She begins on the bench outside the courthouse. Every time there is a thick packet in her lap. It is unclear where the packet comes from, as she is always alone.
Sometimes they are divorce papers. (He has left her.)
Sometimes it is a plea deal. (She has killed him.)
Sometimes it is raining.
Early on she would pore through the pages, but these moments would stretch longer, slower, like threads of cheap bubble gum pulled loose and limp. Perhaps she is not meant to know the details of her own origin story.
In every case, one thing is true: it is impossible to live forward.
* * *
First steps when she goes back: throw out the calendars, disable the date displays. She finds there are other ways to mark time. Over and over she cuts her hair, chooses a new color to help her remember. In this way she begins to build a rainbow of memory. Bottle dyes from the convenience store, the sharp sting of bleach in her bathroom. She is careful to set a timer. The moments that could end badly tend to go by faster than the others.
He’s always there when she goes back, though he’s never in the same place. Near the school, skirting downtown, a few times in the suburbs. There’s always the moment she asks for his address. It spins out, extends on, each blink an eternity—always the starkest confusion on his face, like he’s never seen her before.
Sometimes they live together, but he is never home.
He always prefers her hair in the warmer tones: red and carrot orange and strawberry blonde. She feels least like herself in these shades, but in most cases, she wants to make him happy. She’s found things go best when she selects the deep burgundy, a color that could fill a wineglass. He says it brings out the red in her lips, usually before he kisses her. But then there are the times she wakes up in the night, fails to recognize the fiery tendrils spooling out across her pillow in the darkness.
She comes to find that the beginnings are better—people smile at her more. He’s not yet grown tired of her jokes. And sometimes, in the mirror, her eyes even seem a bit brighter.
The light is never quite the same.
* * *
Every time there are certain inevitabilities. The party is one of them. The realization he comes to at the party is another. Not so much what he realizes, as this remains in constant flux. (She is a drunk, for example, or he never had the chance to be with other women, which is true, or once even that he has come to despise the life he has built for himself and would be much happier if he sold all of his belongings, quit his job, and backpacked across New Zealand.)
Typically this moment is a sign of the end. So she hovers on the outskirts of the room, holding water or wine, and waits for it.
Most times, they fight. In front of other guests, in front of strangers, with lots of yelling. She mixes things up when she’s angry, lashes out at him for a moment that belongs somewhere else, with the inky black hair or the sunflower gold. Sometimes she spills her drink.
This time, a New Year’s party. The fireworks just now cresting overhead, thunder and lightning created by those who play at controlling the weather. Fresh snow gilds the balcony railing. She writes her name in the white with her finger, obliterates the cold letters with the palm of her hand. The cheers can be heard from inside, collective voices slowing to drawl as the moment begins to lag. She isn’t sure what year they’re celebrating.
He smiles up at the sky, eyes glowing different colors in the synthetic light. She only looks at him, her own eyes too wide. Waiting. The seconds thread by at an agonizing pace.
They’re just lighting up the sky with chemicals, he says. That’s all it is, you know. We probably see hundreds of these in our lifetime. And yet they still make people happy.
Confused, she searches his face for an anger that isn’t there, an absent disappointment. The moment skips like a record, jumps ahead through his next sentence. She pretends to hear what he’s said. Two rapid red bursts above them, like a pair of heartbeats. Then a third, sun-shaped, golden beams streaking out endlessly from a sparkling blood-red center. So bright that, briefly, she could swear the sun’s coming out at midnight.
I wish this could last forever, he’s saying. This moment.
No, she says, you don’t mean that. Her stomach churns. She begins to count.
He pushes back from the railing, opens his mouth to speak, but his smile plasters and freezes. In the light of the motionless firework overhead she can count every one of his teeth, imbue his expression with the sentiment of her choosing. The last thing he said starts to mean less and less as the seconds pass. If she threw her drink at him now, it wouldn’t matter.
She’s disappointed that it’s ending like this. But it’s always ending.
Abigail Oswald holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and currently resides in Connecticut. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fugue, Gone Lawn, Hobart, Necessary Fiction, Split Lip, Sundog, and elsewhere. You can find her online at abigailwashere.com.
I once welcomed the wasteland. Wandering across the salted crust of dry earth, I called out until it came. Embodied, naked and barren under the slow scorch of the steady sun, I laid there until I was numb. I laid there until nothing else mattered anymore aside from the smell of my own burnt skin. Then one day, I heard a whisper, like the faint sound of the wind as it echoes through the hollows of a cave. When I cried out to follow, my body awakened to the soft caress of lotus petals against my skin, and I no longer wanted the wasteland where I had been. I opened my mouth to protest, but my voice was made only of the flies that carried the sweet smell of putridity on their wings as they glistened through the air. When they laid my body down on the cold metal table, a black sludge emerged. Trailing vapors of steam, it oozed across the examination floor engulfing those powdery petals like they were pieces of tissue paper. The next morning, I woke up empty, and I would never be numb again.
Sonia Beauchamp is a poet and healer who resides on the North Shore of Oahu. Her work has most recently appeared in Screen Door Review and Thirteen Myna Birds. When she’s not writing, you might find her surrounded by feral chickens or spinning fire in the moonlight. Find out more at soniakb.com.
I push below my belly button, can feel a difference.
this is not an eviction or a reverse coronation.
I did not say goodbye, the so-long implied, nor did I consider a greeting.
the plans are made, I am not home.
Maryan Nagy Captan is an experimental writer, educator, and performance poet based in Austin, Texas. She is a Poetry and Screenwriting Fellow at The Michener Center for Writers and serves as the Marketing Director for Bat City Review. Maryan is the author of copy/body (Empty Set Press, 2017) and an alumna of the Disquiet International Literary Program. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Anomaly, Foundry, ProLit, AJAR, Apiary Magazine, Mantra Review, Boneless/Skinless, Sundog Lit, and elsewhere.
“Abortionists emphasized speed and their own protection. They often didn’t use anesthesia because it took too long for women to recover,” from feminist.com and Our Bodies, Ourselves for the New Century
Green beneath winter mulch, beneath shoes, stable and considerate. How to describe fear as tracks in fresh snow or as vicious dogs let loose from a yard— I did not know what else to do in this time. A body remembers stiff white sheets, a long metal rod that tore into the small red shell of herself her lips repeating something no one could hear. Torn paper with sorrow written in bleach. A young girl as torn paper. The non-creature ripped out of her. A girl and a girl? Mercy a droplet, then swiped into air.
women’s march, 2016
Being {cemetery & hotel}
When you were raped, you didn’t call it rape, couldn’t listen to the stones inside you cry corrosion, you wanted to believe it was love’s hum. You didn’t know the dead beneath their inscribed headstones were seeping into you, like Sapstreak’s disease, and you a maple that didn’t know it was dying.
You didn’t listen to yourself tell yourself what was and wasn’t or believe your own body, its gravel of shock, its heart- mouths widening, suffocating out of water, you were young. You couldn’t say it aloud until you laid like a beached dolphin on a hotel bed where a non-doctor hovered over you, until the seed- shaped being inside rolled out of you, almost forgiveness.
Amy Small-McKinney’s work has been published in numerous journals, including The Cortland Review, Construction, The Indianapolis Review, Connotation Press, LIPS, Tiferet Journal, MiPOesias, and elsewhere. Her second full-length book of poems, Walking Toward Cranes, won the Kithara Book Prize 2016 (Glass Lyre Press). Small-McKinney’s reviews of poetry books have appeared in a number of journals, including Tiferet and Connotation Press, and Prairie Schooner. Her poems have been translated into Romanian and Korean. Small-McKinney teaches community poetry workshops in Philadelphia and is dedicated to helping others find a way to say the unsayable within the safe container of poetry. She has an MS in Neuropsychology from Drexel University and an MFA in Poetry from Drew University.
Seventh grade, science project, my partner Theresa tells me We’re Doing Abortion and shows up in my dining room with glue, glitter, a cardboard trifold,
mock-fetuses that fit in her hand, and baby Holocaust photos: piles of dead babies, sacks of boneless flesh like laundry gathered with a bulldozer,
dented, veiny blue heads like rotting cantaloupes, hollow, black circles where eyes should be—a baby costume I could pull over my face
so my own eyes peeked through. She flips through the propaganda like it’s Teen Beat, she points and says This Is The Vacuum They Use To Suck
The Baby Out Of You. I’m twelve, I’ve never heard of abortion, she hands me a red marker and says I’ll Glue The Pictures On, You Color Blood.
SENRYŪ: HOW TO VOTE IN A MIDTERM
oval small black bean penned clitoris tired eye mark inside the lines
LOVE LETTER TO THE DAUGHTER I MIGHT HAVE SOME DAY
You are small and carry half of me with you, but if I could have it my way, it would be all of me. I am a selfish mother
like this. Please do not ask me how many times I’ve been drunk, because the answer will be all the times. If I am a mother, I must tell the truth:
one time I fell in love and I wasn’t. I’ve said bad things about good people. I no longer think that when we die we shut down like our lights are unplugged forever, because last month our dog Lenny died, and I held his body, bawled into his soft ears, and refuse to live without him. I am a selfish mother
like this. If you ask me where you come from, I will answer: who knows? I can only tell you, daughter, that you and me—we’re animals. We eat, we sleep, we thrash, we run and pant in our dreams. The world is hot garbage most of the time, and I don’t know how to save you. So we hold each other tight. We catch each other’s eye and it burns
until we look away. Here is what I have given you: the right to complain. Rhetoric. Blonde hair, that when combed enough becomes fine like a violin bow. Permission. An appetite for sugar in excess. A healthy obsession with shelter dogs. Unbridled, important rage.
