To Be a Girl by Sarah Freligh

We’re bleeders or will be. This is what they tell us in a dark room, blinds drawn, rows of desks just so, no big-foot boys to distract us from the screen. Here is this and this, they tell us: the tidy lima bean of uterus, the twin snakes of Fallopian tubes into which we’ll hatch eggs once a month for forever, such a lovely thing to be a girl, they tell us. Never what we’ll need to know, like how not to wear white around that time of the month, how to tie a cardigan to hide where we’ve leaked, how to plug the leak. How to pray that we’ll make it to the bathroom, pray that no one’s ripped the Kotex machine off the wall and flung it into one of the stalls for just-because of it, for the oh-so-damn-good-to-scream-and-throw things times. How it feels to be fizzed-up, a bottle of rage waiting for an occasion to uncork and unload. How our skin will become a radar dish for the hurt of the world, how we’ll wish we could unzip ourselves and wear the dull side out. How we’re told to hush the yes in our girl bodies, so much yes in the dark, so much oh, no.