Choice Words Read online

  You will hear it on the radio on your way to work, you will study it in

  English.

  You will read it on the coffee shop’s bulletin boards next to the flyer

  about yoga for babies.

  Because I am not ashamed, I am not ashamed, I am not ashamed.

  I am woman now.

  I will not be tamed.

  I have determination that this termination will still have a form of

  creation.

  It will not be wasted.

  This is my body. This is my body. This is my body.

  I don’t care about your ignorant views.

  When I become a mother, it will be when I choose.

  REGARDING CHOICE

  Alexis Quinlan

  be all you

  can be2 you

  can be all

  you can be

  you (who) you

  can you can

  you can can

  be all you

  be

  you

  can

  WE WOMEN

  Edith Södergran

  We women, we are so near the brown earth.

  We ask the cuckoo what he expects from the spring,

  we throw our arms around the cold pines,

  we search in the sunset for signs and advice.

  I loved a man once, he didn’t believe in anything …

  He came one cold day with empty eyes,

  he went one heavy day with forgetfulness on his brow.

  If my baby doesn’t live, it’s his …

  Translated from the Swedish by Samuel Charters

  “DON QUIXOTE’S ABORTION,” FROM DON QUIXOTE

  Kathy Acker

  When she was finally crazy because she was about to have an abortion, she conceived of the most insane idea that any woman can think of. Which is to love. How can a woman love? By loving someone other than herself. She would love another person. By loving another person, she would right every manner of political, social, and individual wrong: she would put herself in those situations so perilous the glory of her name would resound. The abortion was about to take place:

  From her neck to her knees she wore pale or puke-green paper. This was her armor. She had chosen it specially, for she knew that this world’s conditions are so rough for any single person, even a rich person, that person has to make do with what she can find: this’s no world for idealism. Example: the green paper would tear as soon as the abortion began.

  They told her they were going to take her from the operating chair to her own bed in a wheeling chair. The wheeling chair would be her transportation. She went out to look at it. It was dying. It had once been a hack, the same as all the hacks on Grub Street: now, as all the hacks, was a full-time drunk, mumbled all the time about sex but now no longer not even never did it but didn’t have the wherewithal or equipment to do it, and hung around with the other bums. That is, women who’re having abortions.

  She decided that since she was setting out on the greatest adventure any person can take, that of the Holy Grail, she ought to have a name (identity). She had to name herself. When a doctor sticks a steel catheter into you while you’re lying on your back and you do exactly what he and the nurses tell you to; finally, blessedly, you let go of your mind. Letting go of your mind is dying. She needed a new life. She had to be named.

  As we’ve said, her wheeling bed’s name was “Hack-kneed” or “Hackneyed,” meaning “once a hack” or “always a hack” or “a writer” or “an attempt to have an identity that always fails.” Just as “Hackneyed” is the glorification or change from nonexistence into existence of “Hack-kneed,” so, she decided, “catheter” is the glorification of “Kathy.” By taking on such a name which, being long, is male, she would be able to become a female-male or a night-knight.

  Catharsis is the way to deal with evil. She polished up her green paper.

  In order to love, she had to find someone to love. “Why,” she reasoned to herself, “do I have to love someone in order to love? Hasn’t loving a man brought me to this abortion or state of death?”

  “Why can’t I just love?”

  “Because every verb to be realized needs its object. Otherwise, having nothing to see, it can’t see itself or be. Since love is sympathy or communication, I need an object which is both subject and object: to love, I must love a soul. Can a soul exist without a body? Is physical separate from mental? Just as love’s object is the appearance of love; so the physical realm is the appearance of the godly: the mind is the body. This,” she thought, “is why I’ve got a body. This’s why I am having an abortion. So I can love.” This’s how Don Quixote decided to save the world.

  What did this knight-to-be look like? All of the women except for two were middle-aged and dumpy. One of the young women was an English rose. The other young woman, wearing a long virginal white dress, was about nineteen years old and Irish. She had packed her best clothes and jewels and told her family she was going to a wedding. She was innocent: during her first internal, she had learned she was pregnant. When she reached London Airport, the taxi drivers, according to their duty, by giving her the run-around, made a lot of money. Confused, she either left her bag in a taxi or someone stole it. Her main problem, according to her, wasn’t the abortion or the lost luggage, but how to ensure neither her family nor any of her friends ever found out she had had an abortion, for in Ireland an abortion is a major crime.

  Why didn’t Don Quixote resemble these woman? Because to Don Quixote, having an abortion is a method of becoming a knight and saving the world. This is a vision. In English and most European societies, when a woman becomes a knight, being no longer anonymous she receives a name. She’s able to have adventures and save the world.

  “Which of you was here first?” the receptionist asked. Nobody answered. The women were shy. The receptionist turned to the night-to-be. “Well, you’re nearest to me. Give me your papers.”

  “I can’t give you any papers because I don’t have an identity yet. I didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge and I’m not English. This’s why your law says I have to stay in this inn overnight.

