Choice Words Read online

at the newts in their jar

  swimming briskly in their orbit.

  One girl held her skirts in fists.

  One girl reached for them.

  Look, he said. The water swirled

  and eddied with the motion

  of his wrist. Naked in your blood

  you curled, asking your impossible question.

  I weighed you in my hand,

  slipped you into a soft wrapper,

  kissed the wrapper,

  tucked you beneath the roots of a tree.

  What tree I will not say—

  let them look and never find you.

  I pressed my foot down

  to close your door.

  Of course I loved you,

  even as I set my heel against the dirt.

  FROM for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf

  Ntozake Shange

  lady in red

  these men friends of ours

  who smile nice

  stay employed

  and take us out to dinner

  lady in purple

  lock the door behind you

  lady in blue

  wit fist in face

  to fuck

  lady in red

  who make elaborate mediterranean dinners

  & let the art ensemble carry all ethical burdens

  while they invite a coupla friends over to have you

  are sufferin’ from latent rapist bravado

  & we are left wit the scars

  lady in blue

  bein betrayed by men who know us

  lady in purple

  & expect

  like the stranger

  we always thot waz comin

  lady in blue

  that we will submit

  lady in purple

  we must have known

  lady in red

  women relinquish all personal rights

  in the presence of a man

  who apparently cd be considered a rapist

  lady in purple

  especially if he has been considered a friend

  lady in blue

  & is no less worthy of being beat within an inch of his life

  bein publicly ridiculed

  havin two fists shoved up his ass

  lady in red

  than the stranger

  we always thot it wd be

  lady in blue

  who never showed up

  lady in red

  cuz it turns out the nature of rape has changed

  lady in blue

  we can now meet them in circles we frequent for companionship

  lady in purple

  we see them at the coffeehouse

  lady in blue

  wit someone else we know

  lady in red

  we cd even have em over for dinner

  & get raped in our own houses

  by invitation

  a friend

  [The lights change, and the ladies

  are all hit by an imaginary slap, the

  lady in red runs off up left.]

  lady in blue

  eyes

  lady in purple

  mice

  lady in red

  womb

  lady in blue & lady in purple

  nobody

  [The lady in purple exits up right.]

  lady in blue

  tubes tables

  whitewashed windows

  grime from age wiped over once

  legs spread

  anxious

  eyes crawling up on me

  eyes rollin’ in my thighs

  metal horses gnawing my womb

  dead mice fall from my mouth

  i really didn’t mean to

  i really didn’t think i cd

  just one day off …

  get offa me alla this blood

  bones shattered like soft ice-cream cones

  i cdnt have people

  lookin’ at me

  pregnant

  i cdnt have my friends see this

  dyin danglin’ between my legs

  & i didn’t say a thing

  not a sigh

  or a fast scream

  to get

  those eyes offa me

  get them steel rods outta me

  this hurts

  this hurts me

  & nobody came

  cuz nobody knew

  once i was pregnant & shamed of myself.

  [The lady in blue exits stage left.]

  FROM “INTRODUCTION TO ‘THE IDEA’ AND ‘THE IDEA’”

  Hilde Weisert

  INTRODUCTION TO THE IDEA

  “Hello, Flower.” It’s my aunt in a late-night phone call, drinking, ready to talk. Last week it was about her sister in Rye mistakenly baking the rat in the oven. This week, it’s about me. Or not me. What she has decided she needs to tell me, before she passes on, before the memory is gone, is what my mother said back when all the wives (sisters, sisters-in-law) lived together in the big apartment on the North Side of Chicago and the husbands were all at war. I’ve always thought of it as a sort of paradise for them, independent, unencumbered, going to work and having martinis and taking care of each other’s babies.

  I’ve heard a lot of the stories of that golden time. Now here’s another one. “You know, you weren’t always so special. Actually, you weren’t even wanted. You should know this. I’m sure your mother never told you. About how she cried. She told me, she just didn’t know if she could go on with it. With your father. He was gone, and she felt like she could breathe for the first time in ten years. She didn’t want him back.

  “She had a good job, actually quite glamorous, you know, she’d tell us about it when she came home after work, stories about Dave Garroway and Hugh Downs and the other men at the radio station. Your mother liked men. She was the center of attention there, the only woman. ‘How can I go through it all again?’ she said. I bet you didn’t know any of that.”

  “No, I didn’t.” As I listen, I’m skeptical. All I ever heard were stories about what a beautiful baby I was, how beloved. “Angel child,” my grandfather called me. But listening to my drunk aunt ramble, I think, maybe. Maybe she did think about bailing on it all, bailing out of committing another lifetime to my father. She’d told me about the other pregnancy, my brother, years before me, when she stood on the Wabash Avenue Bridge and thought about throwing herself into the river. I’d ask her, but I can’t, because she’s dead.

