by Annie Finch
Back at the shitty hotel. Himself goes out to get us food and I message @BfN_UK #breastfeeding #medication to find out how much codeine I can take and safely feed the toddler tomorrow evening #ratherbehome #nowforNI
October 22, 2018 [Monday]
4:19 a.m. On Monday morning I’m ruining everyone’s day with our news. Trying to remember who knew we were expecting and who didn’t know. If the long or short version of this shitty story is needed. Thank goodness for WhatsApp because I can’t handle the conversations right now.
I should be at home in the privacy of my own home. Instead I’m trying to discretely bleed in a shitty hotel knowing that some low-paid worker, probably a woman, is going to have to empty a bin full of bloody sanitary pads. There’s no dignity here. There’s no privacy.
8:27 a.m. The drive back to the airport is a relief. I’m so glad we could afford a hire car instead of public transport. At least one small part of this journey is private.
We navigate the airport without delays and board quickly, #thanks @ flybe
The flight home. I feel myself crumbling as we board. When the doors close I can’t hold it together any more. Relief to be going home, loss, grief, exhaustion. I shake and sob. Himself holds my hand and the engines down me out.
My overwhelming thought is that we have left him. We left him alone. I know that we made the right choice, but my body is desperate to hold him, to have him with me. If we were treated at #home he’d be with us.
Home. Landed in Belfast. Toddler is at the gate to meet us. She does a little excited dance and I scoop her up. She clings to me. Was she this strong when we left? I am so relieved to be home to hold my precious girl in my arms.
1:45 p.m. Home. Home. Toddler has a nasty cold. She demands milk as soon as I get my coat off. We sit on the sofa, she snuggles up, latches and I can feel her body relax. She’s exhausted and falls asleep in minutes. I’m relieved to be home with her, #breastfeeding is a comfort to us both.
We’re so relieved to be home—that this journey is over—so our grief can finally begin. But other women are only beginning their stories of exile. Other families don’t know our story might be theirs one day. Unless we change it https://bit.ly/2CYudeF @All4Choice @bpas1968
THE VIRGINITY THIEF (A LETTER TO MY MAN)
Thylias Moss
Dear H,
I’m sixty-five, retired, mixed-race with one term-pregnancy—my son, who is thirty-seven, the best son anyone could ever want—and I’m an award-winning poet, Professor Emerita at a major research university where I was Full Professor of English and Full Professor of Art and Design, and finally in Love with the finest man on the face of the earth, you, a poet also, a life made possible because I had an abortion following my loss of virginity: rape at age fifteen that resulted in pregnancy fathered by Charles Jones, twenty-five-year-old deacon in my mother’s church, and director of the choir I was in.
I can’t tell you why I didn’t fight, instead giving in to paralysis. Each rough ripping of a button breaking in that harshness, mother-of-pearl molar and canine destruction like being bit into with rotting teeth, green at the gumline like Patrina’s, seemed more a misapplication of makeup than deliberate placement of gum disease finding its rot path. No way did I want anything like that to touch me!
D-Con assuring himself that no pregnancy could happen if I sat up, still draped in smelly blanket so semen could run down my legs in a carnivalesque application of cheap lotion. Smelly blanket over me like cloth privacy shield in case he was stopped and could easily explain just taking soloist home from Assembly Baptist Church, just alphabet: ABC.
To get home, I had to run, as he didn’t drive me. Made me get out of the car, I was glad to escape, ten baths weren’t enough; I didn’t stand up straight, found scoliosis out there also, specious muscle relaxant, repackaged snake oil oleo. Blue choir robe stained with a narrow stream of semen twisted as a poisonous snake, the full length, my virginity snaking away, subdividing into tributaries, snakelettes, seeking hem, him too for hellfire; I had very long natural fingernails, at least I could’ve scratched his face, but I didn’t want contaminated fingernails. I didn’t want to touch him anywhere. I wouldn’t get to give it to someone I chose (and I didn’t choose till you). Contaminated robe. That too I burned. Backyard ritual of fire (although I was terrified of matches), always plenty around because my father smoked Pall Malls, my hair having been caught in stove’s flames when I was eight, my signature braids burnt. Crispy.
But no period. Two weeks passed and no blood. I tried to tell D-Con that I was pregnant. What else could it be? Trying also to be back in school. Trying to talk with the only possible man, but he or his wife hung up the phone every time. I persisted. I wanted him to know what he’d done. My body was thickening with his baby, despite what he wanted to think. My large breasts swelled even larger. I kept calling and eventually he agreed to take me to his wife’s OB-GYN, all the bumpy ride hiding me under the ragged, stinky blanket, as if never washed. D-Con said he would call me with results of the test, but he never spoke to me again.
