The Miscarried
by Nadia Chaney
A think smell rides; you unconsciously hold your breath. After three days the remains of black smoke has colonized the neighbourhood. I'm sitting here bleeding, with a calm, lingering, dull kind of sorrow. The rain rattles inside my chest.
Three days ago I bled, one drop, then a barrel. Grief, I believe, will be brief as the rain, and as penetrating. The relief is cloying and heavy and reeks of shame. I scrawl the words nothing is lost. New lands have been unveiled; I have hated my lover like a child and loved him terribly. I have made demands on behalf of a lost future. I have watched my self fool and reel, until this sodden moment in a field of shattered expectations. A dank faith in nature's cycles, the face of She shining through a tree, a rainbow, a fertile blood that grows a yellow flower.
I have returned the borrowed blood to the ocean, but I am adrift in the mangled, straggling lines of Her lineage, so I have to improvise the ritual. I soak a triple-feather token long saved, take the sopping black red feathers to the edge of the water. She is not impressed, and grasps the feathers with a sudden strong wave. I am dismissed by the impenetrable return to rhythmic lapping.
The ocean knows, now, but how to tell the lover? Poor youngold looking forward (do not pity him, child, you both lose ground that way) yes, but so earnest seeming and glad (expect nothing less, little worm). The voice of She in my head is clear, sometimes.
The first drop came just after he left the spaceship, the little apartment we had borrowed from my rocket scientist friend. Mother's day. We had loved riotously, until my entire appetite was nearly satisfied, his too. Then we ate, and he held me, and left. I read The Red Tent. At 11:23 I bled. No thoughts, but a distant horror, like watching airline films with bad earphones. I left the apartment on my bike, got home in time to slip some cloth into my underwear. Numb. Slept under the ocean.
Woke, coffee, drawing, ocean (ritual). Then work, scrubbing and chopping veggies with kind men who know nothing of my trauma. Let it be, bleed into my cup and scrub. Get stoned with the boss. We see a cop near the alley dumpsters. There have been dumpster fires. Boss says, you can't trust these fuckers. Who?
I am almost on the bus to go to the lover's apartment. I cramp up. I cannot mount the bus. I can't face him. I have been humiliated. I am on display, a woman who bleeds away life, and has to wash it down the toilet.
I scream silently and She hears. I tell my roommates, the first full day is over. I am outside smoking after so many weeks of not smoking, and then the back alley is smoking. We are indoors in a flash, what is it, it's in our alley, something very bad is happening.we feel things. We are all feeling things. I run through the alley to find the flaming chaos.
A tricky night, where the neighbour who uses the phone was suddenly an Aryan Nation murderess, hunting the alleys, setting suspicious fires, and infiltrating the basement apartments of young radical mystic muses. Fire and conspiracy. Bloody paranoia.
The second day appears. A long youth worker's meeting in the bowels of an old building downtown. There is a prototype arcade game there, a huge yellow slab of metal with a glass case, two ruts with horses on sticks at one end. The instructions, painted in red across the machine's forehead read: Insert One Penny, and Start Together. I laugh, and cringe, because the honour system will never mean that again; briefly cynical and a strong cramp. I smell sulfur, clearly, then it is gone.
To the lover's house, he's asleep already, I crash the locked highrise, and sleep beside and on top of him, on a cold, thinly carpeted, cement floor, him mumbling appropriately but from far away. I know he is dreaming and won't remember. Stagger to the washroom, empty out more ounces of blood, still bright red full of fleshy black clots. I am sinking under its pull. I need to sleep, as my insides are clawed out by a great and ancient cat, better known to our first grandmothers. I use his tree truck body to ground this unstaunched drenching. I awake petulant and whining over his lack of tears, sore and grouchy about the twisted blankets on the floor, and him almost whistling at five in the morning. The bastard. Me in a baby's bath of blood. The lover. Those eyes in the predawn brightness. She shines praises on his efforts and he works for her, like a tireless dog in the surf. He goes to work. I grumble, roll out of the blankets, shower off dry blood, dripping wet blood, cleaning it, dripping more, red seems everywhere. It seems to splash on the bathroom walls. I feel so empty. I roll out of the apartment, to a poetry workshop at a high school.
At the school, the youth write a song together:
Love is Blind
You never know when you might open your eyes
Love is Blind
You never know when you might open your mind
and exactly one floor beneath us a mother's child is stabbed in the eye by another mother's child. Blood splashes.
We roll home, let it flow, follow the way and sing loud on the buses, gospel, beatboxing, three girls, laughing, I bleed but they ask, of course, kindred sisters, and it is right. We rap, old rhymes we remember, sentiments we understand differently now, about pussy and blunts, and then our own words, uplifting, and the lunchtime Skytrain hushes a bit, and we are modern priestesses. This afternoon we preach the cycles of love, which are the cycles of death.
Nadia Chaney believes the sublime centre of the universe can be found at the heart of every moment. She works as a poet, emcee, musician, arts- empowerment facilitator, social justice activist, visual artist, text editor and writing coach. She lives at the Main Artery in East Van.