Rites of Womanhood

By Aliyah Blattner

I.

All women are accordions. We wheeze.

II.

My mother once defined girlhood as the act of folding in on oneself. When my breaths begin to distend wolfishly, she responds in corrections, compressing the lupine air into crisp angles.

III.

I learn how to sag like a woman from the grandmother who sits on the porch outside my therapist’s office. She pinches the skin along her hips between raisined fingers and rolls the putty of her stomach into corners. She slumps as an act of reclamation and when I inquire after the well-spurt of her Power, she advises: Wring yourself out, girl-child. Only then can you embody the divine.

IV.

I return to the riverbed and lather my scalp with mud and stones. HaShem greets me within the heart of the current. She makes a graveyard of my dance, and tears the hair from my scalp with her fingers. We, waterlogged accordion women, rejoice in our drowning and practice the art of submergence as a new genesis. Plummeting. Plunging. This descent is our birthright. And as we sink farther, the rivels unwind to welcome the revival of Dialogue. We experiment with the tongues of the ancients, our howls a perversely feminine act. Through these rituals we unearth our selfhood.

V.

Tell me I am more than a clay sculpture drying out. Or cup the river between your palms to spill salvation along the fissures, the fault lines.

VI.

When I was a child, a loon speared her beak through the wet of my iris as a rite of Womanhood. She flew away with my eye coddled in the monolith of her throat. My mother urged me to sweat the loss out like a fever. She wrapped me in her grandmother’s quilts and davened to dispel the sickness from my body. The sweltering heat caused the walls to lose their shape, to warp into suggestions. Borderlines and ruins. But the fever refused to break and my mother seam ripped the tendons and tissue in offering to the Mothers themselves. We must learn new ways to reconstruct ourselves. For there is Power in the ways that we women mosaic our own sufferings.

VII.

I once saw women warriors dance through wildfires. They licked the flaming tendrils from their palms and drew heaven from the smoke. I am learning to speak as fire, to weep ash. But I am what burns and not the burning. I am too cowardly to live as infernos do.

VIII.

HaShem visits me again by the river bank. She presses a pomegranate between my palms and together we peel back its skin to unveil flesh and cartilage. We harvest the seeds from the carcass, juice staining our hands, and a flower blooms inside the garden bed of our intertwined fingers. Drums pound, currents rage, howls rip through the night. And I see myself emerging from the unfurling petals. I am giving birth to myself; I am learning a new Womanhood. As HaShem whispers ancient prophecies into my ears the river begins to reflect back a new face: A great fruit tree extends her branches up towards the sky. She revives an old Power, one lost between the accordion folds of our grandmothers’ subservience. She bears new fruits.