Miss Suzie Had a Baby, She Named Him Tiny Tim

By Laura Grace Weldon

 

Outrage drives me outside,
a choice a woman can still make.
I clamber close to our muddy creek
collecting trash caught in fallen branches.
I empty water from a Stroh’s bottle
and battered jug of Cheer detergent.
Pull out blue plastic bags and
an honest-to-God wire hanger.
Untangle a multicolored jump rope
with red wooden handles,
the kind we jumped with during
recess at Pine Elementary School
chanting K.I.S.S.I.N.G., and Cinderella.
Some girls were such good skippers
they didn’t miss a jump till a whistle’s
shrill made us head back in,
line up at the drinking fountain, then
sit every minute of three more hours.
I hear singsong rhymes in my mind
as I walk back with this trash
still feeling our legs leap,
our hair fly in synch,
drumbeat of feet on the ground
the way girls and women
from the beginning
have worked together
while singing in unison.

 


Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, and maxes out her library card. Laura served as Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books. lauragraceweldon.com

Photo credit: ErstwhileHuman via a Creative Commons license.


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Crying in Texas

By M.R. Mandell

       after “Kissing” by Dorianne Laux         

 

Crying as they hope for blood,
crying as they flush the strips,
crying as they hide their bumps.
They are crying in bathroom stalls,
behind Sugarland’s Kroger store.
They are crying on Houston corners,
outside the boarded-up laundromat.
They are crying in each other’s arms,
at the Hampton Inn off Highway 10.
They are crying in their Walmart
uniforms, and their Ann Taylor
suits, in their Wrangler jeans,
and Zara boots. They are crying
alone, on the edge, salt burning
their skin. They are crying as doctors
turn them away. They are crying
harder than before,
before the pious Robes lied.
Crying as they hope for blood.

 


M.R. Mandell (she/her) is a poet living in Los Angeles. A transplant from Katy, Texas, she now lives by the beach with her muse, a Golden Retriever named Chester Blue (at her feet), and her longtime partner (by her side). You can find her work in Chill Subs, Boats Against the Current, The Final Girl Bulletin Board, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, The Bloom, JAKE, Roi Fainéant, sage cigarettes, Anti-Heroin Chic, Stanchion Zine, Fine Print and others. She has works forthcoming in Drunk Monkeys, unstamatic (photo), and Olney Magazine (photos)

Photo credit: Ernesto Andrade via a Creative Commons license.


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Beowulf

By Irene Cooper

 

While my glamorous friend Anne underwent her abortion, I sat at a lunch counter and ate a grilled cheese sandwich and a chocolate shake before returning to the abortion clinic in the urban grid of Brooklyn. I sat in the waiting area and read Beowulf, assigned by my high school sophomore English teacher.

It wasn’t hard to imagine eighth-century Northern Europe—in my Irish working-class community there was nothing unfamiliar to me about drinking halls, trash-talking men, and tribal vindication. I took the side of the monsters—swollen outcasts, a vengeful mother and her son, descendent of the fratricidal Cain—although I knew—because I knew—they were doomed, predestined martyrs to the heroic trope. It’s even more difficult, now that I am in late middle age and my children are tender adults, not to wish for a better outcome for Grendel’s mother, incited to violence through her grief over the slaying of her son, but she never had a chance.

Anne, like me, was a little younger than her peers. She was not an outsider, but neither was she popular, per se. In that way, too, we were alike, but that’s where our similarities ended. I was overweight by the standard of the day, and poorly dressed, and therefore did everything I could to deflect attention. Anne’s mother worked in some mysterious capacity for Estee Lauder, and brought home gallon bags of makeup samples, of which Anne made liberal and dramatic use. She was dark and bird-like, an Audrey Hepburn for the 80s. In our freshman year, Anne developed appendicitis and parlayed the event into an entire final quarter off from school, during which she sunbathed in a bikini, studied Glamour and Vogue, and, when I came over, mined Jeremy’s—her mother’s boyfriend’s—secret stash of Penthouse magazines for story ideas I would then type, loudly, on Jeremy’s IBM Selectric.

