurant, concert port-o-potty, state park bathroom where, behind latched stalls, I angled in smooth cardboard & also, too, to strangers, ladies who helped when I was an empty purse, not a scrounged coin to turn the metal dispensary for this nest I shed month after month after year after decade like it was nothing, a tag-along, the occasional phew, other times the rebuke, fertility failure, but never once did I acknowledge did I really consider, what it gave the rest of me: brain, skin, bones, tissues, memory, sleep, mood, until it was gone. For months. Then back. Back out of whack rollercoaster of a coda, odd day, whole month wallops uncontainable, dinners or meetings unfinished before torrent, final rampage, this sorcery of woman the ancients believed could stop lightening. And then it stopped. Really. Forever. Period.
Victoria Redel is a first-generation American author of four books of poetry and five books of fiction, most recently Paradise (Four Way Books, 2022) and the novel Before Everything. Victoria’s work has been widely anthologized, awarded, and translated in ten languages. Her debut novel, Loverboy (2001) was adapted for feature film directed by Kevin Bacon. Redel’s short stories, poetry and essays have appeared in Granta, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bomb, One Story, Salmagundi, O, and NOON, among many others. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center. Victoria is a professor in the graduate and undergraduate Creative Writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.
"Ode to Menopause" is from Paradise (Four Way Books, 2022). The author and press grant permission.
**We do our best to preserve the integrity of each poem; however, due to programming limitations, some poems may read differently on a mobile phone and in certain browsers. For best viewing, use Chrome on a desktop/laptop.
This is just incredible.