  “As soon as you dub me a knight—by tomorrow morning—and I have a name, I’ll be able to give you my papers.”

  The receptionist, knowing that all women who’re about to have abortions’re crazy, assured the woman her abortion’ld be over by nighttime. “I, myself,” the receptionist confided, “used to be mad. I refused to be a woman the way I was supposed to be. I traveled all over the world, looking for trouble. I prostituted myself, ran a few drugs—nothing hard—exposed my genitalia to strange men while picking their pockets, broke-and-entered, lied to the only men I loved, told the men I didn’t love the truth that I could never love them, fucked one man after another while telling each man I was being faithful to him alone, fucked men over, for, by fucking me over, they had taught me how to fuck them over. Generally, I was a bitch.

  “Then, I learned the error of my ways. I retired … from myself. Here … this little job … I’m living off the income and property of others. Rather dead income and property. Like any good bourgeois,” ending her introduction. “This place,” throwing open her hands, “our sanctus sanitarium, is all of your place of safety. Here, we will save you. All of you who want to share your money with us.” The receptionist extended her arms. “All night our nurses’ll watch over you, and in the morning,” to Don Quixote, “you’ll be a night.” The receptionist asked the knight-to-be for her cash.

  “I’m broke.”

  “Why?”

  “Why should I pay for an abortion? An abortion is nothing.”

  “You must know that nothing’s free.”

  Since her whole heart was wanting to be a knight, she handed over the money and prayed to the Moon. “Suck her, Oh Lady mine, this vassal heart in this my first encounter; let not Your favor and protection fail me in the peril in which for the first time I now find myself.”

  Then she lay down on the hospital bed i
n the puke-green paper they had given her. Having done this, she gathered up her armor, the puke-green paper, again started pacing nervously up and down in the same calm manner as before.

  She paced for three hours until they told her to piss again. This was the manner in which she pissed: “For women, Oh Woman who is all women who is my beauty, give me strength and vigor. Turn the eyes of the strength and wonderfulness of all women upon this one female, this female who’s trying, at least you can say that for her, this female who’s locked up in the hospital and thus must pass through so formidable an adventure.”

  One hour later they told her to climb up pale green-carpeted stairs. But she spoke so vigorously and was so undaunted in her bearing that she struck terror in those who were assailing her. For this reason they ceased attacking the knight-to-be: they told her to lie down on a narrow black-leather padded slab. A clean white sheet covered the slab. Her ass, especially, should lie in a crack.

  “What’s going to happen now?” Don Quixote asked.

  The doctor, being none too pleased with the mad pranks on the part of his guest (being determined to confer that accursed order of knighthood or nighthood upon her before something else happened), showed her a curved needle. It was the wrong needle. They took away the needle. Before she turned her face away to the left side because she was scared of needles, she glimpsed a straight needle. According to what she had read about the ceremonial of the order, there was nothing to this business of being dubbed a night except a pinprick, and that can be performed anywhere. To become a knight, one must be completely hole-ly.

  As she had read—which proves the truth of all writing—the needle when it went into her arm hardly hurt her. As the cold liquid seeped into her arm which didn’t want it, she said that her name was Tolosa and she was the daughter of a shoemaker. When she woke up, she thanked them for her pain and for what they had done for her. They thought her totally mad; they had never aborted a woman like this one. But now that she had achieved knighthood, and thought and acted as she wanted and decided, for one has to act in this way in order to save this world, she neither noticed nor cared that all the people around her thought she was insane.

  AMERICAN ABORTION SONNET #7

  Ellen Stone

  For Rebekah in St. Louis

  Missouri, I thought you were a woman.

  Must be the way your name curls round me.

  Just like a river carries travelers home,

  your arms should keep your people safe—and free.

  Missouri, you cannot have my daughter.

  She is not bound to God by apron strings,

  views this hard world with a clear-eyed manner,

  makes her choices, no matter what life brings.

  Missouri, you know a woman’s body

  is like soil. Her fertile ground is cursed

  when men force her to bloom. So now, if she

  decides to not bear fruit, you’ll say she must?

  Missouri, she loves you, and she will grieve,

  but, like that river, she will also leave.

  AFTER THE ABORTION, AN OLDER WHITE PLANNED PARENTHOOD VOLUNTEER ASKS IF MY HUSBAND IS HERE & SQUEEZES MY THIGH AND SAYS, “YOU MADE THE RIGHT DECISION,” AND THEN “LOOK WHAT COULD HAPPEN IF TRUMP WERE PRESIDENT, I MEAN, YOU MIGHT NOT EVEN BE HERE.”

  Camonghne Felix

  NEW WORLD ORDER

  Lisa Alvarado

  They call us criminals

  as they stand in front of clinics.

  They call us criminals

  and sit in judgment on Capitol Hill.

  They call us criminals

  because we do what is forbidden.

  We say women are not receptacles.

  We say women are not breeders.

