Goddess of Blood

Many pagans believed in the five sacred mysteries of blood: birth, menarche, pregnancy and birthing, menopause, and death.

Birth
You rode in on your mother’s
tidal prayer. I baptized you
in vernix and blood.

Menarche
I came to you again at ten—
such a rusty entrance, a door
swinging open. You stopped
diving into snow dunes long enough
to put on one of your aunt’s pads
then head back out into the Cleveland night.

Soon after my monthly visitations
held the fecund smell of ritual.
No perfume or pad could ever deny me.
Your prayers, dependable and mundane:
please, stop the cramps… but I packed white pants.
You would plead, I would do what I pleased—
mapping the universe within you.

Pregnancy and Birthing
After eight years of marriage
I swelled the fruit of you. It was
spring and you bloomed like
Washington’s magnolias
laden with possibility—
the madder matter of me
folding and cleaving inside you.
Months later, you blossomed a girl
child. Beatific in hematic glory, two
years later you produced a son. For
my sacrifice, a carmine current soaked
the delivery bed. Later, your breasts
swelled with sustenance, giving you a
taste of my power. Your prayers shined
with a new reverence. Bending down,
you would sniff your babies’ crowns
looking for my scent.

Menopause
Decades later, you’ve come to value
my sanguine sovereignty. As I take
my slow exit—I have become
an ordering of the unpredictable.
At the midnight altar of your bed
I anoint you—rivulets of sweat running
down your softening body.

Death
And when death comes
will you be a wrung sponge?
Will you see how alive I made you,
how I made you bleed?

________

Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of Haint, (Gival Press) winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. She has received fellowships to attend Cave Canem, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, the Community of Writers Workshop and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her work can be read in many anthologies and journals including: Not Without Our Laughter: poems of joy, humor, and sexuality and Poetry Ireland Review and Tin House.