Abortions were legal then (1969) in only one state, New York, and mine performed by a Greek doctor at St. Luke’s Medical Center, Dr. Panayotopoulos. Fifth month of pregnancy—many premature babies just that age survive. Nineteen-seventy—I was sixteen when the abortion was performed, assigned to the maternity floor. I could hear the newborns.
I could’ve been another young woman having a live birth. But I wasn’t. There may have been a heartbeat. I didn’t want to hear it. Rhythmic. That baby’s solo for the D-Con Choir. My father was with me. Not sure where my mother was. She liked me the least she ever had so was done with me.
A large syringe withdrew amniotic fluid. Lethal saline solution—salt—replaced it, burned baby. An essential nutrient; no salt in the body and no life. Baby barbecue. Infant flambé. A horrible death, but death penalty seemed right. Labor all night. The next day I delivered the stillborn vaginally and got admonishment from Dr. P: “Don’t do this again, young lady!”—as if I would want to repeat this! I never checked for fetal movement. The baby must have sensed it wasn’t wanted. I did nothing to celebrate it, nothing to memorialize that striped blanket, its stank odor, that D-Conning deacon.
My most fertile days of this cycle for rape, but I didn’t scream. Maybe I could’ve. I don’t know because I didn’t try. I opened my mouth, drained of sound, only mouthing words of an ineffective heavenly song. Nor did I bite him, staining my teeth, rendering them useless for eating anything. I would surely need prosthetics. Voice and virginity gone. And a pregnancy that would follow me to this day. Having to say to every OB-GYN that I have had, not one, but two pregnancies and only one son.
You might think that this would be the end, but two more things: my mother said, “Be sure to tell no one about this. They will never understand. No man will want you. It will always hold you back.” And her prediction seemed to happen, because the person she insisted I marry the very next year, John Moss, who attended that church, said to me, “Charles Jones is laughing at me for having his used goods.”
ABORTION HALLUCINATION
Larissa Shmailo
In the corner of the basement where my father used to lie I
watch, interested, as the snake
grows larger and more menacing I am
taken slightly aback but remember him remember that I like
handling snakes and smile
and as always he softens grows smaller
becomes a hippopotamus I have won again I have stared him down
made him warm
and the Nile gives up its life to me
animals carnivorous and calm come home to me
two by two
I watch for the longest time
until the largest fills the window with his face
black as light
Agnus Dei
BRASS FURNACE GOING OUT: SONG, AFTER AN ABORTION
Diane di Prima
I
to say I fail
ed, that is walked out
and into the arctic
How shd I know where I was?
A man chants in the courtyard,
the window is open
someone else drops a pecan pie
into the yard
two dogs down there play trumpet
there is something disturbed
about the melody.
and what of the three-year-old girl who poisoned her mother?
that happens, it isn’t just us, as you can see—
what you took with you when you left
remains to be seen.
II
I want you in a bottle to send to your father
with a long bitter note. I want him to know
I’ll not forgive you, or him,
for not being born for drying up, quitting
at the first harsh treatment
as if the whole thing were a rent party
& somebody stepped in your feet
III
send me your address, a picture, I want to
keep in touch. I want to know how you
are, to send you cookies.
do you have enough sweaters? is the winter bad?
do you know what I’ve done, what I’m doing?
do you care?
write in detail of your day, what time you get up,
what you are studying, when you expect
to finish & what you will do.
is it chilly?
IV
your face dissolving in water, like wet clay
washed away, like a rotten water
lily rats on the riverbank barking at the sight
do they swim?
the trees here walk right down to the edge
conversing
your body sank, a good way back
I hear the otters will bring it to the surface
and the wailing mosquitoes even stop to examine
the last melting details of eyelid & cheekbone
the stagnant blood
who taught you not to tangle your hair in the seaweed
to disappear with finesse
the lion pads
along the difficult path
in the heart of the jungle
and comes to the riverbank
he paws your face
I wish he would drink it up
in that strong gut it would come
to life.
but he waits till he floats
a distance
drinks clean water
dances a little
starts the long walk
again
the silent giraffe lets loose
a mourning cry
fish surface
your mouth and the end of your nose
disappear.
the water was cold the day you slipped into the river
wind ruffled the surface, I carried you on my back
a good distance, then you slipped in
red ants started up my leg & changed their minds
I fed my eyeballs to a carnivorous snake
& chained myself to a tree to await your end.
your face no sooner dissolved than I thought I saw
a kneecap sticking up where the current is strongest
a turtle
older than stars
walked on your bones
V
who forged this night, what steel
clamps down?
like gray pajamas on an invalid
if I knew the name of flowers, the habits
of quadrupeds, the thirteen points of the compass…
an aged mapmaker who lived on this street
just succumbed to rheumatism
I have cut the shroud to measure
bought the stone
a plot in the cemetery set aside
to bury your shadow
take your head & go!