  In their world,

  they would pass sentence on us.

  In their world,

  we will kneel with coat hangers,

  darkness covering us;

  the dark flow of life

  running down open legs.

  In their world,

  we will climb the narrow stairs

  meeting shadowy men.

  Men with scalpels

  that sing with fear and old blood;

  who will take our money

  and promise to keep silent.

  In their world,

  I have done what is forbidden.

  I am a criminal.

  My crime is that I chose myself instead of a child.

  My sin is that I am not sorry.

  My sentence is I know I am not safe.

  FROM DAUGHTER OF EARTH

  Agnes Smedley

  Then I knew something was wrong—something that drowned the music of “work, money, school.” I complained to my landlady of a sickness each morning. She laughed coarsely. Sex and birth were huge indecent jokes to her.

  “Yer goin’ to have a baby!”

  I turned and left the room when she said that. Fear, bitterness, hatred, gone from me for weeks, swept through me again like a hurricane. Everything that was hopeful vanished—I saw myself plunged back into the hell from which I was struggling—the hell of nagging, weeping women, depending for food and clothing upon my husband, with study but a dream. I looked upon my baby with concentrated hatred.

  “I won’t have a baby!” I announced to my landlady, as if it were her fault. “I won’t. I’ll kill myself first … tell me what to do.”

  I rode along the desert roads, madly, alighted, and ran until exhausted. Wept and hated, wept and hated. Still the sickness came each morning. I stopped eating, thinking in my ignorance that the enemy within me would stop growing. The doctor who had his office above the pool room told me that he could do nothing to help me—it was illegal; I could go to a drugstore and get something. He instructed me verbally. If things went wrong, he said, I could call him and he would have the legal right to finish the operation.

  “How much will it cost?”

  “I’ll make a special price for you of one hundred dollars.”

  All the money I had saved! Still it would be cheaper. I paid his consultation fee of ten dollars, and stopped at the drugstore. But I did not even know how my own body was constructed. In secret and blind terror I tried to learn. I could not—my mind was unclear, terror-stricken. I had not the least idea of the nature of the workings of my body, of the conception or nature of growing life.

  “This is your fault,” I wrote at last to Knut. “Come and get me out of this or I shall kill myself.”

  Days passed and no reply came. One night I lay face downward in the bath tub, but could not hold myself under the water. My landlady, hearing the splashing and choking, ran in and pulled me out.

  But Knut came—he had traveled for days. He went to the doctor. “You either operate or we go to the city and have it done,” he told him. “My wife will kill herself within a week if something is not done.”

  The doctor gravely examined my lungs and heart and said it was as he suspected—I had tuberculosis and the operation was necessary! Childbirth would be most dangerous.

  When I came back to consciousness Knut was sitting by my bedside, smiling. I lay gazing at him and hating the smile—hating it, hating it, hating it! How dared he smile when my body was an open wound, when I had stood before eternity … how dared he smile when a child had been taken from my body, and now my body and mind called for it … how dared he smile when I felt alone in space … how dared he … he a man who knew nothing, nothing, nothing!

  All my money was gone and Knut had returned to the desert. I would not let him pay for the operation … it was my body and I would let no man pay for it, I said. He had become very pale at that.

  Then I learned of a normal school beyond the mountains and I wrote to ask if I could not work my way through. The answer came after a month, and it said yes, I could make some money but not enough. I wrote Knut a letter and said, “Now I am going and I am not coming back … if you ever want to see me you must come where I am.”

  THE ABORTION

/>   Anne Sexton

  Somebody who should have been born

  is gone.

  Just as the earth puckered its mouth,

  each bud puffing out from its knot,

  I changed my shoes, and then drove south.

  Up past the Blue Mountains, where

  Pennsylvania humps on endlessly,

  wearing, like a crayoned cat, its green hair,

  its roads sunken in like a gray washboard;

  where, in truth, the ground cracks evilly,

  a dark socket from which the coal has poured,

  Somebody who should have been born

  is gone.

  the grass as bristly and stout as chives,

  and me wondering when the ground would break,

  and me wondering how anything fragile survives;

  up in Pennsylvania, I met a little man,

  not Rumpelstiltskin, at all, at all …

  he took the fullness that love began.

  Returning north, even the sky grew thin

  like a high window looking nowhere.

  The road was as flat as a sheet of tin.

  Somebody who should have been born

  is gone.

  Yes, woman, such logic will lead

  to loss without death. Or say what you meant,

  you coward … this baby that I bleed.

  CONFESSION #1

  Yesenia Montilla

  If I knew back then that I’d one day be a poet,

  that one day my words would matter,

  that one day I might mean something to someone,

  I might not have had that abortion in ’93. Or maybe

  I would have, but under a different name. Anne

  Sexton taught me everything about lust and shame

  but nothing about regret. No matter, when they ask

  why I did it, I’ll tell them I was young

  & I desperately wanted the fruit to fall far

  from the tree, that is to say, my mother’s face