The Spot

The spot's been there since 6 AM.

I checked the mirror, then checked again

at my desk when nobody was looking,

then once more in the bathroom stall

where the fluorescent light made it worse—

darker than it probably is.

I've kept my blazer on through two meetings,

through someone's PowerPoint about quarterly metrics,

through the moment my colleague leaned across

the conference table and I froze,

calculating angles, visibility,

whether the window light

would catch it the wrong way.

My mother called this "inconvenient timing"

when I was sixteen and bleeding through

my white shorts at swim team practice.

Inconvenient. As if my body

had a choice about when to betray me,

as if there were a schedule I was supposed to follow.

I'm thirty-two now and still

holding my arm at careful angles,

still afraid someone will notice

that I'm leaking, still

turning my cuff under the table

like I'm hiding something criminal.