Because I had no compunction about skipping school to keep Anne company, made no judgments about her hiatus (let alone her clandestine sexual relationship with a peach-faced boy two blocks over and one grade behind us), and was sometimes funny, I was the perfect (and only) candidate to accompany Anne to the clinic. My lack of judgment was not a virtue. It simply didn’t occur to me to have, let alone take, a moral position. I was used to things—bad things—just happening. I was accustomed to trying to make the best of it, afterward.

I finished Beowulf. Anne emerged, visibly relieved and hungry.

We’d stay friends throughout the next year, when she left the peninsula to live in a SoHo loft with her mother and Jeremy. Sometimes when I took the train in, Rachel—Anne never called her mother Mom—would take us to an art show, an occasion that left me bright-eyed, and Anne bored. Mostly, we’d go to Rocky Horror screenings and drink beer, after which I’d lie on the bare loft floor and let my head swim, while Anne vomited our revelries into the toilet. Senior year, I went to Rio de Janeiro as an exchange student. The year after that, she attended a small East Coast college, and I got a retail job in Houston, where my parents had moved in my absence. College was a bore, she said during a visit, but there were some cute guys. We sat in my bedroom smoking Parliaments with a fingernail of cocaine in the hollow tip. We neither of us had any plans. We lived by feel, each wondering if the other didn’t have the better set-up. I felt, at eighteen, that I’d forfeited my chance at college—that I was already too old. Anne enjoyed her visit best, I think, when she was flipping through bridal magazines with my mother at the kitchen table. Switched at birth, we’d joke. We didn’t know it, but everything was still open to us, all our fledgling mistakes and triumphs.

My eldest daughter and her fiancée live in a state where abortion will remain legal, for now, but the unnerving buzz is that this is the first domino—that LGBTQIA+ rights have been set up for a fall all along, as has same-sex marriage and accessible contraception. What will that mean, I worry, for the younger daughter, who’s contraceptive implant will expire in another year?

In the middle of Ron Padgett’s long-ish poem, “How to Be Perfect,” between Cultivate good posture until it becomes natural and Plan your day so you never have to rush is the line, If someone murders your child, get a shotgun and blow his head off. Perhaps Grendel’s mother was perfectly well-behaved, before she wasn’t. I suspect good behavior, or the slavish adherence to it, is another big lie, another promise unfulfilled.

A scene near the end of the 2005 BBC movie, The Girl in the Café, shows Kelly Macdonald’s character in the airport with Bill Nighy’s character, after she’s disgraced him at an international conference by talking about dying children in front of all his colleagues at the banquet table. He’d met her in a café, and in an uncharacteristic moment of spontaneity, asked her to join him for the G8 Summit in Reykjavik. He knows nothing about her (duh) and is surprised and aggrieved to learn she’d been in prison.

“I hurt a man. I hurt a man who hurt a child,” she tells him.

He asks, “Was it your child?”

She answers, “Does it matter?”

In the 2007 movie version of Beowulf, Grendel’s mother takes the form of a beautiful woman to seduce the hero in hopes that he will put a baby in her to replace the slaughtered Grendel. In the eighth-century text, as I remember it, she remains a monster, a hag, unseductive, the corpse of her monster son buried in her hair. In either case, she has only “mother” for a name, not even a kenning such as demon-bearer or seedfurrow or icicle-sheath. No, “mother” is her sole identity and purpose, as far as our heroes are concerned. And then they take that from her, too, and rejoice.

Grrr.

And what of Anne? The deer-path of our friendship forked at the end of adolescence. I cultivated my own glamourous mythologies, and still emerged dripping from the brine of my twenties to shed my scales on the toll-road of mortgage, partner, and 2.5 kids. I never liked weddings—uneasy union of the sentimental and the transactional—but, long after my own, have come to appreciate the precipitous question at the core of the ritual: Will you? It is a moment of consummate agency, bedazzled out of focus by diamonds and pearl-encrusted lace. The whole of the endeavor, however, hangs on the answer, and commitment is a matter of individual will.