& may the woman that you find know better
than talk to me about it
VI
your goddamned belly, rotten, a home for flies.
blown out & stinking, the maggots curling
your hair your useless never used cock,
the pitiful skull the pitiful shell of a skull, dumped in the toilet
the violet, translucent folds
of beginning life
VII
what is it that I cannot bear to say?
that if you had turned out mad, a murderer
a junkie pimp hanged & burning in lime
alone & filled w/the rotting dark
if you’d been frail and a little given to weirdness
or starved, or been shot, or tortured in hunger camps
it wd have been frolic & triumph compared to this—
I can’t even cry for you, I can’t hang on
that long
VIII
forgive, forgive
that the cosmic waters do not turn from me
that I should not die of thirst
IX
oranges & jade at the shrine
my footprints
wet on the stone
the bells in that clear air
wind from the sea
your shadow
flat on the flat rocks
the priestess (sybil)
spelling your name
crying out, behind copper doors
giving birth
atone
silence, the air
moving outside
the door to the temple blowing on its hinges
that was the spirit she said
it passed above you
the branch I carry home is mistletoe
& walk backwards, with my eyes on the sea
X
here in my room I sit at drawing table
as I have sat all day, or walked
from drawing table to bed,
or stopped at window
considering the things to be done
weighing them in the hand and putting them down
hung up as the young Rilke.
here in my room all day on my couch a stranger
who does not take his eyes
off me as I walk & walk from table to bed.
and I cannot stop thinking I would be three months pregnant
we would be well out of here & in the sun
Even our telephone would be polite
we would laugh a lot, in the morning.
XI
your ivory teeth in the half light
your arms
flailing about, that is, you
age nine months,
sitting up & trying to stand
cutting teeth.
your diaper trailing, a formality
elegant as a loincloth, the sweet stench
of baby-shit in the house; the oil
rubbed into your hair.
blue off the moon your ghostshape
mistaken as broken tooth
your flesh rejected
never to grow—your hands
that should have closed around my finger
what moonlight
will play in your hair?
I mean to say
dear fish, I hope you swim
in another river.
I hope that wasn’t
rebuttal, but a transfer, an attempt
that failed, but to be followed
quickly by another
suck your thumb somewhere
dear silly thing, explode
make someone’s colors.
the senses (five)
a gift
to hear, see, touch, choke on & love
this life
the rotten globe
to walk in shoes
what apple doesn’t get
at least this much?
a caramel candy sticking in your teeth
you, age three
bugged
bearing down on a sliding pond.
your pulled tooth in my hand
/>
(age six)
your hair with clay in it,
your goddamn grin
XII
sun on the green plants, your prattle
among the vines.
that this possibility is closed to us.
my house is small, my windows look out on grey courtyard
there is no view of the sea.
will you come here again? I will entertain you
as well as I can—I will make you comfortable
in spite of new york.
will
you
come here
again
my breasts prepare
to feed you: they do what they can
WHAT WAS, STILL IS
Alida Rol
Although the how matters
little, she blamed herself
as women do. She told only
those she had to and nursed
her shame alone. There was
never a question. There were no
what-ifs. She knew there must be
no baby. It was legal and yet
so difficult to lie on a strange
man’s table, trust his hands
inside. It was hard to feel the
delving, hear the motor, taste
the pain. It was as right
as it was unbearable. She held
these thoughts side by side
and carried them into her future
where she treats the women
who’ve come to lie, often afraid,
on her table. Now there are
pills to take and probes
instead of fingers, but there is
no proxy, still, for the plain
words and kind touch
of someone who was there.
FROM “ABORTION”
Anne Finger
Amber and I ate a p.m. breakfast at a diner near her house. A man in a stained white apron came over to the booth to take our order, carrying a pencil but no pad. He pointed the pencil eraser end outwards (as if pointing with the sharpened end were rude) first at Amber, repeating, “Bagel, scrambled, grapefruit, coffee,” and then at me, “Poached, bacon, whole wheat, coffee.”
“Amber, when you had your abortion, did you … ”
“Jesus,” Amber said. “Jump right in.”
“I’m sorry.” I took a cigarette from her pack but didn’t light it. “I think I feel guilty. About having had one.”
“You?” Amber asked. “Guilty?”
“What do you mean, me, guilty. I’m guilt-ridden. It’s my sap, my second blood.”
