i know, kid: it can't be any fun for them to tell you
that you're almost a woman now, that just because
you're sitting in what's going to become a pool
of your own blood that this means you can have babies
and it's a sign you're growing up--

who needs any of that ****...but how much
worse could it get has been spared you because
you didn't see what i did, your friend finding
the pencil case you had your ****-pad in only to have
no clue what the hell it was, so she waved it in the air
and said that she'd found someone's diaper, and what else
was i going to do but laugh within as i cried at her
innocence if that's what you wanted to call it--

but you can't blame her, she weighed maybe eighty pounds if that, maybe toward the end of this year, maybe at the
beginning of the next one, maybe that's when she'd find out
just like you did, the hard way, the messy way, the way
lots of little girls found out because no one wanted to
have that talk with them--

so i thought about my own mother and the day she'd
decided to tell me and how i'd held her responsible
for this horror she was disclosing, how i'd lost my mind
in a way because it's not like i could ever feel close
to women ever again, not knowing what this curse was that
nature had cast upon them, upon you all--

but was this what made a woman, or was it the breaking
of the *****?--was it getting married, having a baby, paying
taxes, being destroyed by others around you, having to rebuild your life up from nothing, looking around and finding no one around whom you could trust, no one you
wanted to trust?--

everyone seemed to have their own idea of what it was to
be a woman, and what with all the rites of passage, and
everyone having their own definition of what was what, and
with everyone being different anyway and chiming in about
solidarity even as they preached individuality, you could
play semantics with them till your head fell off, till the toll of the final bell, till you had enough like i had--

so that menstrual blood and ****-pads and the embarrassment of everything that surrounded "the talk" and everyone finding out what you were (that you weren't a little girl anymore), all paled when placed against what was still awaiting you because i have only listed those things i know
anything about, for they can happen to anyone--

and you  will endure this cycle until your body begins to fail and falter,
until you enter what they'll call a new phase of life because no one wants to call it what it is,
which is the unraveling of the body as incarnated in the form of woman, which you have only just begun to begin to understand you are--

the flower unfolding, the flower dying even as it unfolds,
it just takes time, and from here i can tell you, don't
leave that friend behind, the one who still thinks a
****-pad is a diaper because soon enough she'll need you,
and your eyes will exchange things i will never know--