Anne, I presumed, would someday say I will to a baby, if she could, after making the choice to say, I won’t.  I don’t presume to know what she’d think of the Supreme Court’s reversal, or how she might remember her own experience. I do know that when we had almost no sense of our own agency, we could take for granted that autonomy which was provided by law. We could—and lawfully—take care of ourselves as if we, and the embattled women we were to become, mattered.

 


Irene Cooper is the author of Committal, poet-friendly spy-fy about family (V.A. Press) & spare change (FLP), finalist for the Stafford/Hall Award. Writings appear in Denver Quarterly, The Feminist Wire, The Rumpus, streetcake, Witness, Beloit, & elsewhere. Irene supports AIC-directed writing at a regional prison, and lives with her people and Maggie in Oregon.

Photo credit: Phil King via a Creative Commons license


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On the Front Lines

Fiction by Kit-Bacon Gressitt

You look in the bedroom mirror, small enough to deny self-adoration, and pull your brownish hair into a ponytail. Tight, like Mother used to do it. You turn to the bed. Your clothes are laid out on sheets held in place by perfect hospital corners. You dress in practical layers, to accommodate the variable temperatures of the daylong vigil you perform every Thursday. First, your underthings, then flesh-tone tights and a plain white t-shirt. Next, the pleated blouse Mother used to wear, when you held the vigils together, and ski pants, a modest one size too large. Finally, a nice worsted wool skirt you found at Goodwill for a dollar. It’s a bit matronly, but you top it off with your 12-week ultrasound hoodie.

You strap on your choose-life fanny pack, loaded with crisis pregnancy tracts and embryo dolls; take the bigger-than-life-size fetus parts poster in one hand and your calico-covered Bible in the other; and you march to the local abortion mill. Battle ready. Here profit motive thrives under Satan’s leering eyes and abortions are marketed to the vulnerable—to provide lucrative embryos for ungodly research. You believe this with all your heart because that’s what the tracts tell you.

You bungee-cord the poster to a tree and take your position between the clinic entrance and the parking lot. You’re armed with the assurance that you’re doing God’s righteous work, as Mother taught you, witnessing for life, sidewalk counseling would-be abortion victims, guiding them away from mortal sin, toward salvation. You adjust the bunched-up layers around your waist while you await the poor misguided mothers, bearing their precious preborns to slaughter. You know they will come, as they do every week, in numbers that torment your heart with the horrid image of God’s beloved innocents torn asunder by evil and torturous tools in the hands of Death’s doctors. But you are stalwart, determined to rescue a life from the great abyss of immoral destruction.

The clinic opens, the women and girls—not so much younger than you—begin to arrive, and you gird your supplies—they are comforting. Mother was so much better at this.

You take a breath. “Excuse me,” you say as you step before the nearest sinner heading for the door. The young woman looks sad. She wears immodest jeans from which she’ll soon burst forth in the full flower of maternal fertility—if you can lead her to Jesus.

“How many weeks are you?” you say.

“Huh?” the girl says, wires dangling from her ears to a front pocket.

“How many weeks pregnant are you?” You give her your kindest, most eager smile.

“Hmm?” The girl frowns, pulls a phone from her pocket and, without looking up, says, “What?”

“Do not renounce God’s miracle growing within you,” you say. “Already it feels. Already it knows life. Already it loves you.”

She stares at you, says nothing. She needs you.

“I know you’re scared and confused, but don’t succumb to the fear of your situation, to the temptation of an easy solution. In truth, it is not easy. There are better ways. God has sent you his love and support—through me. Choose life for your preborn child.”

The girl pulls the wires from her ears. “What did you say?”

“Choose life,” you repeat. You put down your Bible and pull a tiny plastic embryo from your fanny pack. “Look, this one, this one here is probably the size of yours. Choose life for the blameless gift God has given you, and you will receive his endless blessings. Choose life for your baby and heavenly eternity for yourself.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the girl says and steps around you.

“Please wait!” Mother taught you how to deal with denial. You must use extreme counseling technique. You grab the girl’s hand and drop to your knees. “You needn’t be afraid. Turn your heart away from the evil of abortion. God’s innocent fruit grows in the garden of your womb. Don’t let them suck it out to rot in the bowels of evil!”