Daughter, you are the song before the lyrics match the tune. You are the sundog captured in the shot. Every day I ask you where you came from and you answer: who knows?
META-POSTPARTUM
I came as a six-legged horse,
cobalt cold,
Picassoesque Man o’ War
carrying a jockey made
of bubblegum and branches,
my entire life muted fanfare,
a race lost to Upset.
in the race
between woman and man
my breasts hold me back—
azure and cinderblock.
I came as indigo as time,
riding a balloon
the balloon was filled with glass—
I came as stiff as seized gears
I greased the pinions with acetone
the acetone was on fire—
I was born sapphire,
and I don’t know why
I’m here.
I iron my cornflower cape
and question joy.
Unhappy birthday to me,
I come as an ocean,
navy and bored.
I will major in lazy
and become a galaxy—
hold stars
between my fingers
I got baby reds
I got baby greens
I got baby blues
Jean Prokott has appeared in Quarterly West, Midwest Gothic, and RHINO, is a recipient of the AWP Intro Journals Award, and a finalist for RHINO’s Founders’ Prize. Her poetry collection received third place in the Cathlamet Prize for Poetry with Ravenna Press and was a finalist for the New Issues Poetry Prize. She is a graduate of Minnesota State University Mankato’s MFA program, holds a Master of Science in Education, and currently teaches in Rochester, Minnesota.
Summer held thunder
to the mountainside
like a lover but offered
nothing—heat lightning
the false prophet of rain—
a chalk-dry sky that swallowed
the moon and everything blue.
My mother didn’t believe
in omens but that year
I caught her lighting candles
for want of water, found
my father staring
at what was left of the lake—
the way its cracked shoreline
curled like the mocking smile
of a skull.
On Sunday mornings
the preacher said it was sin—
our secret pleasures—
that kept the rain at bay
so men lined up all summer
to be baptized and all
the women started wearing
white.
The week after the abortion
I wanted to be heavy
so despite the drought
I swallowed water in secret
wrapped my body around
whatever spigot I could find
while the pious prayed
for rain, and like Judas
kissing cheeks on Sundays
I prayed with them—tested
the weight of water on my knees—
but when it finally came
it flooded everything,
uprooted all that might
have grown—
THANK YOU FOR PUNISHING ME INSTEAD OF MY RAPIST, OR: HB 314
for Senators Greg Albritton of Atmore; Gerald Allen of Tuscaloosa; Will Barfoot of Montgomery; Tom Butler of Madison; Clyde Chambliss of Prattville; Donnie Chesteen of Geneva; Chris Elliott of Fairhope; Sam Givhan of Huntsville; Garlan Gudger of Cullman; Andrew Jones of Centre; Steve Livingston of Scottsboro; Del Marsh of Anniston; Jim McClendon of Springville; Tim Melson of Florence; Arthur Orr of Decatur; Randy Price of Opelika; Greg Reed of Jasper; Dan Roberts of Birmingham; Clay Scofield of Guntersville; David Sessions of Mobile; Shay Shelnutt of Trussville; Larry Stutts of Sheffield; Jabo Waggoner of Vestavia Hills; Cam Ward of Alabaster; Jack Williams of Wilmer; and Governor Kay Ivey.
The day I became
property of the state
of Alabama I’d already
been bleeding for a week
and I knew I wouldn’t
use my body’s blood to save
the idea of someone else.
I knew I’d lose it trying
to save myself. I prayed,
told God I’d rather die
than live another day
as a daughter in a country
full of sons. He answered
in a voice like a funeral,
or America, or a man:
That’s the only choice
a daughter gets to make.
Raye Hendrix is a poet from Alabama. She earned her MA from Auburn University and her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. Raye is the winner of the 2019 Keene Prize for Literature and the 2018 Patricia Aakhus Award (Southern Indiana Review) and a finalist for Tinderbox Poetry Journal’s Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize (2018). Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Shenandoah, Cimarron Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Daily, The Pinch, and elsewhere. Raye will begin working on her PhD in American Literature and Queer/Crip theory this fall at the University of Oregon.
Gambling your life in the yellow pages,
I found a name, dialed a number,
rolled the dice and felt you quiver
inside me. Sitting against my womb,
you were barely there, suspended
between alpha and omega, a dwindle,
a sprout, tiny bud among dandelion
and wild grass, a clock ticking too soon.
Forgive me, for I was already timing your
breath, each leaf falling outside my window
numbering your days as on an abacus,
each bird song a mea culpa tolling torment
in the wee hours of morning. You never leave.
Today still you sit on my chest in the quietest
of nights and I still carry your weight in me
the way gods carry punishment, shouldering
the world as their burden, rolling boulders up
a sacred mountain before their repeated tumble.
Fabienne Josaphat is the author of Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow. Her poetry has appeared in Hinchas de Poesia, The New Engagement, and has been anthologized in Eight Miami Poets. Her essay, Summer is an Empty House, made the Notable Essays mentions in Best American Essays 2016, and she was recently a national juror for the 2019 Scholastic Awards. She lives in South Florida and is currently at work on a second novel.
Scrolling across the club walls: slash of silhouettes like a fist of razor blades, X’d arms and legs, Nagel hair. And they’re gone. The famous Troix-Croix Gymnasts. Twenty-two hours, countless takes. Three seconds of on-screen time. Count that. One-one-hundred-two-one-hundred-three-one-hundred.
Wedge of eight suits, shoulders slicing past the girls on reception, looking at no one looking at everyone. Bodyguards orbiting, their blunt dog heads turning, ears looped with wires.
The suits are high on the win and the celebration still only three hours old. They shouldn’t even be there but the center of their group, short black hair, wide grin, maverick eyes, is young enough to insist. It’s my party. Landslide win.
That disarming smile. The talk-show women notch their legs tighter, sit straighter, lean closer. What’s your secret senator? No false modesty here, no avoiding the question. Young people are speaking up. They want change. They want something better for their country. I’m lucky enough to be part of this movement. He’s not the whole thing—just a part. The disarming smile. What does the rest of the senate think of him, a thirty-something? I’m thirty-two. Wow. They’re dazzled. He’s quick to point out that John Henry Eaton was younger – twenty-eight. Sworn in on November 16 1818. Laughter. So you’re the second youngest. Sure. But there are other twenty-eight year-olds out there who are ready to serve. That’s what we’re here to do—serve our country. High-wattage smile into the camera.
Nearly everyone’s excited about the New Party. The old parties are less excited. Snide social media commentary about little kids with loud voices. The new senator has a loud voice. But he also has a sharp budget proposal, shiny new immigrant, tax, and medical care reforms—the result of eight months’ consulting, crafting, tweaking, leaking and poaching. Because all great ideas come from other great ideas.
Shoulders knuckling forward, the suits push into the lounge area just as the next part of the new Trois-Croix promo zeros in: full screen close up of thick-lashed eyes, and pupils like trapped stars against blue-green irises. The senator stops. Who has eyes like this? Does the search: Colomba. Pupil irregularity.
The fast-buzz cocktail of alcohol and cocaine brakes/accelerates and it’s that movie moment when the world rushes up and teeters on three seconds. What happened to her? Is she wearing contacts?
And the eyes are gone.
The others slap him on the back, Come on Buzz Lightyear. Come on, you dick. Hey don’t call him a dick. Sorry. Senator Dick. Cheering. You did it. We did it. We all did it. You’re next. No, you are. Did you hear? Charlton’s going to run. Charlton? Miami Dolphins? He’s great. He had that head injury. He doesn’t play anymore. His head’s okay though? He can still talk, right? Does it matter? Hahahaha. Charlton. Remind me to call him. Okay, Drum. That’s Senator Drum to you.
The starburst eyes. What color were they?
The Smoke and Feathers VIP Lounge is at the back of the club and you can only get in with special clearance and a quad-digit deposit. She watches him watching her behind her gold and black mask. She leans her elbows against the bar. Watches him scan her body, the lean long muscles, the flat stomach. She reaches around for her drink so he can take in her high ass.
Here, he’s not a senator. She walks over to the jeweled jukebox and pushes buttons. Can’t Take My Eyes Off You. She lifts her chin at him. He stands up, sticks his hands in his pockets. As she walks over, he smiles his disarming smile, overdoes the drink slur to cover his nerves,
—You wanna dance?
—You have to get me to come to you. Get up. Sing with Franki.
She walks back to the bar, props her elbows and leans back.
He’s unsure. Is she making fun of him? She’s telling him what to do? No one—
You’re just too good to be true/can’t take my eyes off you.
She lifts her glass and toasts him.
He begins to mouth the words, You’d be like heaven to touch.
She calls across,
—Can you dance?
The suits cheer him on and he lifts half-clenched hands, shrugs one shoulder at a time, shuffles from foot to foot, a dud boxer. He watches her, smile slightly desperate.
At the chorus, she skims across to him, I love you baby, steps between his shuffling feet, glitter-bright thigh hard to Prada crotch, grabs his hips and circles them against her. And again and again. She locks his eyes. Her thigh, his erection, his hips moving against hers, those eyes eight inches from his, the strange pupils with the flaring edges like they admit much more than light.
She feels him: pressed, aroused, appalled. As the second verse arrives, she releases him and moves back. You’re just too good to be true. He tries to sing along and dance but his Gucci feet barely move and his dud-boxing-dance shuffle is pathetic enough that she takes pity on him.
She leads him to his seat, the suits cheering and clapping.
