Choice Words

by Annie Finch

  She flinched.

  “Delaware is a pretty name,” Kathryn said behind the reception desk, and after a while the words came across to Delaware. “Where did you get that name?”

  “My mother just liked how it sounded.”

  “It’s unusual.”

  “There’s Indiana Jones.”

  Kathryn laughed and nodded. She sorted papers in a file. “Just you and her live together?”

  Delaware didn’t mind, because Kathryn’s voice was easy, or because her sugar-brown face looked tired now that it didn’t look angry. “Yeah,” she said.

  “You in high school?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Job?”

  “Summers. She works at the Frost-T-Man. She always works.”

  “That’s good,” Kathryn said softly. She sorted some more and after a while said, “You doing okay in high school,” not a question but as if she knew.

  “Yeah.”

  “I bet you do. Go on to college?”

  “Yeah I guess.”

  “That’s good,” Kathryn said again. “You’ll do it.”

  The tears arrived suddenly and quietly and poured out and dried up. Delaware read reviews of a movie about a man who killed twenty women and a movie about children possessed by demons. The nurse came to the end of the hall and said, “Your friend’s in recovery now, honey.”

  Delaware followed her down the hall. The nurse talked to her without turning around. “She was a little nervous so Doctor gave her a tranquilizer. She’ll be a little woozy for half an hour, maybe. Then she can get dressed.” She led Delaware into a clean, green, windowless room with three beds in it, two of them empty. Sharee was tucked into one, her curly, thick hair pulled back and her face without makeup, so that she looked like a kid. She focused on Delaware and smiled sleepily. “Hi, baby!” she said.

  DEAR ELEGY THE SIZE OF A BLUEBERRY

  Katy Day

  Did I ever tell you how scared I was to swallow a watermelon seed? Even as a child I knew the pit of me was no place to take root, no sunlight penetrated my walls, and how could I let anything grow hostile as me? You were never more than the size of a blueberry. Dear elegy, that is all you’ll ever be. I watch your sister watch your sister watch your sister. She is mortified by what we’ve done to the planet. Seal pup on a sheet of ice is someone’s dinner on TV. I watch your sister watch the pup get eaten alive. How she cries. Is this real? Is this all real? And I don’t lie. There is nothing we can do to save you. Dear elegy, if I could, would I wind you back up into the size of a blueberry? Dear elegy, dear, dear, the predator needs to eat too. When she was two, your sister called them bluebabies. I fed them to her in a small dish. Before she swallowed, she held each one to her lips, gave it a kiss, soothed it with her little finger, told it she was sorry. I didn’t know the cherry blossom petals falling was beautiful too. I wish I could show you snow in April, elegy, the way I wish I could show you the cormorants flying in again, giving spring a second chance.

  “FAREWELL, MY LOVE,” FROM THE SACRAMENT OF ABORTION

  Ginette Paris

  When I awoke that morning with a prickly feeling in the tip of my breasts and a subtle heaviness in my lower belly, I already knew I was pregnant. It was the first time it had happened when I didn’t want it to happen. I thought about nothing else night and day for two weeks. I wanted to weigh everything, think of everything, all the alternatives, all the angles, taking into account the energy, the support, and the money that was available or even possible. No matter how I looked at it I came to the same conclusion: alone with your children, with no help from their father, I could accept a third child only through some dubious and costly form of heroism on my part. I would be giving life at the cost of swallowing up what little energy is left over from my job. I would be giving life to the detriment of my two small children who still need me a lot. And finally, I would lose the creative momentum in the work that I adore, the work that nourishes me, the work that was then and still is my contribution to the world. So the decision was clear, the appointment was made, and yet I was inconsolable. Several times a day, at the most unexpected moments, I was overcome with tears that I had more and more difficulty hiding from or justifying to my two children who are too young to understand. My heart was broken.

  Paradoxically, during this period of reflection and calculation, my heart went about doing what it had done for my other children, loving this little creature curled up somewhere in my belly. I had long silent conversations with it. Why had it come? Why the absurd contraceptive failure? And above all why these waves of love for it, just as I was getting ready to refuse it a place, and thereby a life? The waves of love were so physical they were beyond my control; they submerged me every day in a painful and sensual way, like inflows of milk. I could only let myself glide along, feverish and amorous, full but without roundness yet, a little intoxicated as at the beginning of an affair. So why refuse all that? The absurd tearing apart of the abortion process seemed intolerable. I had to find an answer in the deepest part of my being.

  During one of those inexplicable loving conversations I felt as if I was carrying in me someone who had previously died in the complete oblivion, anonymously, far from loved ones. And that it had come this time to refashion its departure from life. Just the departure. But this time in full and loving consciousness. And I could give that. I don’t know where the idea came from, nor is it important; it gave meaning to what I was going through and allowed me to commit myself wholeheartedly to my decision and to my love.

