[Written By: Jennifer Constable]
[Photographer: Gabriela Saldanha Blackwood]
How accomplished are we, to possess the
means to loop a leash on Mother Nature herself.
No more “accidental leaking” and goodbye to
those days spent doubled over our duvets.
At last! We have outsmarted our own bodies,
no longer to be enslaved to the sullen waves of
hormonal tides and currents of cramps that toss us side to side
in a monthly cycle of aches and pains to be braved in silence.
We are now prescribed our silver foiled sachets of
twenty-eight pink hued pearls, popped
into the innermost pockets of our purses;
discreet and dainty like the pamphlets had promised.
We have scheduled each bodily function to
be timed to our exact convenience.
How naive were we, to believe that leash would be
looped on Mother Nature so easily.
Those peals that once held so much wonder
now sit weighted in ever-younger wombs of
calcified cysts and infantile tubes blocked with
clots from the bleeds we’d thought we’d managed to staunch.
The aches and pains we endured still exist now
paired with the constant panic of something which
burns just below the surface. The hormonal tides still turn
ever more turbulent as we struggle to keep our heads above water.
Blindly, we ingest those pink orbs like polymer prayers to
swell our stomachs and bloat our breasts
until every inch of our skin has been
stretched over limbs made puffy by our own pride;
the artificial regulation of our own menstrual system,
that we thought was ours to command.
