My body is a clock. My body is a vessel, a temple, and a grave. My body is a traitor.
I run my fingers over my collarbones when I feel restless,
envision myself sprouting wings to carry me out of my 24th floor window,
a gray bird, flying, following the tradition of all the other women in my family.

This is the third year treating my disease of being a female in my bloodline,
trying to prevent me from falling from the tree like my grandmother, my mother, my aunts.
I am the one who resisted flying because I kept track of the bouts enough to know
that it only takes ten days, nine days, eight for the sickness to run its course.

Then I am resurrected from woman back to human,
and I curse Eve from my knees for the gifts she has given me and the mothers she has taken away.
Maybe God fears our power because we too can create life,
so He punishes women for the sins of the first imperfect one He created.

This is the third year of treatment and nothing seems to ease my operose rhythm.
For ten days each month, I am mistaken for someone worthy of a diagnosis like my mothers'.
Counselors and doctors hesitantly list off possible names, but my only abnormality is a temporary
overdose of my genealogy, a fear of what I share with the birds who flew before me.

I surrender to my inherited flight pattern, swooping low and swinging back up again,
sighing on the way. My doctor has assured me that all women feel this way sometimes.
Compared to where the women before me flew off to, these ten days aren't so bad.
But ten days a month, I point out, is one third of my life.