  Which I did, right up to the night before the appointment. The separation approached and wrung my heart. I cried so much that evening I thought a dam had burst. I asked myself: “What am I crying about? the death of a fetus? my own cruelty? a child I’ll never know?” The friend who offered me a shoulder to cry on assured me the answer was not important, that I just needed to let myself feel the pain. But I felt I might find a clue in that answer.

  I suddenly realized through my tears that I was afraid of being a bad mother to this baby. But bad mothers, if they exist at all, don’t worry about harming their little ones. No, I wasn’t a bad mother. On the contrary I was giving this creature the best of me, as I had done for the other two. All of this came to me with such certainty that a great sense of peace ran through me, and I went to sleep with only a few leftover sobs.

  I woke up in the same frame of mind, calm, sad, and serene.

  When my turn came I stretched out on the table, feet in the stirrups, ready to let my little darling go. But as soon as the doctor touched my cervix with the first metal instrument, I became terribly nauseated and drenched in sweat; everything toppled over backwards, the whole room went dark. They began to throw cold water in my face, check my blood pressure, call out to me, while I put my total effort into each breath so as not to lose contact. I was in a state of clinical shock, my body reacting violently to what it perceived as mortal danger. I wondered for a long time afterward why that had happened when I had been so at peace with my decision. I realized that, even if my head and my heart accepted the loss, my uterus still saw it as a mortal threat and was protesting with all its strength in an effort to protect its little lodger. I was very proud of my uterus for doing its job so well!

  After everything calmed down the procedure moved gently ahead. One instrument, then another. Breathe, breathe, breathe. Say yes, say yes. And when the machine made its horrible, absurd noise I talked to it: “Farewell. Goodbye, my beautiful little love.” And I cried. Then the machine shut off. It was over. My baby was really gone. The rest of the day went by smoothly, my hands on my belly for warmth, and a kind of muted pain or the memory of pain. A few tears of sorrow now and then. Only sorrow.

  The next day life went back to normal. But curiously several friends I met asked me: “What’s going on with you? You’re so radiant today, you’re absolutely glowing.” What’s going on is that I’ve just had an abortion and lived an impossible love and accomplished a great reconciliation with myself
. But it was my secret and my gift.

  Now, seven years later, I cry as I write this. Not with regret or remorse or guilt. Just tears of sadness. My darling is still alive but he is far away. And I am his mother.

  Translated by Joanna Mott

  AFTERLIFE

  Joan Larkin

  I’m older than my father when he turned

  bright gold and left his body with its used-up liver

  in the Faulkner Hospital, Jamaica Plain. I don’t

  believe in the afterlife, don’t know where he is

  now his flesh has finished rotting from his long

  bones in the Jewish Cemetery—he could be the only

  convert under those rows and rows of headstones.

  Once, washing dishes in a narrow kitchen

  I heard him whistling behind me. My nape froze.

  Nothing like this has happened since. But this morning

  we were on a plane to Virginia together. I was seventeen,

  pregnant and scared. Abortion was waiting,

  my aunt’s guest bed soaked with blood, my mother

  screaming—and he was saying kids get into trouble—

  I’m getting it now: this was forgiveness.

  I think if he’d lived he’d have changed and grown

  but what would he have made of my flood of words

  after he’d said in a low voice as the plane

  descended to Richmond in clean daylight

  and the stewardess walked between the rows

  in her neat skirt and tucked-in blouse

  Don’t ever tell this to anyone.

  1“She Did Not Tell Her Mother (A Found Poem)” is based on quotes gathered from Mitchell, Ellen H.H. et al., “Social Scripts and Stark Realities: Kenyan Adolescents’ Abortion Discourse,” Culture, Health, and Sexuality, Volume 8, 2006, pp. 518–528.

  WILL

  THROUGH THE BLOOD

  Busisiwe Mahlangu

  At night, I hug my body to sleep

  just to feel like it belongs to me.

  Body has been dragged through mud

  with a million hands grabbing their own pieces.

  Body has been talked down into a hole

  by a thousand mouths each taking a bite.

  Body is exhausted of searching for ways to be mine.

  There are many ways I whisper I love you to it.

  Sometimes the whisper is a loud bang of protest.

  Other times the whisper is just silence.

  In this ugly world,

  any whispering Black woman is a danger to herself.

  You should swallow a storm.

  You should eat the wind.

  Any way to lock the voice in your throat.

  Somewhere, a law is written against my body.

  Here, I give my body all the love I have.

  I eat as much fried chips as I can.

  I stay up all night watching movies.

  I walk into a hospital and terminate a pregnancy I don’t need.

  I don’t explain to anyone why I did it.

  There are only few words to say I did it for life.

  I don’t explain to anyone why I did it.

  There isn’t enough time for them to see

  that the life I speak of is mine.

  That I was alive before the abortion

  and I am alive now—

  That too is a life blessing.

  When the world crumbles with their insults again,

  I whisper to the empty space in my womb,

  This is love

  This is love

  This is love, too.

