At First Light
Welcome to the grief-tinged end of my girlhood: blood.
All my girls had reddened already, said finally
when I showed them my undies in that sickly green
three-stalled middle school bathroom with no light.
Finally.
We processed out, single file back to Period B
one-ply rolled and stuck between my thighs.
No mercy.
Blood requires something old of the body
or so my mother told me after Paul told her
it had happened. Chineke, biko! what else
won’t you tell me? How I wanted a semicolon
of my girldom. How I wanted an unbodied body.
Who was there to call me my name?
To say beautiful? Ancient? Brave? Nothing
except the redslick tissue, dripping.
All my girls had reddened already, said finally
when I showed them my undies in that sickly green
three-stalled middle school bathroom with no light.
Finally.
We processed out, single file back to Period B
one-ply rolled and stuck between my thighs.
No mercy.
Blood requires something old of the body
or so my mother told me after Paul told her
it had happened. Chineke, biko! what else
won’t you tell me? How I wanted a semicolon
of my girldom. How I wanted an unbodied body.
Who was there to call me my name?
To say beautiful? Ancient? Brave? Nothing
except the redslick tissue, dripping.
Precious Musa is a first-generation Nigerian American Black girl trying. She graduated from Smith College with her B.A. in English and Africana Studies with a Poetry Concentration. She’s a poet and evolving creative intellectual whose work often engages the inner life of the body, fugitivity, and belonging. She participated in the 2020 Tin House Workshop and the 2018 Juniper Summer Writing Institute at UMASS. Her work appears in Cosmonauts Avenue, Black Perspectives, and is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly. Musa received her MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Louis where she interned at Dorothy, a Publishing Project. Musa currently resides in St. Louis, MO, where she’s learning how to commune with her ancestors, speak to them, and language their story.
Art: Tom Rogerson on Unsplash