—Thanks for the dance.
She walks away from him and out of the room in less than seven seconds. One-one-hundred, two-one-hundred, three-one-hundred. His voice doesn’t work. His hands don’t move. He stands there like a melting snowman.
The suits, What the fuck get a load of would you can you Jesus.
A group of dancers has come in. They wear pink gauze tops and silver thongs. They have glitter on their faces arms, legs. Boys and girls with slender limbs, lithe against the music. The suits are whooping and clapping. The anemone arms beckon the dancers. One, then another, is detained by white hands cuffed with thick-money watches.
Girls and boys, wide cheekbones, eyes flooding-black, long hands feathering shapes around the white expensive hands. They might have been designed for graceful twining. The suits leave for other rooms, with one, two, three dancers.
The senator is still snow-manned, frozen out of the music, the dancing, the twining. A headrush that may be the drugs, maybe the tequila. The strange experience of being astonished. When was the last time he couldn’t find words? His edges are crumbling. He has been defied, outwitted, by a thin girl with eyes that stare into him but that he can’t stare into. Who is she to walk away from him? What is behind those pupils, tiny gaps between each star point? How can you really know anyone with eyes like that?
He steps away from the two dancers who are threading fingers around his neck and texts someone to text the manager. Get her. The one with the eyes. Room 4.
She turns up. Impatient with being summoned. Stalks into his room as he opens the door.
Flings the velvet sofa cushions on the floor.
—Turn your back.
And she collapses her limbs, bones rearranging in folds so that she disappears behind the soft cushion heap.
When he turns back he is confused. A small gap between the cushions allows her to watch him. He glances at the cushions and then looks about as though she ought to be hanging from the ceiling fan.
—I’m here, dummy.
No one calls him dummy.
She lifts her head and rises, swaying, boneless, until she’s standing.
He’s delighted,
—How did you do that? You just—but how do you—I mean, you can make yourself flat?
She kicks the cushions out of the way and shows him. Her limbs, folding, flattening. She lifts her head,
—For the show. They put me in a kind of flat box that you can’t see from the audience. So when I come out, the audience is all ooh ahh.
He touches her elbows, wrists, like he wants to make sure she has bones, thrilled by the magic of her body. His eyes are hot,
—How small can you fold up?
His pedestrian sexuality. He wants her against the wall. Does his boxing shuffle until she’s pinned. It’s easy to twist out of his hands. He has brute strength and weight. She has the flexibility of a water spider and knows how to deflect. Traps his gripping hand and uses her other hand to push his face. A swift inner ankle kick and she slips away from him.
He is baffled and angry. I-am-a-senator-eyebrows and I-am-a-senator-pinched-mouth and I-am-a-senator-puffed-cheeks.
She arranges her supple limbs on the bed and waits while he adjusts his pants, his face,
She gets him on his back, fucks him for less than five minutes. He’s convinced it’s longer because she brings him to the point of release three times before she lets him finish. He is weak, comatose. She slips on her bodysuit, coat, and red stilettos, slips out of the room.
For two days her phone blows up with his messages. She deletes them. He couriers a thick wad of $100 bills. She goes to Western Union, sends half to Ma, and saves the other half for the airfare back to São Paulo.
He’ll last a few weeks and it’s worth it for the cash wads she can use to feed the family and stay in São Paulo for a couple of months.
She messages back. How much? He responds with a number and the word “thousand”. She agrees to meet. Takes a train to another train, walks three blocks, and a just-like-the-movies black car door opens. They drive to an out of town airport with one hangar and a cluster of small jets that look like toys. At the back of the one single-story building, in a private room, he is there with two of the suits. He gets her to perform her magic boneless body trick again. He wants to see if she can fit into a golf bag. She can.
He looks like a boy. His bright eyes and flushed cheeks, like Jeffy’s when she brings him the yellow cake with chocolate icing, when they sing their sword-fight-with-bananas song, when she gets him up in the night, sssh quiet, so they don’t wake Ma, and they sit out on the back step and count the stars. You take the right side and I’ll take the left and we’ll meet in the middle. Except Jeffy only counts to twenty and sometimes he misses a few so they have to go back, and you can’t cheat because Jeffy will know. And sometimes there’s a shooting star and they put their hands over their mouths because it’s so lucky they’re laughing and trying to keep the laughter in is making it worse. And they don’t want to wake Ma. She wouldn’t be mad but it’s not fair because she has to leave the house at four anyway.
Until she loses her job. And the food goes. And the electricity goes. And the only things that come are the men who jam the door open with one foot.
And someone has to do something.
Like a cage of bird bones, her chin tilted to one side, her breathing shallow.
We’ll sneak you on board. A college prank. This is my emotional support animal.
His life is shaped around his successes: his father’s family motto (we always win), his mother’s pride (Drum couldn’t fail if he wanted to), the indulgent faculty, fraternity brothers who were as drunk (groping women against a wall) as he was.
He squares his Tom Cruise shoulders. He can out-run, out-wrestle, out-score any of them. Any of them, including best friend Stoat from college days. Hell, they once did four girls in a double bed. So hilarious. The girls kept falling out.
He stares at the terminal officer, Do you know who I am?Yes, Senator. Of course.
He tips his head back. The terminal official speaks in a rush, We are huge supporters, sir.
Inside the bag, she sighs. Is everyone so bowled over by one more white man with no sense of rhythm and adolescent sex skills?
She hears labored breath as she is carried up the steps and placed, carefully in the cabin. She gently rearranges her shoulders, her legs, pries the bag’s zipper open an inch and sees the red leather seats. It’s a flying boy-lounge. There is hearty laughter and the clinking music of glasses and silverware.
She puts one star-burst eye to the open hole again. Recognizes the two suits. The third is some kind of secretary. He hovers by the three, seated men, his tablet ready. He takes notes like there’ll be an exam later. He burbles into a phone. Connecting you now. I’ll hand you over now. He’ll talk to you now.
On the phone, the Senator turns into many people. His fast voice is for his contemporaries. Metallic, brief, powerful. Sometimes she guesses he’s talking to an older person. His voice drops, he speaks more slowly. He’s trying to mimic them, to show he’s one of them. She knows that trick. She used to do that before the acrobat gig. Take on a taste of Texas, Chicago, Brooklyn. And as the man—usually a man—warmed up, she’d stretch or crush the vowels a little more. Soon they were buying drinks and food and handing over a few twenties. Enough for a hand job. Truckers, night shift workers, nurses, emergency responders. Some of them would apologize, handing over their twenties and tens. You shouldn’t be doing this. You’re too young. She’d tell them: I want to go back to college and finish my degree. Sincere, determined. And they’d be encouraging, glad of the opportunity to be some kind of mentor, funder. They don’t want to hear another hard-luck-poor-as-shit story. People like a little hope with their hand jobs.
Sees: parts of legs, hands, a sweep of hair as someone bends down.
Smells: shampoo, sweat, meat, alcohol, popcorn.
Hears: women’s voices whispering. Hisses of s’s and sh’s and then a nasal accent, maybe Tennessee,
You want the pecawn pah, Senator?
No thanks, I’m good.
She would like pecawn pah. Any pah.
Feels: The bounce of the seat as he stands, the pressure as he sits back down.
Tastes: Fear like copper at the back of her throat. If he starts drinking he’ll forget about her.
Slips the zipper shut. Hears him speak,
Can you give me some space here? Now?
Feels: A sudden pressure as someone squeezes onto the seat next to her. The cramping starts from the back of her neck. Her feet, wrapped around her head, are going numb. The thigh muscles are twitching. She tells herself let go, let go.
Careful of that.
Hey—I like your emotional support animal, too.
The voice is snide.
Feels: The bag’s zipper jiggling.
Hears: the slap of open hand—on shoulder? Arm?
You’re pushing it.
Listen, I carried this—
Just go.
Smells: Stink of alcohol and bad breath. Does no one brush their teeth here?
Hears: Protocols aren’t reciprocated everywhere, Drum. Thought about getting this thing through customs?
The Senator speaks softly:
We’ll be okay. Just go.
Silence.
He opens the zipper all the way and she tumbles out. Hair painted onto her head, legs jello-ing, neck cracking. She’s sweating all over.
He’s whispering,
—I’m sorry. I would have gotten you out earlier—
She stretches each limb gently. She wipes her damp hair back,
—I’m not coming back in your damn bag. You can pay for a ticket.
She takes the handful of towelettes he offers and swabs off her face and arms.
He’s watching her,
—Twenty? Twenty-one?
Tries for nonchalant. Are they all this stupid?
—Am I a minor? No.
He smiles.
She’s good at this. She can fool a police officer, a truant officer, an Ivy League senator.
She turned seventeen three months ago.
She looks so small, curled up on the seat, hair pushed back, those astonishing eyes, the blue-marine of the irises. He holds up his cell phone and takes her picture.
Of all the people he knows, she is the one who wants the least. No political ambition, no agenda, no wheedling a space in his new entourage, a few moments of his time to plug a cause, proposition, special interest. She wants money but who doesn’t?
—I could use a shower.
He points to the back of the lounge,
—You can take one back there.
She’s astonished,
—A shower? On a plane?
—Towels, shampoo, robes.
She walks to the back of the boy-lounge, pushes the button next to a slim silver door and it swishes open.
Laughs,
—I can’t believe it.
—Go ahead.
She hesitates,
—You coming?
—Not enough room.
