The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman. Katie Manning

      The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman

      Point Loma Press Series

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      ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-097-0

      EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-7058-8

      Foreword for Point Loma Press Series

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      Acknowledgments

      Special thanks to the journal editors who first published the following poems, sometimes in earlier forms.

      Fickle Muses: “The Flesh Made Word” and “Where Death Is Not an Is”

      So to Speak: “The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman” and

      “The Resurrection of Nura”

      Trivia: “First Blood,” “Well,” and “The History of Bleeding”

      Thanks also to Hadara Bar-Nadav, Michelle Boisseau, Ki Russell, Rashad Givhan, Katie Galvin, and Piper Abernathy for their invaluable feedback on these poems; to Mark Mann for his thoughtful editorial suggestions and great enthusiasm for this collection; and to Jon Manning for his translations, multiple readings, and constant encouragement.

      I.

      First Blood

      Just dawn. The warmth

      wakes me. I feel wet

      and ashamed

      but then I know.

      I bolt up, look

      down at the cloth.

      A dark tide pool

      spreads out

      from the center—

      a red sun rises

      where life begins.

      Seven Weeks Later

      The tears won’t flow

      from my face the way blood

      flows from my womb.

      The current continues

      daily down my legs

      though I have begged

      the God whose temple

      I may not enter to sew

      me closed. Once,

      they say, he turned

      an Egyptian sea to blood

      and back to water.

      I don’t believe this now.

      The blood remains

      and never turns. My tide

      moves ever out and out.

      The Doctors Advise

      She has—

      She is—

      She miscarried—

      a leaking heart.

      an abnormality.

      a demon.

      She must have—

      She could have—

      She has sinned.

      touched herself.

      eaten unclean meat.

      Bleed her arms each day.

      Kill one goat a week.

      At the next full moon, float face

      down in the center of the sea.

      Passover

      They tell me my body

      is impure.