levelheaded: I recommend talking seductively about your period

The subtext of the recommendation to talk “seductively” about your period is that women cannot talk directly about menstruation. Perhaps this inability derives from our male-dominated culture, in which locker room bros deem the female reproductive system an appropriate topic of conversation if the conversation is actually banter centered on the physical act of sex. By talking “seductively,” the female narrator in a male-centered world talks “appropriately.”

With these unsettling undertones present, Kayla Wheeler uses sensuality to bring levity to the taboo topic of menstruation. The poem is humorous (“if you wanted wine / for the Eucharist / you could have just asked / I do this without trying”). But, while the point may well be that it’s absurd for women to be encouraged to speak in a 900 number voice about their monthly bleeding, the poem actually is sexy:

this ripe quake in my hips

this that wants

out like the zenith

in my body when you

put your hands on it

One can sexualize pretty much anything with the right word choice, but what makes Wheeler’s poem so enticing is the delicacy, the sensuality rather than pornography, in her fresh phrases (“I am an engorged moon /  a swollen pulse / [. . .] the bloodwave of a body’s promise”). Even this, though, is troubling—the expectancy that women walk some impossibly fine line between prude and whore.

The way that this poem is able to manage so many messages at once speaks to the power of language. Matching the weight of the poem’s social commentary is the magnitude of its beauty. The poem’s rhythm, its organic feel created by short phrases that flow into one another uninterrupted by punctuation, complements the natural process of menstruation. By writing beautifully (“I am the last raindrop on / earth staining your deep sky”), Wheeler reminds us that the wondrous processes that occur inside women’s bodies should be celebrated not shamed.

– The Editors