She closes the tiny silver space capsule. Steps out of her clothes. Pulls the thin shower curtain across and steps on the blue foot pad. A watering can sprinkle of warm water. A shower in the sky. She washes quickly, using the vanilla scented body wash, vanilla-scented shampoo. The luxury of a soft towel. It’s more like a hand towel but it does the job. Uses the bergamot body lotion. Rakes through her hair with the wide-toothed red plastic comb. Wipes a spot on the misted miniature mirror. Her strange self stares back. Who are you now? Next to the sink, a tray with four tiny glasses with clear liquid, maybe vodka or gin. She sniffs, downs one. Doesn’t have that alcohol burn.
She steps out without the towel. The two suits have come back in, no jackets, rolled-up sleeves. She grabs her discarded shirt. The senator laughs,
—Boys! Turn your backs for the lady.
They turn their backs.
—This is fucked up, Drum.
—Is she an adult? Does she have a passport?
—Relax—
—You need to get rid—
—That’s enough.
Silence.
Slides into her sweat pants, shirt buttoned.
Why are they so angry? He said it would be fine. That’s what rich people do.
Shit-shit-shit stuff shit stuff shit stuff. She looks around. Where did the echo come from? And how did it echo when she didn’t say anything out loud?
The Senator stares at the suits and she shivers. She wouldn’t want to be on his bad side.
His mouth tightens, his cheeks puff out. His mad face. This is much worse than his confused face.
—Remember who you’re talking to.
—Hey Drum—come on. This is us. We’re the same.
—This is my show. Mine.
She stays on the edge of the cabin, Instinct tells her not to approach him, not to talk to him. She is some part of his life that isn’t this. And it’s clear that her part is temporary.
The rest doesn’t concern her.
Doesn’t concern doesn’t concern doesn’t concern. She shakes her head. What’s going on?
His mouth is screwed up into a fist bud, a tiny anus,
—You guys are overreacting.
—Are you crazy? Do you realize the potential—
—Nothing is going to happen. We’ll get off the plane. We’ll meet the delegation. She’ll be part of the entourage. A secretary, personal valet or something.
His voice is petulant. They are spoiling his party.
—Look, Drum. You can have all the fuck-fests you want but not this time.
—If you get off the plane with your bendy bitch—
—Watch it.
The senator paces as much as the jet will allow.
The suits haven’t given up,
—The Central America Emergency Summit? We’re talking serious shit here.
—They’re mourning their dead. Over 500,000. And we’re there to show our deepest sympathies.
—And an aid package.
—Tied to an oil deal.
The senator is unamused,
—I’m aware of that.
—So, you can’t turn up with this—
—lunchtime thot—
Talkingtalkingtalking like she’s not even theretherethere. She steps forward,
—Uh, excuse me? Do any of you actually-actually know, I mean, know what a thot is? Because I’m not not not. I’m not not not—
What’s with the echo?
—Shut up—
—Don’t tell her to—
And the echo breaks through and everything gets loud and painful like she’s plugged into a sound system. Like she’s the sound system. And these fuckers are breaking the sound. Breaking her sound. Break-breaking. Her.
Everything swirling around the cabin, swirling around the inside of her stomach. Who the fuck-fuck-fuck do they think they are?
From the nearest lunch tray, she grabs one of the delicate silver forks and sticks it into the bare arm of the nearest suit. He screams.
—Fuck! What the—
—Get her—
—My arm—
She picks up another fork and lunges at the other suit but he dances back, arms spread wide,
—Drum—fucking do something with your—
The senator steps forward. She levels the fork with his eyes,
—A thot? A thot?
—Hey—hey. Don’t listen to them. Listen to me. You’re okay. We’re okay. Okay? It’s you and me.
—Tied to an oil well.
—What?
He looks directly at her but for some reason his face keeps sliding away as though it’s rubber. Everything is sliding away. She has to fight to keep the fork straight. Keep it pointed. Keep it up.
She snatches at a glitter from the tray. Peers at it. A knife with a curl at the end of the blade. A what—fuck—a cheek—a cheese—a cheese knife. Who’s knife is worth the cheese?
He stretches out a hand,
—Why don’t you put that down and let’s—
But the cheese knife writhes in her hand She holds up the curly blade. It has two little pointy bits at the end.
The suit she didn’t stab is trying to get the knife from her. He is a thief. Thief. Thief.
They are all thieves.
She holds the blade away. Then lifts it to the suit’s eye level. What would his eye look like on the end of the knife. That’s a funny idea and she begins laughing. The eye would be looking at her. Would it see by itself or would it see through the mind of the suit? Mind? Mind the cheese.
She is sorry for Stabbed Arm,
—Is there blood?
He snaps his head up,
—Stay the fuck away from me.
She holds the cheese knife up—it is not for him. He is only worth a fork and this little cheeky knife is worth much more.
The other suit,
—C’mon, sweetie, put the knife down. What’s her name?
But the senator says nothing, He’s looking at her. He is seeing her.
—I—never told you how much I like your eyes.
That’s funny, too. That’s funny. That’s—
—That’s what first made me look twice. Your incredible eyes. Like something in there just exploded. You know—like a flower.
A flower exploded in her eyes? Who the fuck voted for him?
She shakes her head.
Cliché Man,
—C’mon sweetie—
—I’m not your fucking sweetie or honey or baby or sweet cheeks.
Stabbed Arm,
—I’d never call her sweet cheeks.
Cliché Man,
—Where’s our FBI protection?
The Senator moves in between her and Cliché Man.
—Listen, it’s just you and me.
—And your tiny-brain body guards—
—They’re not body guards.
—Hoo boy you can say that again. That again. They couldn’t guard a dead dead dog. You can say that again. Know what? That one smells like ass. Remember when I stuck one finger up your ass and you said, No, three—
—Let’s talk about your eyes. Like flowers.
His voice is loud, like bricks chucked and bouncing across metal.
The suits say nothing. It’s good they’re quiet. Less echo.
She laughs,
—You said that already. You said that.
It’s funny how he does that. Maybe it’s how the rich people do it—just say the same shit over and over again until someone believes it.
She leans back against the cabin wall. She’s discovered how to twirl the knife. She can flip and swivel it against the back of her fingers. How did her hand do that? The glitter knife balances and jumps and flicks back into her hand. Did she just learn it? Or did her hand always know? Does your body know how to do things, like jump and arc and hold a knife, but waits until you’re ready? That means she’s a slack-liner and a deep-sea diver and a snake dancer and a conductor.
A conductor. A conductor.
The senator moves, small movements that bring him closer.
The suits makes noises that bounce and flatten off the cabin walls. Their words don’t sound like words.
She has this idea. If she keeps one hand on the cabin wall, her words will be conducted directly to the senator. He’ll hear exactly what’s in her head.
He’s staring at her like he’s concentrating hard. Maybe he’s already hearing her. Maybe he’s—
But his eyes are looking at her like she’s a breakfast tray he didn’t order. His mouth is going small.
The only thing is
The only thing is
The only thing
The thing is that if she only
She drops her hand with the knife. She drops her body into a resting pose. Except for her thighs, tense under the sweatpants.
She can drop her whole body into a space no larger than a floor cushion.
Everything could drop right now.
How did it all change? One minute she was going into the—what was the thing she went into? The space capsule. Something was wet. Something was warm. The soap smelled like open windows. Something bright in a small glass.
One minute they were were taking phone pics—I want to make sure I get your eyes.
One minute is less than—
One minute is greater than—
Cliché Man is holding the golf bag.
Stabbed Man is holding his arm.
The senator is holding nothing.
This is the three seconds before it all happens
One-one-hundred two-one-hundred three-one-hundred
One or all of them will step forward
One or all of them will continue to wait
One or all of them will make some comment about shutting her up
She will stay still and loose, except for her balanced thighs that will inform the arm, that will lift the wrist, that will tense the knife, gently, and flicker like an afterthought to the throat of the first one to reach her.
And then they will use their big arms and their body weight to pummel and keep her down and she will end up in the bag one way or another.
After that it is a matter of air and sound and
She and her starburst eyes, unique and startling and she was good enough to be part of the new promo. It’s her eyes sliding across the wall.
The senator weeps actual tears and someone hands him a glass of whiskey, dims the lights in the cabin. He sips.
His reading light flares off white pages. In three hours he’ll be giving his speech of compassion and hope for the future. He puts the folder on the seat next to him. Lifts the heavy Glencairn glass. A shuddering constellation of lights scintillates across the white cabin walls. His hand shakes. One-one-hundred, two-one-hundred. Three-one-hundred.
And his friends and their friends, and the reaches of his particular competent orbit will close around the small irregular gap that happened in between this event and the one after. It is only one girl, alone, without family.
The main thing—the senator will emphasize this with a pointing finger at each of the televised conferences—is the Greater Good For The New World. It’s a fine slogan. It has rhythm. It will look good on a t-shirt.
Sandra Hunter’s fiction has won the 2018 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, 2017 Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest, 2016 Gold Line Press Chapbook Prize, October 2014 Africa Book Club Award, and three Pushcart Prize nominations. Her story, “Finger Popping” won second place in the 2017 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. She is a 2018 Hawthornden Castle Fellow and the 2017 Charlotte Sheedy Fellow at the MacDowell Colony. Her books include Losing Touch, a novel, a fiction chapbook, Small Change, and a fiction collection Trip Wires. She is working on a trilogy of novels set in Johannesburg, Los Angeles, and Amsterdam. sandrajhunter.com
The birth would’ve been that day, I was sure of it.
