Throwback Thursday: ‘The Third Day of Spring’ by Susie Taylor

There have been suicide bombings in Belgium;
reverberations of despair hitting us on this North Atlantic island. 
A description of glass falling on a woman’s foot
coming through my radio.  
There is a report of an accident on the highway.
Someone is dead and a car burning.
My mother has called to tell me of a suicide in Bear’s Cove;
not a drowning, as I imagined first,
but a hanging.
A body found suspended in the rust coloured shed.
And the wind howls and howls and the front door keeps banging in its frame
and the chair and desk I write at shake.
It is the third day of spring and the second day of my period.
Clots of blood are splattered on the bathroom floor
flung from the tampon I pulled out in the night.
This morning I found a bloody hand print on my thigh.
Through my buffeting window I watch as my neighbour smokes.
She stands on her porch in the hundred kilometre gusts.
And I am envious of her,
the fuck you of it:  
smoking in the wind.