This year for Halloween I will go as my luteal phase.
When people approach me at the bus stop, or at some party, asking
who are you I’ll say I’m my luteal phase. At worst, this
will commence a bristling of the awkward feminist variety,
disgust levied by abuse or spit, a face described as confused emoji;
at best it will be a teachable moment for those unfamiliar with the
wholescale personality change that slips upon many like a terrible veil
for half the month. Typically, one would describe this condition as
being ‘in’ one’s luteal phase, so the transposition of this ‘in’ to ‘as’
goes from being inside the experience to adopting it as a costume,
the masquerade of what is otherwise a source of personal torture
hoping to reclaim it via performance. The existential being
found in such biological, temporal, cyclical and internal
semantic frames offers a diagnostic and self-locating tone,
an explanation for why I might feel the intense sensitivity
to fluctuations in progesterone and allopregnanolone, words
I see spelled out in dreams, the brand names of candy-wrapped
flickers whose inevitable dissolve on my tongue results in the sudden
onset of sadness, hopelessness and feeling crushed by life.
To have this level of pre-emptive dysphoria in the face of future blood
is to exist in a perpetual adolescence of being deemed capable of nothing
but ‘phases’ and so as to be in oestrus is to open myself unwisely to
whichever wolves respond to my texts, or to lower my locomotion
and exploratory compass in favour of bed rest in the period that
follows. Often it’s as if I will never get out of the maze and
I just want the doctor to squash me. Some say this hormonal
choreography may be conducted by affirmation and despite
the fatigue it is possible to reconfigure dysphoria if you just
learn to breathe a bit. Manifest change in the hall of mirrors
by looking yourself in the eye and repeating ten times
I love you. Soon, you will start to see an inner child rise
from your irises and she will be crying in them, regardless
of whether you meant it. In these days I feel italicised,
flushed with a signal emphasis and double voicing which
haunts every thought with white hot irony and critique, tilting
meaning to the brink of itself so that thinking remains unfinished and
so will you, shedding from the tumbleweed in your brain fog
yes dude my luteal phase where I become what is medically
deemed exquisitely permeable just like the night as it
thickens towards starlessness, letting in ghosts. Etymologically,
luteal pertains to the yellow body and so part of this outfit
is to paint my whole form in gold, to wear excess jewellery
whose structure resembles the glandular moment of post-
ovulation, a cluster of words linked to light, ripeness and
transience sewn into the gold-dark of fertility’s descent.
It would be easier to experience fruiting, spawning or
colony stress, to shift from aquatic to terrestrial life
or from polyp to medusa. The eel goes from glass to silver
and the nymph to flying adult. Every time I engender
the pain of restless dread, flourishing into suicidal ideation
by sundown, I am liable to forget that I have this mammalian
purpose towards the production of life and this is totally
freaky so I work on stitching the outlines of a bloodied attire
suitable to scare the neighbourhood with the electric truth
of how it feels. It takes weeks. I swap my eggs for pearls
and pills. When the seams
burst, as they must, I will be furnished with a relief
that what I am carrying is an ancestral doom decorated
with the chemical instabilities of a toxic present
plummeting towards its young. Still, in this state
of metabolic inwardness I find my wings, I fold
them beneath me. I trick myself into
winter. I’m so gold it hurts.
When people approach me at the bus stop, or at some party, asking
who are you I’ll say I’m my luteal phase. At worst, this
will commence a bristling of the awkward feminist variety,
disgust levied by abuse or spit, a face described as confused emoji;
at best it will be a teachable moment for those unfamiliar with the
wholescale personality change that slips upon many like a terrible veil
for half the month. Typically, one would describe this condition as
being ‘in’ one’s luteal phase, so the transposition of this ‘in’ to ‘as’
goes from being inside the experience to adopting it as a costume,
the masquerade of what is otherwise a source of personal torture
hoping to reclaim it via performance. The existential being
found in such biological, temporal, cyclical and internal
semantic frames offers a diagnostic and self-locating tone,
an explanation for why I might feel the intense sensitivity
to fluctuations in progesterone and allopregnanolone, words
I see spelled out in dreams, the brand names of candy-wrapped
flickers whose inevitable dissolve on my tongue results in the sudden
onset of sadness, hopelessness and feeling crushed by life.
To have this level of pre-emptive dysphoria in the face of future blood
is to exist in a perpetual adolescence of being deemed capable of nothing
but ‘phases’ and so as to be in oestrus is to open myself unwisely to
whichever wolves respond to my texts, or to lower my locomotion
and exploratory compass in favour of bed rest in the period that
follows. Often it’s as if I will never get out of the maze and
I just want the doctor to squash me. Some say this hormonal
choreography may be conducted by affirmation and despite
the fatigue it is possible to reconfigure dysphoria if you just
learn to breathe a bit. Manifest change in the hall of mirrors
by looking yourself in the eye and repeating ten times
I love you. Soon, you will start to see an inner child rise
from your irises and she will be crying in them, regardless
of whether you meant it. In these days I feel italicised,
flushed with a signal emphasis and double voicing which
haunts every thought with white hot irony and critique, tilting
meaning to the brink of itself so that thinking remains unfinished and
so will you, shedding from the tumbleweed in your brain fog
yes dude my luteal phase where I become what is medically
deemed exquisitely permeable just like the night as it
thickens towards starlessness, letting in ghosts. Etymologically,
luteal pertains to the yellow body and so part of this outfit
is to paint my whole form in gold, to wear excess jewellery
whose structure resembles the glandular moment of post-
ovulation, a cluster of words linked to light, ripeness and
transience sewn into the gold-dark of fertility’s descent.
It would be easier to experience fruiting, spawning or
colony stress, to shift from aquatic to terrestrial life
or from polyp to medusa. The eel goes from glass to silver
and the nymph to flying adult. Every time I engender
the pain of restless dread, flourishing into suicidal ideation
by sundown, I am liable to forget that I have this mammalian
purpose towards the production of life and this is totally
freaky so I work on stitching the outlines of a bloodied attire
suitable to scare the neighbourhood with the electric truth
of how it feels. It takes weeks. I swap my eggs for pearls
and pills. When the seams
burst, as they must, I will be furnished with a relief
that what I am carrying is an ancestral doom decorated
with the chemical instabilities of a toxic present
plummeting towards its young. Still, in this state
of metabolic inwardness I find my wings, I fold
them beneath me. I trick myself into
winter. I’m so gold it hurts.
© Laynie Browne
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Maria Sledmere is a poet-scholar based in Glasgow, Scotland. She is managing editor of SPAM Press and Senior Lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. Recent books include an ambient novella, The Indigo Hours (Broken Sleep, 2025), experimental monograph Midsummer Song (Hypercritique) (Tenement Press, 2024), and the poetry collection Cinders (Krupskaya, 2024). Poems can be found in Fallow, b l u s h, Berlin Lit, DELEUZINE, Ludd Gang, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere. She is one half of the performance duo Project Somnolence.
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