Stopper on a String

A stopper on a string - cotton, like the kind that air dries on a laundry line, but more sinister, because only women can use them.

Sometimes they come with life-threatening chemicals, if you get unlucky. Nevermind third world countries.

A life saver. A commodity in women’s rooms everywhere, where we teach under stalls covered in graffiti, night club reveries. We ask politely. But there’s no need: we’re here, entwined forever as a gender, for better or worse. There’s no line crossed when it’s the cross we all bear.

Did you know, that in psych wards, they are contraband - not allowed, for fear we’ll hang ourselves on the end of them.

So predictable of women, I guess, to hang ourselves with five inches when we can get that measurement from men.

Signs at protests that read: I can do what you do, bleeding.

All you have to do is have a uterus to be in this ultra-exclusive, oppressed and subservient club of ours.

A necessity: but expensive, not free. Disposable, somehow political.

They are easily discarded. But rest assured: every month, we reach for these objects, grateful for them, though the public merely whispers about them.

Rest assured: it’s a man’s world, and we are stuck with the reproductive burden, the stained pants, the humiliation of a natural body process.