It took me years to learn to use them
starting with Pursettes and a jar of vaseline.
I didn't even know where the hole was.
I didn't even know enough
to try to find one. I pushed until
only a little stuck out and hoped
that was far enough.
I tried every month through high school.

And now that I can change it in a moving car --
like Audrey Hepburn changing dresses in the taxi
in the last scene of Breakfast at Tiffany's --
I've got to give them up.

Tampons, I read, are
bleached, are
chemically treated to
compress better,
contain asbestos.
Good old asbestos. Once we learned not to shake it --
Johnson & Johnson's -- on our babies or diaphragms,
we thought we had it licked.

So what do we do? They're universal.
Even macrobiotics and lesbian separatists are hooked on them.
Go back to sanitary napkins?
Junior high, double napkins
on the heavy days, walking home damp underpants
chafing thighs. It's been a full twelve years
since I have worn one, since Spain when Marjorie pierced
my ears
and I unloaded half a suitcase of the big gauze pads in the
hotel trash.

Someone in my workshop suggested Tassaways, little
cups that catch the flow.
They've stopped making them,
we're told. Women found they could reuse them
and the company couldn't make enough
money that way. Besides,
the suction pulled the cervix out of shape.

Then diaphragms
It presses on me, one woman says.
So swollen these days. Too tender.

Menstrual extraction, a young woman says.
I heard about that. Ten minutes
and it's done.
But I do not trust putting tubes into my uterus each month.
We're told everything is safe
in the beginning.

Mosses.
the Indians used mosses.
I live in Aptos. We grow
succulents and pine.

I will buy mosses
when they sell them at the co-op.

Okay. It's like the whole birth control schmeer.
There just isn't a good way. Women bleed.
We bleed.
The blood flows out of us. We will bleed.
Blood paintings on our thighs; patterns
like river beds, blood on the chairs in
insurance offices, blood on Greyhound buses
and 747s, blood blots, flower forms
on the blue skirts of the stewardesses.
Blood on restaurant floors, supermarket aisles,
the steps of government buildings. Sidewalks will have blood trails,
like Gretel's bread crumbs. We can always find our way.

We will ease into rhythm together, it happens
when women live closely -- African tribes, college sororities --
our blood flowing on the same days. The first day
of our heaviest flow we will gather in Palmer, Massachusetts,
on the steps of Tampax, Inc. We'll have a bleed-in.
We'll smear blood on our faces. Max Factor
will join OB in bankruptcy. The perfume industry
will collapse, who needs
whale sperm, turtle oil, when we have free blood?
For a little while cleaning products will boom,
409, Lysol, Windex. But
the executives will give up. The cleaning woman is leaving a
red wet rivulet, as she scrubs down the previous stains.
It's no use. The men would have to
do it themselves, and that will never come up
for a vote at the Board. Women's clothing manufacturers, fancy
furniture, plush carpet, all will phase out. It's just not
practical. We will live the old ways.

Simple floors, dirt or concrete, can be hosed down
or straw can be cycled through the compost.
Simple clothes, none in summer. No more swimming pools.
Dogs will fall in love with us.
Swim in the river. Yes, swim in the river.
We'll feed the fish with our blood. Our blood
will neutralize the chemicals and dissolve the old car parts.
Our blood will detoxify the phosphates and the
PCBs. Our blood will feed the depleted soils.
Our blood will water the dry, tired surface of the earth.
We will bleed. We will bleed. We will
bleed until we bathe her in our blood and she turns
slippery new like a baby birthing.

- Ellen Bass, Tampons

One of the things that has always made me most uncomfortable about doing white collar work is the dress code. I don't have much of a style and don't pay a lot of attention to what I wear, but I simply can't feel like myself in formal clothes. "Business casual" qualifies as formal for me as well. I never understood why you had to conform to someone else's standard of propriety to be considered worth listening to. Ehrenreich puts it quite well:

"Robert Jackall's book impressed on me that corporate dress serves a far more important function than mere body covering. 'Proper management of one's external appearances,' he writes, 'simply signals to one's superiors that one is prepared to undertake other kinds of self-adaptation.' By dressing correctly, right down to the accessories, you let it be known that you are willing to conform in other ways too - that you can follow orders, for example, and blend in with the prevailing 'culture.'"

She has this to say on the process of getting made over for job interviews:

"This should be the fun part --playing with paints and little swatches of fabric-- but I am suddenly gripped by queasiness. I understand that to make myself into a 'product' that I can market, I must first become a commodity, a thing."

And finally, on the corporate aesthetic that permeates our physical surroundings:

"Back at the Homestead Suites that night, a stripped-down, generic sort of place near Dulles Airport, I was struck by how much my motel resembled the church. Not literally, but in the sense of some underlying aesthetic - the same economy of line, neutral colors, cheap indestructible furniture, extremely short-haired carpet for easy cleaning... In my exhausted state, it seemed to me that this aesthetic permeates all aspects of the world I have entered: narrative-free resumes dominated by bullets; sensuality-suppressing wardrobes; precise instruction sheets; numerous slides."

"It works, more or less, this realm of perfect instrumentality; it makes things happen: deadlines are met; reservations are made; orders delivered on time; carpets kept reliably speck-free. But something has also been lost. Weber described the modern condition as one of 'disenchantment,' meaning 'robbed of the gods,' or lacking in any dimension of strangeness and mystery. As Jackson Lears once put it, premodern people looked up and saw heaven; modern, rational people see only the sky. To which we might add that minions of today's grimly focused business culture tend not to look up at all."

("All that wind that blows through you hair, it makes things new.")

"In many ways, here in the U.S., recycling presently serves both materially and rhetorically as an alibi for the continuing, accepted and acceptable absence of sustainability, not as a harbinger of change. Recycling is presented as a cornerstone of the environmental project, as an alternative to waste, even to consumerism itself. But its actual operation is something rather different, a way for corporations and governments to present a marketable "earth-friendly" face to consumers and citizens, without changing the impact their actions have on the ecosystems in which we live."

"The project that the Garbage Liberation Front (GLF) and Trash Worship embody can be thought of as the normalization of thorough use and re-use as opposed to recycling's separation of these "resources" from everyday life. It is an admittedly parasitic approach, but one that carries the potential for an escape or transformation, since it reduces dependence on consumption even as it feeds on others' excess."

"The rejection of garbage, of trash, of refuse as a valid concept, which lies beneath this approach, has an affirmative side as well. It involves a deep-seated belief that everything, no matter how battered or rejected, is useful—to someone, for something. This runs parallel to the anti-hierarchical core of anarchism, which insists on the validity of all voices, on the necessity for every voice to be heard and taken into account directly, not through an allegedly "representative" mouthpiece. Both insist that anything cast aside is a loss not only to itself but to those around it, to the entire community."

-Daniel Lang, 'Give Us the Dumpsters -Or - Give Us Life': Res Derilictae and the Trash of Free Trade