I didn’t thank God, I didn’t curse God,
God didn’t enter into it when suddenly
from my own body all this blood.

I was at my grandmother’s and woke
to a soaked bed. My aunt found me crying
at the shame of it. She helped me clean up,

my aunt with no children of her own, and
was it then that she drew away from me,
threw herself into teaching my brothers tennis?

At church all was the same: shame, suffering,
the old rugged cross. But everything could change
just like that. It seemed faith didn’t trump all

and not for my careful mother either—
her seven children to say grace over—who
in time got a doctor to give me birth control pills.