“Gross.” The girl pulls away from you.

You hold on tighter. “Don’t do this,” you say. “We’ll help you through your pregnancy and then—”

“Yeah?” the girl says, “and then what?”

“Then the lord will provide.”

“Yeah, right.” The girl snickers and pulls harder. “Let go of me.”

“No, please.” You try not to, but you cry. “Listen to me.” The girl hesitates. Your nose drips. You look up at her and think of Mother. “Before God formed the sinless one in your womb, he knew her. His hands shaped and made her. Would you now turn from the wonder of his love?” You wipe your nose on the sleeve of the ultrasound hoodie and wrap yourself around the girl’s calves.

“You’re nuts.” The girl struggles against your embrace. “Let go—let go!”

“I can’t. Jesus wants me to save you. Please don’t murder your baby! Give your preborn the gift of life!”

The girl yanks one leg free, puts her foot against your chest and pushes you backward. “Cool your shit,” she says. “I’ve got a killer UTI—stay the fuck out of my way.”

You gather yourself and get up from the sidewalk, brushing dirt and leaves from the nice Goodwill skirt, tidying your ponytail, and you wonder if the clinic switched the weekday it murders unborns. Nausea quivers through your belly at the thought of having to change your routine. The routine you and Mother performed together every week. Mother, who didn’t abort you.

“Have a blessed day,” you call after the girl.

She’s already inside.


January 22 is the anniversary of the Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision guaranteeing women the freedom to make their own private reproductive decisions. It’s also Kit-Bacon Gressitt’s birthday, which has long seemed significant to her. Spawned by a Baptist creationist and a liberal social worker, K-B inherited the requisite sense of humor to survive family dinner-table debates and the imagination to avoid them. As a result, she’s a feminist writer, she supports unrestricted access to affordable abortion and other reproductive health services, and she’s an LGBTQ rights advocate. She also birthed a child of color, who’s taught her a lot about white privilege and intersectionality. An erstwhile political columnist with an MFA in Creative Writing, K-B is now an occasional Women’s Studies lecturer. Visit her website, Excuse me, I’m writing.

Because it’s unlikely the nation will see anything from the new administration akin to President Obama’s 2016 commemoration of the Roe v Wade decision, it is reprinted here:

The White House
January 22, 2016

Statement by the President on the 43rd Anniversary of Roe v. Wade

Today, we mark the 43rd anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, which affirmed a woman’s freedom to make her own choices about her body and her health. The decision supports the broader principle that the government should not intrude on private decisions made between a woman and her doctor. As we commemorate this day, we also redouble our commitment to protecting these constitutional rights, including protecting a woman’s access to safe, affordable health care and her right to reproductive freedom from efforts to undermine or overturn them. In America, every single one of us deserves the rights, freedoms, and opportunities to fulfill our dreams.

Reading recommendation: The Cider House Rules by John Irving.

Embryo doll photo credit: Anthony Easton via a Creative Commons License.

The President-Elect Speaks

By Marge Piercy

 

“You can always go to another
state” to have your abortion
just so long as you’re rich,
have a nanny to watch your

kids, can take off from your
job, have a ride available
or your own car, aren’t
living at home or needing

to hide the procedure. Yes
affluent women could fly
to Puerto Rico while the rest
of us were doing it to ourselves,

dying of back alley butchery,
bleeding to death, left sterile
from botched operations,
yes, we can always just die,

Mr. Trump, and many mothers
will be leaving their children
to be raised by others, many
teenagers will drop out of school,

many women will die alone
in their bloody beds. It will
be just the way you like it
for women who dare to choose.

……………………………………..

Marge Piercy has published nineteen poetry books, most recently Made in Detroit and The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems from Knopf; seventeen novels; a short story collection, The Cost of Lunch, Etc.; four nonfiction books; and a memoir Sleeping With Cats. She has given readings, lectures and workshops in more than five hundred venues here and abroad.

Reading recommendation: The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service by Laura Kaplan.