Five years old, there was a day that I bled
and told no one.
I squeezed my finger into a paper towel,
soaking it deep. I was a painter’s daughter
cleaning a brush. And I was red cinnabar.
The stain was a portrait of myself. I tore it
out of the cloth
and, pressed in glass,
made it into a slide.
I had a child’s microscope,
and in it saw myself
as an image. I saw my insides.
I could have written my name in silent blood then,
awed. The word in my own hand.
I have since tried to write
in images. At seventeen I squeezed red
cinnabar onto my palette beside a pile of yellow ochre.
A painter’s daughter,
I cleaned my brush on a paper towel, careful,
but never made a canvas.
Sealed shut, I wasn’t menstruating.
I couldn’t even
prick my finger then, so my guts stayed within. I held myself tightly
and searched for the truth—nothing
else warranted being written in blood.
Nothing else could touch my open hands
without profaning them.
A long time later I noticed that I had been in pain,
a child that had chosen to look at herself
magnified 10,000 times
instead of crying.
