“Woman with the Issue of Blood”

Content Warning

This work depicts attempted suicide.

An image of a poem. It reads: At all hours, wine feathered through fabric, seeping, in sleep through my shawl and bedroll. Between thighs, a dark iris swelled purple, pruny, oozing the black dregs of yesterday's grape, at all hours inking my skirt hem, at all hours siphoning rosiness from my skin. Twelve years unclean, I'd touched no one, been touched only grudgingly. When I brushed against that Nazarene's fringe, how many onlookers washed their hands of me? All paused then. Nosing earth, I waited for stones to batter me, but instead my trickle slowed, course hands raised me gently. He looked a nobody, with crow's-feet furrowed around walnut eyes, lips peeling in the heat. He but spoke, and my elders walked on, curved around me as water around stone, none touching, though their eyes lingered. Who was he to call it faith (my daily emptying of purse and womb, that final reaching for a crowed to hurl stones, crush my bones––anything just to stop feeling pain)? I stood numb and watched the people crawl like bees, sun lighting up their edges, and the sky cloudless, clean and bare and terrifying.

“Woman with the Issue of Blood,” Prairie Schooner, Vol 97.1 (Spring), December 2023, pages 96-97.

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