After my first semester in New Zealand was over, I had decided to visit relatives over the winter break in Australia, when one July night, while flying from Sydney to Perth, I looked at the stars through my window seat, the moon, the darkness, the Southern Cross, and cried inside as if the whole world were spinning and the plane was about to crash. But it was just me crashing as I suddenly remembered it would have been the baby’s due date. I would relive the memory when my boyfriend had taken me to my appointment as I sat uncomfortably next to a woman in her eighth month for her prenatal appointment while I had been there to end my pregnancy.
At 20, I had an abortion and for ten months afterward, suffered trauma. How do I explain it? I didn’t want to be sad. I didn’t want to cry every night for hours. I didn’t want to get up at 4 PM. But those things happened. My emotions took over and trying to keep busy felt like I was dragging my feet.
Is there a link between abortion and trauma? For me, the answer is yes. It still remains difficult to say I suffered trauma after my abortion as I fear I am somehow criticizing a fundamental right I so fiercely believe in. After experiencing trauma after my abortion, I question what a pro-choice person is supposed to look like. Am I a bad pro-choicer?
Under the pro-life movement, the subject of trauma has become a weapon against the pro-choice movement where Post-Abortion Syndrome, specifically coined by the pro-life movement, has been used to perpetuate the myth that abortion is a harmful procedure resulting in regret and depression. If we applied the same mental health reasoning of post-partum depression to pregnancy, no woman would ever want to become pregnant. As investigated by the American Psychological Association, Post-Abortion Syndrome is scientifically proven to not exist as the immediate result of all abortions, just as much as post-partum depression does not exist as the immediate result of all births.
When I had my abortion, I had just turned 20, still one of my more memorable birthdays. Though I couldn’t admit it to myself then, I had an abusive boyfriend who forced me to have sex. Rape would be the appropriate term to describe this, but even still, that is a hard word for me to say.
He was Indian and Hindu. His parents disapproved of my being Filipina and Catholic. My own parents didn’t know he existed. It’s not that I wasn’t allowed to date. Boys and dating were nonexistent topics growing up. You studied hard, got straight A’s, and went to college. Anything outside of that was extraneous. But my traumatic experience with an unwanted pregnancy and abortion begins even way before my abusive relationship in college. It begins in childhood.
Childhood consisted of pro-life propaganda starting at age 9. Catholic school was 12 long years in the LA suburbs. The student body of my Catholic elementary school was predominantly Filipino and Mexican, the children of first-generation immigrants. By age 12, the infamous year of finally learning where babies come from, my parents, our parents, handed over the reins of their child’s sex education to my Catholic school thereby ceding absolute control to include abortion as part of the curriculum. We learned more about abortion than sex itself. Sex Ed should’ve been renamed Abortion Ed. None of the parents were explicitly informed that graphic pictures and videos of mutilated fetuses would be part of Sex Ed.
My Catholic elementary school made sure we were well-versed on every kind of abortion procedure as if we were surgical interns. No doubt their intention was to ingrain (and traumatize) us into a pro-life stance by forcing their young pupils to watch graphic abortion videos – both early and late trimester. We didn’t have the choice to leave the classroom even if it made us sick.
No one said anything during our forty-minute lunch breaks, our young minds held hostage by gruesome images where slices of ham in our otherwise boring little sandwiches suddenly resembled strips of flesh torn apart limb by limb.
As we resumed our regular afternoon session of Social Studies and Science with the expectation that the gruesome images of abortion could be easily forgotten by studying anthropological pictures of the Amazonian tribes, I asked if I could be excused to the bathroom. Most of the girls were starting their periods and we were usually excused without having to explain ourselves. I just needed to be alone. Once excused, I found a classmate already there, crying. When I asked her what was wrong, she snapped, “I hate those videos! My sister had an abortion.” I didn’t know what to say. My classmate’s sister was 17.
When we returned to our desks, a classmate boldly raised his hand and asked, “Does this mean it’s okay for us to watch Faces of Death? It’s a documentary from the 70s. You get to see the different ways people die. There’s this one scene where they’re eating monkey brains!” at which the class exploded in laughter.
“Of course not!” our teacher yelled.
“But you made us watch those abortion videos. Faces of Death is just like it except –”
“We’re moving on to Math,” she replied, cutting him off while the class froze like someone had slammed on the brakes.
As I reflect on that incident thirty years later, the abortion videos did not necessarily scare all of us but held the opposite effect of entertaining our morbid curiosities about death and mutilation.
While the abortion videos focused on the termination of the fetus, which looked more like a froglike humanoid creature, there was never any acknowledgment paid to the faceless woman on the table. I wasn’t watching the murder of babies, but rather the grotesque objectification of a woman’s body. Surely, women weren’t naive to undergo such procedures unless for very good reason. The reasons must’ve been extraordinary, but we were never taught those reasons. The woman on the table wasn’t even a woman but simply spread-legs à la carte, a mutilated cave of flesh, as we all are if you consider instances of open heart surgery, but my school did not show us videos of open heart surgery.
If my Catholic school believed and taught abortion is murder, then what we were essentially seeing were snuff films. Memories of Catholic school have oftentimes made me wonder what holy means.
School nailed it into our brains that women who have abortions are evil and abortion doctors are evil. They also taught us that saving a woman’s life over that of a high-risk pregnancy doesn’t exist and that pregnancy was 100% safe. They taught that rape rarely resulted in pregnancy since a woman’s body goes into shock thereby making pregnancy impossible. They also taught us that rape wasn’t necessarily evil if it produced a child as they believed God’s hand was shining down on the sexual act and blessing it through conception. I see my teacher now – her Catholic hand raised up as if she is God placing her hand over a scene where a man is raping a woman and blessing it with the existence of human life.
The subject of abortion endlessly follows me as each of these myths would rear its ugly head twenty years later and I’d hear these ridiculous myths preached once again as truth from one such Republican Rep. Todd Akin who would be infamously known for saying that victims of what he called “legitimate rape” rarely get pregnant, stating, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,” while Eve Ensler so graciously penned her scathing response to shut Akin down, “Did you honestly believe that rape sperm is different than love sperm, that some mysterious religious process occurs and rape sperm self-destructs due to its evil content?” We need not mention the mass rapes of women and girls in war torn countries, currently and historically, who are impregnated and forced to birth their rapists’ children. Or how the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland would also prove that high-risk pregnancies do exist and can cost women’s lives.
But in the days of my Catholic school education before the internet and social media, my Catholic school would find ways to support their sheltered beliefs through one particular guest speaker whom they would invite back year and year. It was a white female police officer who, on top of preaching that we shouldn’t take drugs, also preached that abortion was evil. She told us the story of how she knew a woman who had been raped in a garage by three men who videotaped the rape over three days, and out of that rape, the victim became pregnant. This same officer persuaded her to keep the pregnancy claiming it was God’s plan.
I was 11 when I heard this story. I didn’t even know what sex was, but the very thought of three men videotaping the rape for three days made me sick and angry. I was undoubtedly angry at the men but I was also angry at this female officer who told the victim to keep her pregnancy. Deep in my gut, even at 11, I knew she was wrong. She further taught us how the woman had put her child up for adoption, which the officer praised as the right thing to do, but who knows what happened to that baby. Who knows what happened to the victim.
At recess once again, my classmates had nothing to say. This same guest speaker was invited back several times during 5th, 6th, and 7th Grade. The abortion lessons never ended.
They constantly scared us and racked the girls with guilt that we were nothing but potential murderers if an unwanted pregnancy resulted. How ironic that a decade later, our adult lives would place us in situations where abortion was not a tragedy but charted our lives toward a more favorable course than have us become mothers when we clearly weren’t ready.
We were taught to always pray for the election of a Republican president since the Democrats support abortion. The same girl whose older sister had an abortion, this sharp-tongued 12-year-old, had raised her hand and made the brave observation how we shouldn’t vote Republican since “they believe in war and dropping bombs on innocent people.” Her observation had been made in reference to the first Bush administration in the Persian Gulf. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had then ordered the invasion and occupation of Kuwait in early August 1990. The United States had been called upon to intervene. By mid-January 1991, the Persian Gulf War began with a massive U.S.-led air offensive known as Operation Desert Storm.
“But that’s different,” my teacher countered. “The soldiers who fight in wars don’t hate the other side. God forgives them. They’re just doing what they’re told. Killing in war just happens. As for people who believe in abortion, they pre-meditatively plan to murder their babies.”
“But this war is about oil,” another female classmate whose father was a war veteran countered. Rather than further discuss this topic which most of my classmates, including myself, had no clue about the significance of oil in the Middle East, my teacher was clearly stung by both my classmates’ counter-arguments and simply cut both girls off. She gave the excuse that we were running short on time and needed to move onto Math. That was my teacher’s usual tactic when she had no comeback.
When my best friend and I from grade school reminisce about our Catholic school days, the fetus posters and anti-abortion messages don’t stand out in our memory. It’s only when we see old classroom pictures that we are reminded of the glaring pro-life classroom we sat in everyday, our 8th grade classroom decorated with fine letters, “ABORTION KILLS CHILDREN,” with posters of fetuses as if they were normal school decor. Our collective amnesia over the fetus posters and anti-abortion messages seem to reveal how desensitized we probably became where we only flinch now after thirty years of seeing them again.
Photo courtesy of Eliza Gano, 1991.
For a long time I thought abortion videos were part of standard Sex Ed curriculum at all Catholic schools, until adult friends also former Catholic school students would gasp in horror when I’d nonchalantly mention the videos as we reminisced and laughed about our zany Catholic school childhoods. Much to my astonishment, we do not share the experience of abortion videos. My Catholic school was rather one of a kind in that respect. I’m not naïve, however, to believe that pro-life lessons such as the ones I grew up with were isolated. They are probably still taught at Catholic and evangelical schools somewhere in this country. Thirty years later, some things never change.
