by Ricki Thompson

It wasn’t spring.
It was the third Wednesday in Lent
And our principal was pulling
The heavy vinyl curtain between us,
Boys on one side,
Girls on the other,
Our fifth grade split
Like a cross of section of a tulip,
Here is the stamen, here is the pistil,
And behind us on the plaster wall
Was Jesus, bleeding
And with downcast eyes.
A white-capped nurse gave
Each girl a sanitary napkin
And the vocabulary we would need:
Erection, menstruation,
Fertilization, reproduction,
She piled up words like mortared bricks.
The movie was called
Growing Up and Liking It.
It showed an animated egg
Clicking along the fallopian tube,
A product on the conveyor belt
Of early automation. We saw
The outline of a naked boy,
Heard the nurse say,
Of course you know about wet dreams,
The words escaping like
Houdini’s doves. Did she mean
That dream about the swamp
Where snake-like monsters
Swelled with venom? We knew
There were other words, unspeakable,
Engraved in toiled stalls,
And written in our hearts
The words of Scripture,
Know ye not that your body
Is the temple of the Holy Ghost?
Each girl held a sanitary pad,
Wide and long as our Girl Scout
Troop’s raft. As we stood
At the edge of the swift current
Without the strong arms of
Fathers and brothers to guide us,
We would learn to ferry ourselves
From this world to the next.