  RIGHT TO LIFE

  Marge Piercy

  A woman is not a pear tree

  thrusting her fruit in mindless fecundity

  into the world. Even pear trees bear

  heavily one year and rest and grow the next.

  An orchard gone wild drops few warm rotting

  fruit in the grass but the trees stretch

  high and wiry gifting the birds forty

  feet up among inch long thorns

  broken atavistically from the smooth wood.

  A woman is not a basket you place

  your buns in to keep them warm. Not a brood

  hen you can slip duck eggs under.

  Not a purse holding the coins of your

  descendants till you spend them in wars.

  Not a bank where your genes gather interest

  and interesting mutations in the tainted rain.

  You plant corn and you harvest

  it to eat or sell. You put the lamb

  in the pasture to fatten and haul it in

  to butcher for chops. You slice

  the mountain in two for a road and gouge

  the high plains for coal and the waters

  run muddy for miles and years.

  Fish die but you do not call them yours

  unless you planned to eat them.

  Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman.

  You lay claim to her pasture for grazing,

  fields for growing babies like iceberg

  lettuce. You value children so dearly

  that none ever go hungry, none weep

  with no one to tend them when mothers

  work, none lack fresh fruit,

  none chew lead or cough to death and your

  foster homes are empty. Every noon the best

  restaurants serve poor children steaks.

  At this moment at nine o’clock a partera

  is performing a tabletop abortion on an

  unwed mother in Texas who can’t get Medicaid

  any longer. In five days she will die

  of tetanus and her little daughter will cry

  and be taken away. Next door a husband

  and wife are sticking pins in the son

  they did not want. They will explain

  for hours how wicked he is,

  how he wants discipline.

  We are all born of woman. In the rose

  of the womb we suckled our mother’s blood

  and every baby born has a right to love

  like a seedling to sun. Every baby born

  unloved, unwanted is a bill that will come

  due in twenty years with interest, an anger

  that must find a target, a pain that will

  beget pain. A decade downstream a child

  screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,

  a firing squad is summoned, a button

  is pushed and the world burns.

  I will choose what enters me, what becomes

  flesh of my flesh. Without choice, no politics,

  no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield,

  not your uranium mine, not your calf

  for fattening, not your cow for milking.

  You may not use me as your factory.

  Priests and legislators do not hold

  shares in my womb or my mind.

  This is my body. If I give it to you

  I want it back. My life

  is a nonnegotiable demand.

  FROM ZAMI: A NEW SPELLING OF MY NAME

  Audre Lorde

  Two weeks later I discovered I was pregnant.

  I tried to recall half-remembered information garnered from other people’s friends who had been “in trouble.” The doctor in Pennsylvania who did good clean abortions very cheaply because his daughter had died on a kitchen table after he had refused to abort her. But sometimes the police grew suspicious, so he wasn’t always working. A call through the grapevine found out that he wasn’t.

  Trapped. Something—anything—had to be done. No one else can take care of this. What am I going to do?

  The doctor who gave me the results of my positive rabbit test was a friend of Jean’s aunt, who had said he might “help.” This help meant offering to get me into a home for unwed mothers out of the city run by a friend of his. “Anything else,” he said, piously, “is illegal.”

  I was terrified by t
he stories I had heard in school from my friends about the butchers and the abortion mills of the Daily News. Cheap kitchen-table abortions. Jean’s friend Francie had died on the way to the hospital just last year after trying to do it with the handle of a number one paintbrush.

  These horrors were not just stories, nor infrequent. I had seen too many of the results of botched abortions on the bloody gurneys lining the hallways outside the emergency room.

  Besides, I had no real contacts.

  Through winter-dim streets, I walked to the subway from the doctor’s office, knowing I could not have a baby and knowing it with a certainty that galvanized me far beyond anything I knew to do.

  The girl in the Labor Youth League who had introduced me to Peter had had an abortion, but it had cost three hundred dollars. The guy had paid for it. I did not have three hundred dollars, and I had no way of getting three hundred dollars, and I swore her to secrecy telling her the baby wasn’t Peter’s. Whatever was going to be done I had to do. And fast.

  Castor oil and a dozen Bromo Quinine pills didn’t help.

  Mustard baths gave me a rash, but didn’t help either.

  Neither did jumping off a table in an empty classroom at Hunter, and I almost broke my glasses.

  Ann was a licensed practical nurse I knew from working the evening shift at Beth David Hospital. We used to flirt in the nurses’ pantry after midnight when the head nurse was sneaking a doze in some vacant private room on the floor. Ann’s husband was a soldier in Korea. She was thirty-one years old—and knew her way around, in her own words—beautiful and friendly, small, sturdy, and deeply Black. One night, while we were warming the alcohol and talcum for p.m.-care back rubs, she pulled out her right breast to show me the dark mole which grew at the very line where her deep-purple aureola met the lighter chocolate brown of her skin, and which, she told me with a mellow laugh, “drove all the doctors crazy.”