The situation was no different at my Catholic high school regarding contraception. Abstinence was stressed to quiet our raging hormones, and when it wasn’t, lessons on contraception were covered in the measly thirty minutes of Sophomore Health class which my teacher hurriedly read aloud from a textbook when many of us had no idea what a condom even looked like. Come graduation, half a dozen girls would be approaching their due dates as they received their diplomas.
The exclusion of sex education also came the exclusion of lessons of what a healthy relationship looked like. By the time I had my first boyfriend in college, he made me believe “good” girlfriends had sex, and oftentimes he guilted me into it – what I still have a hard time calling rape. Like any kid of the 90s where the topic of sex was exempt from the household, TV was the main source of information. Rape was a stranger jumping out of the bushes. No one ever said it could be an intimate partner who could unexpectedly turn on you and use sex as a weapon.
When I lost my virginity, it was consensual, even romantic. We were both virgins. How charmed the experience quickly ended. I wasn’t on the pill, having believed horror stories that it caused weight gain, acne, painful breast tenderness, and the old wives’ tale that it raised the risk of infertility. My boyfriend did not always wear a condom. He practiced the withdrawal method, or so I thought.
I was in my third year of college and on my way to study abroad in New Zealand having earned a highly coveted spot in the study abroad program that year.
They say you know before you know. My period was a week late. As I went on my usual morning run with very sore breasts and overwhelming nausea, I already knew I was pregnant before a campus doctor confirmed it.
I was devastated. I knew I couldn’t keep it. My Catholic upbringing which threatened excommunication and eternal damnation would not change my mind. Still, I felt the powerful tug of my body’s strong instinct to be a mother. It didn’t matter that I was 19, turning 20. It didn’t matter that I was about to study abroad in New Zealand. It didn’t matter that I would face the crushing disappointment of my parents and most likely be forced to marry my abusive boyfriend to save face in my respectable Filipino-American family. My parents had no idea I was even dating anyone. I had never been in a serious relationship before. Distant cousins were already being shipped to the Philippines to hide away the shame of their out-of-wedlock pregnancies. Why not me? I don’t think my parents would’ve gone to that extreme, but who’s to say what my father would’ve done during his disciplinary rage. If my body had had its way, I believe I would’ve had that baby despite the consequences. But my head knew better. No matter how much I could disagree with my body’s instincts, its instincts would eventually hold a small victory over me as the unexpected physiological and mental effects of what I would later understand as trauma would feel like my body’s revenge against the rational side of myself.
I confided in a male friend about the pregnancy. He was the only other person I told besides my boyfriend. My two best friends were at colleges more than one hundred miles away. I had two sisters but I didn’t feel comfortable confiding in them, at least not then. I had three female roommates, but I kept my pregnancy a secret, sparing myself their judgment and opinions on what I should do. It wasn’t anyone’s business but mine.
My best guy friend and I were parked outside of his apartment after having lunch together. He was feeding the parking meter when he told me how crappy his week was going. “Not worse than mine,” I laughed, adding, “I’m pregnant,” at which his jaw dropped.
“What are you going to do? How are you going to continue with school?” he asked, which I can only guess he assumed I was going to keep it. I nonchalantly responded, “I’m not going to keep it.” I didn’t bat an eyelash despite the day before I fled the clinic in tears, running to a secluded spot in the woods where I rubbed my tummy and quietly told my baby goodbye. I would later place red roses there a few days before my scheduled abortion.
In my eight weeks of pregnancy, I experienced the sore breasts, the stifling nausea, the fatigue, and the hard, muscly shell in my abdomen. I was sad that it was all about to end. I did not go to Planned Parenthood and opted instead for a private clinic of an experienced Ob-Gyn who specialized in first-trimester abortions. I received the referral from the campus doctor. She came highly recommended by other college students who had dealt with unwanted pregnancies. A private clinic was more expensive by a couple hundred dollars, which I easily had in my checking account, but more importantly, I wanted to spare myself the stress of facing an angry brigade of pro-life protesters picketing outside Planned Parenthood, which the campus nurse forewarned me about. The private clinic had no such problem.
To this day, the doctor who performed my abortion does not publicly advertise her abortion services. For all the choice, access, and legalization we have in the liberal state of California, the best practitioners can still choose to operate quietly due to fear, safety, and reputation in a predominantly Republican county. My doctor was nothing but compassionate, gentle, and absolutely knowledgeable. I couldn’t have had a better doctor. The procedure itself was easy and painless, and took about all of 30 seconds to complete, very unlike the gruesome portrayal in the abortion videos that I was forced to watch during Catholic school.
I was in her office for at most an hour, which included waiting time, consultation, anesthesia prep, the procedure, the pathology report, and recovery. She had two other patients scheduled that afternoon for their prenatal appointments – each woman’s round belly bursting with new life. The nurse acted as my doula. She held my hand and provided comforting words while the doctor smoothly performed her magic. Afterward, my boyfriend carried me out of my car into my apartment as I was groggy and nauseous from the anesthesia.
“Don’t cry,” he commanded while I lay in bed feeling like my heart had been ripped out. How could he tell me not to cry? But I was sad, medicated, and too tired to be angry then. None of my roommates were home. He didn’t stay long before he left to study for a Physics exam. My best guy friend ended up holding me that night and criticized my boyfriend for leaving me all alone for a stupid test.
Just a few days before, I had gone home to my parents to celebrate my 20th birthday. While home, I had woken up with a migraine when I heard my mother’s familiar call for breakfast. The smell of pancakes wafted into my bedroom which only made me nauseous.
“Sweetheart, are you going to get up? I made pancakes. Why don’t you take some Tylenol for that migraine?” my mother sweetly said as she sat on the edge of my bed. She kissed the top of my head and held me, simply believing I had a migraine when it was really morning sickness. I silently cried as my mother held me and the quiet grandchild within. There was no burning desire to tell her. Sex, pregnancy, and dating were never discussed in my household. My pregnancy felt like a grave trespass in their home. There was no alternative but to remain silent. My siblings and I were their academically stellar children who did not make such egregious mistakes. There was a reputation to uphold in our Filipino-American community. I knew I wasn’t the only Filipina-American to go through this, but because I told no one and no one confided their experience to me, besides my classmate’s 17-year-old sister back in grade school, I did feel like I was the only one.
A week later, my body returned to normal. I never suffered the uncomfortable cramps and heavy bleeding that is expected. There were soft red swirls and delicate little clumps in the toilet, but outside of that, I bled like I had my period and that was that. My breasts eventually stopped being sore and my abdomen returned to its soft supple self.
During my follow-up exam, the doctor prescribed birth control pills which I unquestionably accepted. In order to get a refill from the campus clinic, I was required to take, for the first time in my life, a comprehensive sexual education class that covered all forms of contraception and sexually transmitted diseases.
Three and a half months later, I was on a plane to New Zealand. No Pinay I knew had ever traveled alone. Traveling alone at 20 as a female, as a Filipina, was daring. For the next nine months, besides my extended family whom I would meet in the Australian Outback, I would encounter only two other Pinays. Outside of that, I would be the only Pinay I knew – in the classroom, my flat, and just anywhere in downtown Auckland.
Within the first six months of starting the pill, I switched from an American brand to a New Zealand one when I found that it cost me only $1.50 for a three-month supply versus $30 for what I would’ve had to pay for the same amount in California. While the American pill lightened my periods, the New Zealand pill made me soak through pads. My naïve self concluded that these body changes must be normal. One can only imagine the dizzying ride my body would endure as it went through a pregnancy, abortion, birth control pill changes, a new country, and a long distance abusive relationship all within six months.
The hormones in my body had been constantly fluctuating and I didn’t have the faintest idea why. Though depression runs in my family and I suffered occasional bouts during high school, I had never felt as empty as I did in the months following my abortion. The rational side of myself told me that I had done the right thing but my body and emotions were acting completely opposite. I was taken on a wild rollercoaster ride of sleepless nights and staying in bed all day.
Even though my boyfriend was in California, I remained faithful in a long distance relationship. He managed to verbally abuse me through telephone calls, scoffing at my adventures in a new country, which were then followed by sweet apologetic letters and emails. I thought his jealous behavior was part of a normal relationship despite my gut feeling that something was terribly wrong.
I had wonderful friends but they still did not have the slightest idea of the emotional turmoil I was under. I feared their judgment and misunderstanding lest I open up about the abuse, and the abortion. On the outside I was charming and unstoppable, while inside, I felt like I was dying.
I disclosed my abortion to two friends in New Zealand, but it was said as a sentence, never a discussion. I remained silent on the subject while my friends were probably too shocked to ask questions. I was the only one I knew who had an abortion in my social circle. I didn’t know how to talk about it. I didn’t know how to talk about anything then.
That same year, it came to light across the world how 49-year-old President of the United States, Bill Clinton, had had an affair with his White House intern, 22-year-old Monica Lewinsky. She was 24, only four years older than me, when the world found out about their scandalous affair, but at my age, anyone even a few years older felt like decades older. It had not occurred to me how she was merely a kid who had been taken advantage of by a very powerful man who was nearly her father’s age and whom the global media unjustifiably painted a slut. I didn’t believe she was a slut. I did think she was naïve. The egregiousness of what any of it meant then had not occurred to me. Everyone in every one of my political studies classes had something to say about it, but I had nothing. They asked me what I had thought. Me, the lone Pinay-American in the class. The President of the United States had lied. The President of my country. But I didn’t think much about my country. Not then. I had never heard so many 20-year-olds talk so passionately about American politics, and yet they surrounded me in Auckland, an entire ocean and hemisphere away. At my college back in Southern California, most college kids talked about parties and drinking and dating. Very rarely did I hear talk about the state of our country or the world.
