Perimenopause
By Joanna Solfrian
I DON’T KNOW what a poem is, either. Sometimes it’s a palpitation, a sugar maple bud or a bloody nose. I have a bloody nose right now. I’ve jammed a tissue up there so my hands are free to type. Is that necessary to include in a poem? I don’t know, because—faites attention!—I don’t know what a poem is. I am hoping for one of those delicious clots, the ones where, when you pull the tissue out, a tensile cord of blood unplugs and makes space in your brain such that genius thoughts seem not only possible, but likely. Lately I’ve been identifying the clots on my tampons. Saying so is unusual for the sort of poem I write, but who am I to stomp on change. So I identify. This is the clot that came from the cramp that nearly brought me to my knees in the Brooklyn Museum. I was in the room with El Anatsui’s giant sheet of cascading bottle caps, which glowed at great speed, when my uterus stabbed itself—Oh!—and I slumped against the closest wall. The security guard made a mental note of something, I’m not sure what, and left me alone. On the walk home I needed to sit so I stopped at a Caribbean restaurant and dragged up to the bar. I drank a sorrel margarita, and after striking up a conversation with the Trini bartender, we somehow got talking about aging. He had me guess his age and I asked him the same, then we did a shot to toast the fact that each thought the other looked pretty good at 47. He showed me how to eat a tamarind pod. I told him I’d been drying seeds in the pandemic and asked if tamarind could grow up here. “I don’t know,” he said, “but if they can, it’ll take a couple of years.” I peeled the flesh off the last seed with my teeth, sucked it clean, and kissed it into a bar napkin. “Maybe I’ll come back in two years with a plant.” He laughed and poured me a free drink, my third. God. Life is a wonder. I wove home, seed in my fanny pack, cramps dulled by the booze.
That was several months ago. I keep watering the seed, but nothing has happened yet. Who knows if it will. It’s really OK either way.
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About Joanna Solfrian
Solfrian’s first collection, Visible Heavens, received the Wick First Book Poetry Prize, judged by Naomi Shihab Nye. Her second collection, The Mud Room, followed from MadHat Press, then a chapbook of ghazals from FLP called The Second Perfect Number. She’s had poems published in journals such as The Harvard Review, Boulevard, Image, Margie, Rattapallax, The Southern Review, Pleiades, and The Spoon River Poetry Review. I am also a five-time Pushcart nominee and MacDowell fellow. Find her on instagram or her website.