  “Right, you had no idea, did you? Everyone thought she was so perfect. You have no idea the things she told me.”

  I think my aunt is crying softly on the other end of the phone, a signal that the conversation is almost over. “I don’t, I know I really don’t. Don’t worry about it, whatever it was, it’s okay. You should get some sleep.” Some snuffles, something more about Flower, the line clicks off. Interesting, I think. Here’s the trump card in every right-winger’s anti-choice deck—“How would you feel if…?” Well, this is how I feel.

  THE IDEA

  Why would this be the worst thing?

  That you held me as an idea you could turn

  into one thing, or the other? Mother,

  I can almost imagine it.

  NOT YOURS

  Angelique Imani Rodriguez

  No woman has an abortion for fun.

  —Elizabeth Joan Smith

  I sat on the toilet for so long that my legs fell asleep. The three pregnancy tests I had taken were on the white tiled floor, originally all in one box, the third packaged as a bonus test, as if the company that made them knew I would need all three to confirm what I already recognized in my body. My period hadn’t come and though I had experienced irregularity with my cycle in the past, this time felt different. I could feel it in the cramps low and dull in my belly, in the way my stomach churned in the morning, the lightheadedness.

  I fucking knew it. But I still took all three tests.

  I sat there afterwards,
staring at them, lined up in a row, six blue lines telling me that I was pregnant.

  How the fuck did I let this happen?

  The guy I slept with was the guy everyone in my family wanted me to stay away from but who I harbored such an infatuation for that I kept going back, rebounding after breakups by rolling around in his bed. I got pregnant after one of those he-always-makes-me-feel-better rebound moments when the condom broke. We stared at each other as if the world were ending.

  “I pulled out in time. You should be okay.” His voice was soft, reassuring.

  I thought I would be. I was wrong.

  I didn’t tell him I was pregnant. I justified it with, “Well, he ain’t looking for me,” or “He’s chilling with that other chick now, so who cares?” The reality was that I was afraid to tell him because I was afraid of what his reaction would be. I didn’t want to hear “Are you sure it’s mine?” I didn’t want to hear him say I should keep it.

  Because I knew I was going to have an abortion.

  Not my proudest moment, no. He deserved to know.

  Years later, he confessed his love for me over a candlelit table. I could see the love in his eyes, the hope of a brilliant future fluttering in his eyelashes. I could hear his voice trembling with nervousness as he said it.

  “When I kiss you, I feel it in my stomach. I have loved you for a long time. I can’t see anyone else having my children, Angie.”

  I put my hand over his and said, “I have something to tell you.”

  Our relationship was never the same after that, the rebound moments ended, though a warm friendship remained. He has a son now. His son looks just like him.

  I made the choice to have an abortion with the knowledge that I had put myself in a place I didn’t want to be. I was twenty-two, completely unprepared for a child both mentally and emotionally, not to mention being financially incapable of supporting a new life. I was just starting a new job, I had no degree under my belt, no plan of action for my life, no dreams. I didn’t want to start a family with a dude who I thought didn’t know I existed outside of my vagina and what I could make him feel in bed. I didn’t want to have a child knowing that I could not provide it with the life it deserved, with the support it deserved.

  I was reeling from a life not yet faced. I hadn’t even begun to work on the layers of shit I had to unlearn because I was in the midst of creating more fucking layers.

  I was not ready, and I didn’t want to be a mother.

  That was my reasoning and I have been damned to hell and judged for it by people in my life.

  By myself.

  * * *

  My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer the summer I found out I was pregnant. I cried when I found out because I knew that me confessing to her would be a burden for her to carry during such a delicate time for her. She didn’t need this.

  And I was the one who had done this.

  I told her I was pregnant over the phone while I was on a break from working in a cell phone store. I walked into a CD store and browsed the stacks of CDs as I dialed her number. We chatted for a few minutes before I said anything.

  “Mami, I haven’t gotten my period yet.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  “I … I took a test and …”

  “Imani, are you pregnant?”

  I let the words slam into me, a gavel coming down. An explanation rushed out of me, an urge to plaster the holes, to solve the issue before she could say anything.

  “I am. But don’t worry, I am going to set up an abortion. It’s the only thing I can do right now. I’m not doing well at work because I’ve been so sick. I don’t have a degree. I don’t have anything together for my future. I can’t have a kid, Mami … and now with you being sick, I …”

  “Don’t use that as a reason for what you decided to do. You should’ve been smarter, Imani,” she said.

  The moment froze, suspended in the air, a judgment and a reprimand.

  The day I had my abortion, my mother poked her head in my bedroom when she got home from work. She sat on the edge of the bed as I cried. I don’t remember what was said. I don’t remember crying in her lap or her putting her hand on me.