While Bill and Monica were hot fodder at my New Zealand campus, I could only think of my silence. My abortion. My shame. My anger. My guilt. My classes. My grades. My friends. My boyfriend. My world was very small. Except for my boyfriend, I hardly missed my family and friends in California. I was living, crying, and dying in New Zealand.
Despite some weekends lying in bed depressed until 4 PM, I did manage to have an amazing time in New Zealand. I had dared myself to skydive, bungee-jump, hike, run, party, and meet as many people as I could. I had thrown myself into school, studying obsessively and pulling off A’s. I was an overachieving superstar, but behind closed doors, I’d retreat to bed in tears before falling asleep. I had become compulsive. I had to keep moving, whether I was studying or socializing or doing some kind of extreme physical activity, while at night, I was allowing myself to cry, to cleanse, to forget. But I never forgot.
Before I became aware that some women’s bodies can count down to their due dates, I believe my body counted down to my baby’s due date, regardless of whether my mind wanted to or not.
After visiting my relatives in Australia during the winter break, I returned to New Zealand an insomniac and cried for hours every night. I journaled incessantly and wrote long letters about the abortion to my boyfriend, which to a large degree helped me cope with my feelings of isolation. Years later, when I was ready to leave him, he admitted he never read my letters, saying they were too long.
One particular evening, when a friend had fallen asleep in my bed after a late night studying, I remember being angry as her presence interrupted my nightly weeping ritual. She never knew about my ritual, though I made sure no one could ever interrupt it. It was like a drug habit. I believed I needed to cry every night to function normally. I wasn’t crying because I missed my pregnancy. I cried because I hated that my stupid self had gotten pregnant and had to go through an abortion in the first place. I hated my boyfriend but believed he could change and understand the pain I was going through. I hated what others might think of me – that I killed my baby, that I was selfish, that I was stupid. And I cried to cleanse myself every night.
I cried night after night until my throat started to hurt beyond the normal sore throat. I visited the campus doctor only to discover that my nightly weeping ritual had developed into tonsillitis. I was terrified that I would require surgery in New Zealand. Luckily, the doctor said it was curable through a simple dose of antibiotics over the next few weeks. If not for the tonsillitis, I might have never realized I was making myself sick. After that, I stopped crying every night.
By the time my 21st birthday and 1st year anniversary of my abortion arrived, I booked a spontaneous weeklong getaway to Fiji alone. It was a cathartic celebration. My mind and body felt more at peace than it ever did since my abortion.
The trauma eventually subsided but it would take another three years before I was finally ready to leave my abuser. Rather than end the relationship upon my return to California from New Zealand, I made the mistake of introducing him to my parents. I was hopeful that my return would repair our relationship, but things only grew worse as he became more abusive, especially about my academic achievements and career aspirations, accusing me of caring little about our relationship. His attempts to coerce me into sex also escalated where sex lost all meaning and enjoyment. Another year away from him during my first year of law school in New York would help me realize I deserved better.
He never allowed me to talk about the abortion and preferred to call it “a bunch of cells,” but would then conveniently bring it up when I tried to leave him. He tried making me feel guilty for leaving by saying we shared the trauma of an abortion together while it was evident we shared nothing about it.
As a Literature major, I would stumble upon Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays and Audre Lorde’s Zami, which helped me make sense of my abortion experience, but what helped me most was becoming a post-abortion counselor. Almost a decade following my abortion is when I finally had the opportunity to grapple with what had happened as I counseled hundreds of women about their abortion.
A part of me still denies that what I had gone through wasn’t “that bad.” But who am I kidding?
As a post-abortion counselor, I learned that emotional surges following any pregnancy are believed to be a natural effect of the hormone shifts that occur with it. Levels of estrogen and progesterone that increase during pregnancy drop suddenly after childbirth, miscarriage, and abortion. Female hormones are supposed to return to their pre-pregnancy levels within a week or so. As hormone levels normalize, depression that can follow usually resolves on its own without medical treatment. However, factor in poor partner relationships, stress and a pre-existing history of depression and sexual abuse, and the likelihood of experiencing trauma can be prolonged for more than one year after pregnancy.
I realized just how much I had fit into all of the above.
By the time the 10-year anniversary of my abortion arrived, I found myself in a much better place than the decade before. I was starting a new relationship with a kind and compassionate man who would eventually become my husband.
For my 30th birthday, I decided to travel without my partner to Hawaii, not only to celebrate my birthday, but to honor my abortion. By then, my partner and I had only been dating six months and I felt such an occasion seemed only something I could celebrate and fully appreciate.
The idea to travel to Hawaii originated from meeting a Japanese-American filmmaker. I had met her at an art event where we both served as panelists representing the Asian-American Reproductive Justice Movement. I was there to represent the organization where I volunteered as a post-abortion counselor while she presented her documentary about the Japanese “water baby” ritual of consecrating the spirit of the unformed child to the protection of a Jizo bodhisattva, a “saint” of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition. Jizo is understood to be the protector of those journeying through the physical and spiritual realms. This bodhisattva is closely associated with children, believed to be their guardian before birth, throughout childhood, and after death. As the unborn are seen as beings who float in a watery world awaiting birth, water is thus regarded as the realm where all souls reside before becoming human as well as the realm where the spirit returns.
After seeing her film trailer, I decided to conduct a little investigation of my own before I went to Hawaii, as what better place to be surrounded by water and perform a Jizo ceremony to consecrate the spirit of my pregnancy.
On my 30th birthday, my best friend and I launched our kayaks from Lanikai Beach into open water to reach the Mokulua Islands. We had kayaked through giant waves where our little banana boats bobbed up and down with each swell that I could barely make out my best friend kayaking ahead of me as a wall of water separated us.
It had been the first time in a long time where it felt like a beautiful homecoming from the abortion and the trauma. I never got to perform the official Jizo water baby ritual in Hawaii but kayaking in the open water made me feel like I bonded with my pregnancy’s spirit in a way that I never could before.
A decade after my abortion, my mother confronted me about my abortion after Googling my name and finding articles I had written. I cannot say she was understanding. Particularly for my mother, she was born and raised in the Philippines where abortion is not only considered a mortal sin by its Catholic oligarchy, but is criminal where women brave enough to go through a clandestine abortion risk infertility, infection, even death, if not criminal prosecution and public shaming. I personally knew this to be true after volunteering at a women’s health clinic in the Philippines. During a work sabbatical, I took my post-abortion counseling skills to the country of my birth and interned at a post-abortion complications program, a program specifically created with the purpose of serving women who had clandestinely induced their own abortions and needed emergency nonjudgmental post-abortion medical care.
I told my mother that the person who got me pregnant was a rapist. I couldn’t tell her it had been the person whom she had welcomed into her home several times. This person whom I called my boyfriend. To her, it could’ve been a person jumping out of the bushes. It wasn’t my intention to protect him but to protect her from further pain in knowing she couldn’t protect me.
“I wish I had taught you to avoid it,” her voice shook under tears. When my mother cries, it feels as if the ground is splitting and both of our feet threaten to drop off. In my life, I’ve only seen my mother cry twice. She has always been a gentle and stoic woman. Her words stung as she thought the rape was somehow my fault. I still excused what she said, knowing well that this was, and continues to be, the thinking of the day, that rape is somehow always the woman’s fault. I never told her, “It wasn’t my fault.” Instead, I let it go and silently forgave her. I forgave the generation and culture that taught her to think this way about women. I knew my mother wasn’t blaming me. She was blaming herself. I simply told her, “It’s nothing you could’ve taught me to stop.” We haven’t talked about it since.
No matter how many times I write about this experience, I hear the judgment being passed around inside my head. As a Filipina-American, I am walang hiya. I should be ashamed of myself, that whatever trauma I experienced was just punishment for the crime I had committed, when maybe the true crime was being raped and my abusive ex being able to live free from any responsibility and guilt.
My Catholic upbringing had brainwashed me to believe that women who are pro-choice see pregnancy as an unemotional trivial matter where abortion is a nonchalant decision. It also brainwashed me to believe that it is only when women do decide to go through with an abortion that they quickly learn how devastating the experience is and live to regret it, as if the personal experience truly awakens us to the horrors of its psychological damage. It’s either that or pro-choice women are self-centered, misguided, reckless, promiscuous, spoiled, and who hate children. How untrue all of it was. And yet, how true that the personal experience of abortion didn’t awaken me to the horrors of abortion’s psychological damage, but awakened me to the psychological damage inflicted by a judgmental society who refuses to trust women’s choices.
When the 2012 case of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland hit headlines across the world, the pain hit deep. At 17 weeks pregnant, she died of septicemia a week after being admitted for severe back pain at a Galway hospital where the 31-year-old dentist was told she was miscarrying. She had asked for an abortion several times over a three-day period, during which she was in severe pain but her requests were denied because a fetal heartbeat was still present. She and her husband were told at one point, “This is a Catholic country.” Medical staff removed the dead fetus days later after the heartbeat stopped but Halappanavar died of septicemia.
Savita Halappanavar made global headlines but how many women like her, nameless and deceased, have demanded an abortion out of emergency medical need and are denied?
