Menstrual Love

away while my eye wanders from leeks and ripe tomatoes and lingers too long as I fill my wife’s list. Nevertheless, I’m saved by Rose as she watches me grow smaller across the parking lot and vanish through automatic doors, as she waits with raised and expectant eyelashes, a peculiar tilt and crinkle to her forehead, worried or certain, Jimmy, I’m never coming back.

M e n s t r u a l L o v e

Well after check out time, deep into their affair, the fugitive lovers are fucking on a four poster in a posh hotel: She’s on top when her hand moves to prop another pillow under his head, leaving a perfect handprint of blood, whorled lines he eyes with amazement, while kissing the coppery decoupage that’s bloomed across her chest and neck; and later, as they shower, mesmerized by the volume of watery blood flowing from

his inner thighs, transfixed by her pose of pained serenity, her vulnerable yet languid inward gaze as hot spray thrums her back, an image arises of arrows piercing San Sebastian’s female torso, along with the spear thrust and churned into Christ’s side, and finally of a rag soaked in vinegar stuffed into each other’s thirsting mouths. While she strips the bloodied sheets, he slides bloody cases off pillows, and together they hurriedly roll these with the ream of white sanguinary towels they’d used to wipe themselves into a big ball outside the bathroom door; a mound he eyes carrying their suitcases past as though a dead child were wrapped inside.