Let’s Pretend Today Is Not Sunday, But a Weekday

I bleed all over someone’s bed and my phone knows it, advertising menstrual products to me a
few hours later.

So that I guess I have a record, someone else’s more accurate record.

You cum; the person fucking you wants a small break; the condom comes out covered in goopy
blood and you notice then the blood near the pillow, and twice in the middle of the mattress, and
once at the bottom of the mattress. And later, after you’ve put on underwear and laid there for a
bit and talked about your workout routines and also the way that anxiousness permeates literally
everything but sex, for both of you, and then given a blowjob, eventually you get up and go to
the bathroom and notice another gloopy strand of blood hanging out of you, which momentarily
drops from your body.

Your blood will be recorded in the “oh whoa you’re bleeding a lot” and apologies in relation to
the comforter—so that the waste your body’s expelled might go variously to the dry cleaners and
down the toilet, but has also been productive, creating money for Instagram.

So my gloopy blood has produced an economic reaction, and

after we separate the bodies of the ruling class from their heads,

we’ll be able to reverse the code and resuscitate all of it:

where an ad for Kotex is recorded in the book of history we’ll instead get a glob of blood
smeared across the page,

there to be licked up and tongued back into the body, and

then into the mind and its experiences. We can dwell in it if we want: don’t go to work, stay here
and fuck and be fucked, like the scene in Eisenstein’s Stachka when the factory workers have
struck and a couple lays around in bed with a great fur blanket. Mid-day fucking, the opposite of
work.

Except who knows: maybe instead of revolutionary bloodshed we’ll get the slow deaths of our
children’s children. Except we don’t want children, we want periods, recorded in the ledger of
history via targeted advertisements. And in our imaginations our periods signify little executions
of the wealthy in our bodies, but in the daylight we don’t even need a shower, usually you’d just
check your makeup and leave.

Marie Buck has lived in South Carolina and Detroit and now lives in Brooklyn. Recent books are Portrait of Doom (Krupskaya, 2015) and Goodnight, Marie, May God Have Mercy on Your Soul (Roof, 2017)

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