As a woman myself who experienced an anembryonic pregnancy, a pregnancy that was very much wanted by me and my husband, it was a dilation and curettage at 12 weeks, a common abortion procedure, that was medically necessary to save me from an unsafe miscarriage, which could have easily resulted in hemorrhaging and infection. I can attest that the D&C was a quick and clean 10-minute procedure. It was more awkward than painful but nothing like the butchering event that the pro-life movement portrays in their abortion videos.
The abortion videos I was forced to watch at 12 never completely won me over as a pro-life believer. I became pro-choice when I had to make that choice myself though this is not to say that having an abortion automatically makes you pro-choice, or that being pro-choice means you will remain so. Norma McCorvey for instance, otherwise the Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade, converted to Catholicism twenty years after Roe, and was a staunch pro-life activist until her death, publicly expressing her remorse and denouncing her participation in the case that legalized abortion.
McCorvey stated after becoming pro-life, “I remained basically anonymous for almost 17 years. I, in those 17 years, I tried to commit suicide a couple of times. I was very ashamed of what I had done, and I was looking for forgiveness not only from God but from myself.” Maybe it is this aspect of the abortion experience that we pro-choicers need to address rather than shy away from. To shy away from it only seems to fuel pro-life activists, particularly those who have had abortions, into believing that our emotional response is a one-sided narrative of relief, and that we are liars denying that grief and trauma aren’t significant, when some women attest to feeling these very emotions and nothing else.
As a Catholic, I feel my abortion story makes staunch Catholics believe that I belong in the fiery pit of damnation, expecting me to repent for my mortal sin when my abortion was the only right thing for me to do under the circumstances. I’ve never felt that I needed to be forgiven by God.
While McCorvey converted to Catholicism, I haven’t done the opposite and renounce my faith, though I did feel Catholicism had turned its back on me with their rule of latae sententiae, automatic excommunication to any woman who has an abortion. My feelings toward the Catholic Church remain lukewarm. I am well aware of the existence of pro-choice Catholics, even the organization Catholics for Choice who advocate on our behalf, but no matter our existence, we are still outsiders to the Vatican who do not see our stance as noteworthy. Church doctrine remains strictly opposed to abortion without exception. It would be naive to think that Catholic women are ignorant of latae sententiae as it is a law so deeply ingrained in our catechism. It’s important to compare that rapists aren’t automatically excommunicated. One need not look further than how the Church handled the sex abuse scandals of their priests, and yet we, excommunicated women, are expected to repent to these men whom the Church has bestowed as the only ones capable of officially absolving us of our sins.
Unlike McCorvey who became pro-life in response to the trauma after her abortion, the trauma after my abortion only has made me fiercely pro-choice even though a part of me fears the pro-choice community will hate me as I don’t necessarily shout my abortion as an empowering experience. To be honest, it was very lonely. Even still, I don’t feel totally empowered sharing my abortion story but more than ever feel afraid of judgment and attack from both the pro-life and pro-choice sides.
I firmly believe in the fundamental right to an abortion but also believe trauma can be one of the natural responses to an abortion. I’d like to believe the pro-choice community would welcome me with open arms, but it seems voicing any negative opinions about the abortion experience such as trauma undermines what we’re fighting for.
It seems good pro-choicers do not see abortion as a traumatic experience. Good pro-choicers do not see abortion as a tragedy. Good pro-choicers find the abortion experience empowering. Good pro-choicers see abortion as a solution. Good pro-choicers see abortion as a relief. While I agree with the good pro-choicer, I also see what the other side sees and agree with them too.
In 2005, when Hillary Clinton called abortion a tragedy by saying it represents “a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women,” pro-choice pundits were quick to voice their skepticism. On a big picture scale, I see why the pro-choice movement swiftly questioned just how much of a pro-choicer Clinton was. Unfortunately for Clinton as a politician, I understand why it was crucial for her to refrain from such comments as words like “tragic” and “necessary evil” attach a negative connotation when trying to legislatively support abortion. But I can also see that she was speaking from a place so deeply personal and in her own eyes, abortion is a tragedy if solely taken on a personal level and not just a legislative one. The sad thing is how these various feelings toward abortion, whether they be spiritual, celebratory, relieving, remorseful, tragic, or traumatic, have divided us as a movement as if our pro-choice feelings should be a one-size fits all.
I am split down the middle between calling abortion a tragedy and not. Maybe that makes me a bad pro-choicer. But why not be inclusive and leave it to a woman who has gone through an abortion to decide whether she calls her own abortion a tragedy or not, as long as she does not impose that emotion on other women.
We can believe that we are sparing a child from a future that we simply cannot provide for. We can believe that we do not want to bring unwanted children into the world. We can still love babies, but believe that we ourselves were not meant to be mothers. Besides my own personal experience with abortion, my experience as a post-abortion counselor has proven that different women react differently toward their abortions, whether they came to that decision immediately or through the private counsel of friends, family, their religious community, or alone or after days of serious consideration and reconsideration, with different emotions ranging from relief, sadness, shame, regret, even joy. I’ve known women who have held ceremonies for their abortions while others have thrown celebrations.
I believe I spared myself and my baby from being terrorized and legally bound to an abuser who would’ve made my life and my baby’s life a living hell. If I had that baby, which a small part of me did want, I believe I still would’ve been fortunate to finish college with the generous support of my family, but it would’ve been at the heavy cost of being pressured to marry my abuser to save face in my Filipino-American family versus being a shameful single mother at 20. I believed my baby deserved better than that. I believed I deserved better than that, and I was able to stop all of it from ever happening.
The pro-life side will argue that I should’ve considered adoption, but that would’ve meant having to publicly acknowledge my pregnancy to my family, something that was completely unfathomable. Adoption wouldn’t have felt that I alone was giving up my child but it would’ve felt like a collective surrender where my entire family would’ve felt they were giving up the child. I couldn’t imagine having to carry my baby for 9 months only to have him or her taken away while I and my family would’ve spent an entire lifetime mourning and agonizing over whether he or she was being treated well or abused or abandoned or feeling resentful of me and us. As someone who has also personally worked in adoption and the foster care system, the termination of one’s parental rights is far from an easy experience for biological family, mother, child, foster parents, and adoptive parents.
Among us pro-choicers, some of us believe abortion is murder, but also believe that our personal well-being and future depend on the life we take. I know saying that is legislatively dangerous and problematic, but personally naming it as such is how some pro-choicers feel and in turn helps particular women grieve, find forgiveness, cope, and move on. To exclude us from the pro-choice conversation only diminishes the many facets and inexplicable complexity of those who identify as pro-choice. At the outset of saying this, I expect harsh criticism from my own pro-choice community, but if we are to shout our abortions, then we need to shout each and every kind. The pro-choice side, though flawed and imperfect and evolving and still arguing on whether we need to change our name or not, still holds room for discussion, even for those who do not choose abortion. Maybe that makes me a bad pro-choicer, but I’m still pro-choice nonetheless.
Elsa Valmidiano is an Oakland writer and poet. She was a reproductive rights activist for several years with Planned Parenthood, a post-abortion counselor for Exhale, and then a post-abortion complications care intern at Likhaan—a women’s health organization in the Philippines. Her poetry and prose have appeared in various literary journals and anthologies. A recipient of the Editors’ Choice selection from the Many Voices Project competition in Prose sponsored by New Rivers Press, Elsa’s debut essay collection, We Are No Longer Babaylan, is slated for publication in Fall 2020/Spring 2021. For more information, please visit her website at slicingtomatoes.com.
I cut my hair first. The realization of her carrying me for sixteen years felt embarrassing. It was enough that I didn’t understand that I had flushed her down the toilet in relief. Perhaps it was the fact that I saw his child being loved by arms that had held me down. He applied pressure until he knew I would be still and unyielding. I put the hair in the rabbit skin for the next day. I went to bed with a tear-stained face and woke up with a large blood clot between my legs. Creator had given me a second chance to do it right. I grabbed up the blood the best I could and placed it in the bundle. Once it was tied, she came and hugged me as large as a she would have been in a body and the tears came. The deer knew I would need to come back. They had taken me to that place where they slept. None of this feels particularly reasonable, but it doesn’t need to be. When she was eight, she tried to crawl inside of me and be born. She didn’t know the process, only where she wanted to be. I bled for years after that. Dysfunctional Uterine Bleeding. Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. The endocrinologist said I “made too much testosterone.” I used to call it the butch body disease. There is no language for blood that is not born. When my grandmother was dying the hospice staff would not declare it as the truth. A ninety-five year old black woman’s body, dying, could not be believed. White bodies don’t have to deal with this kind of indignity—except for white bodies that are poor. When are they gonna realize their only right is to make white babies? My aunt thought she had taken a shit in the bed and called the nurses to clean her up. I stepped outside but in full view to give her space and dignity and to feel. One of the staff called me inside. “She’s bleeding, do you want to see?” She pulled open the white sheet to reveal large cochineal masses between her legs. It didn’t bother me. My grandmother was talking through the blood. This went on for about an hour—bleeding, cleaning her up, repeat. This body that had birthed and fed five children closing itself out. When I returned home she was waiting for me; a presence so much bigger than her body. I made a bundle, cut hair.
M. Carmen Lane (Tuscarora, Mohawk, African-American) is a two:spirit poet and cultural worker living in Cleveland, Ohio. Their poetry has been published in the Yellow Medicine Review, River Blood & Corn, and Red Ink Magazine. M. Carmen Lane contributed to the Lambda Literary nominated anthology Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literatures. Their first collection of poetry is Calling Out After Slaughter (GTK Press, 2015).
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