  I remember her sitting at the edge of the bed, a heavy sigh leaving her. I remember thinking to myself that I wanted her to not have that look on her face, the one where her hopes for me died. I remember wanting to apologize.

  But I didn’t.

  Instead, after she left, when I was alone, I wrote in my journal that I wanted to die in the folds of my bedsheets.

  * * *

  When a friend became pregnant with her second child, she didn’t tell me. It was a year or so after I had my abortion. She asked me to talk to her about it one day as we chatted on the phone. She told me she wanted to hear all of the specifics.

  So, I did. I told her every single detail, from the man handing me a paper that said I was a murderer at the entrance, to the hours of waiting in rooms with uncomfortable chairs covered in faded burgundy fabric, to the ultrasound and the cashew-sized baby on the screen I couldn’t look at, to the fear and the shame I carried. All of it. I was honest, my previously bottled emotions spilling out. I wouldn’t want to be forced to make that decision again but I told her that it was the smartest decision for me to make.

  When I found out she was pregnant, it wasn’t even from her, it was from another friend. The pregnancy was mentioned casually over a phone call.

  “Wait, she’s pregnant? Is she keeping the baby?”

  “Yeah. She told me that she could never do what you did.”

  I held on to the shame of that for years before we spoke about it.

  Her beautiful daughter is eleven years old now, a vibrant shiny spirit and I am so happy to know her. Her mother and I remain friends, learning from each other that every woman has her own journey to follow, and every woman has a right to her own choice.

  BEING A WOMAN

  Jennifer Goldwasser

  A woman must

  Choose

  When met with

  The male counterpart

  Of her warrior-self

  To take life or to give.

  She must remember

  Death is also a

  Woman who plows the fields

  AN ABORTION DAY SPELL FOR TWO VOICES1

  Annie Finch

  As I turn your blood back to the earth,

  I am life, you are death, and we kiss

  Through the fire that is my freedom’s birth.

  By the womb of our love’s endlessness,

  As you turn my blood back to the earth,

  I am death, you are life. And we kiss

  As we move through the deep, giving forth

  To the web that is love-woven bliss,

  By the fire that is our freedom’s birth.

  I THINK SHE WAS A SHE

  Leyla Josephine

  I think she was a she.

  No.

  I know she was a she, and I think that she would have looked just like

  me:

  full cheeks, hazel eyes, and thick brown hair that I could have plaited

  into dreams at night.

  I would have stuck glow-up stars on her ceiling

  and told her they were fireflies to protect her from the dark.

  I would have told her stories about her grandfather.

  We could have fed the swans at the park.

  She would have been like you too, long limbs

  with a sarcastic smile and the newest pair of kicks.

  She would have been tough, tougher than I ever was,

  and I would have taught her all that my mother taught me,

  and I would have taken her to all the museums

  and there she could see the bone dinosaurs,

  and look to them and wonder about all the things that came before

  she was born.

  She could have been born.

  I would have made sure that we had a space on the wall to measure her
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  height as she grew.

  I would have made sure I was a good mother to look up to.

  But I would have supported her right to choose.

  To choose a life for herself, a path for herself.

  I would have died for that right, just like she died for mine.

  I’m sorry, but you came at the wrong time.

  I am not ashamed. I am not ashamed. I am not ashamed.

  I am so sick of keeping these words contained.

  I am not ashamed.

  I was a teenage girl with a boy she loved between her thighs that felt

  very far away.

  Duvet days and dole don’t do family planning well.

  I am one in three. I am one in three. I am one in three.

  I had to carve down that little cherry tree that had rooted

  itself in my blood and blossomed in my brain.

  A responsibility I didn’t have the energy or age to maintain.

  The branches casting shadows over the rest of the garden.

  The bark causing my thoughts, my heart to harden.

  I am not ashamed. I am not ashamed. I am not ashamed.

  It’s a hollowness? that feels full, a numbness that feels heavy.

  Stop trying to fit how this feels on an NHS bereavement brochure

  already.

  I am allowed to feel it all, I am allowed to feel.

  I am woman now, I am made of steel,

  and she wasn’t a girl and she wasn’t a boy.

  That’s just the bullshit you receive to keep you out of parliament

  and stuck on maternity leave.

  Don’t you mutter murder on me.

  70,000 per year. 70,000 per year. 70,000 per year.

  Dead.

  That’s 192 per day

  from coat hangers, painkillers, the back-alley way.

  Don’t you mutter murder on me.

  Worldwide performing abortion like homework,

  looking for the answer in the groves in our palms, the bulges on our

  bellies,

  the whispers in our ears,

  only to be confronted with question marks.

  Women have been hidden away in the history books.

  After all it’s history:

  His story.

  Well this is herstory, ourstory, goddamn it.

  This is my story,

  and it won’t be written in pencil and erased with guilt.

  It will be written in pen and spoken with courage.