menopause

praise the blood-leaving days—
the long years of hide and cocoon
dissolve, shed, middle-aged spread …

I don’t want to go there—to the dark. I’ve crossed a threshold—remember the whole-body woosh of energy as it left. But I know it. Notebooks full of rushed wild writing. Words I couldn’t say to anyone because …

The food scraps are out of the freezer. Potato peelings. Giblets. Onion skins. Dug-out pumpkin pips and flesh, the ghosts of hollowed-out Halloween lanterns …