Choice Words Read online

  She dipped her fingers in holy water

  and sighed how she likes to choose

  “Forgiveness” for everybody.

  “Hold on,” I said. “Aren’t we the ones

  who’re supposed to need forgiving?”

  I laughed until she laughed, and we collapsed

  on the cement steps, tossing leftover pieces

  of Chinese dumpling to the city pigeons as

  they descended like a blessing upon us.

  FROM SURFACING

  Margaret Atwood

  I knew when it was, it was in a bottle curled up, staring out at me like a cat pickled; it had huge jelly eyes and fins instead of hands, fish gills, I couldn’t let it out, it was dead already, it had drowned in air. It was there when I woke up, suspended in the air above me like a chalice, an evil grail, and I thought, Whatever it is, part of myself or a separate creature, I killed it. It wasn’t a child but it could have been one, I didn’t allow it.

  Water was dripping from me into the canoe, I lay in a puddle. I had been furious with them, I knocked it off the table, my life on the floor, glass egg and shattered blood, nothing could be done.

  That was wrong, I never saw it. They scraped it into a bucket and threw it wherever they throw them, it was traveling through the sewers by the time I woke, back to the sea, I stretched my hand up to it and it vanished. The bottle had been logical, pure logic, remnant of the trapped and decaying animals, secreted by my head, enclosure, something to keep the death away from me. Not even a hospital, not even that sanction of legality, official procedures. A house it was, shabby front room with magazines, purple runner on the hall floor, vines and blossoms, the smell of lemon polish, furtive doors and whispers, they wanted you out fast. Pretense of the non-nurse, her armpits acid, face powdered with solicitude. Stumble along the hall, from flower to flower, her criminal hand on my elbow, other arm against the wall. Ring on my finger. It was all real enough, it was enough reality forever, I couldn’t accept it, that mutilation, ruin I’d made, I needed a different version. I pieced it together the best way I could, flattening it, scrapbook, collage, pasting over the wrong parts. A faked album, the memories fraudulent as passports; but a paper house was better than none and I could almost live in it, I’d lived in it until now.

  He hadn’t gone with me to the place where they did it; his own children, the real ones, were having a birthday party. But he came afterward to collect me. It was a hot day, when we stepped out into the sun we couldn’t see for an instant. It wasn’t a wedding, there were no pigeons, the post office and the lawn were in another part of the city where I went for stamps; the fountain with the dolphins and the cherub with half a face was from the company town, I’d put it in so there would be something of mine.

  “It’s over,” he said, “feel better?”

  I was emptied, amputated; I stank of salt and antiseptic, they had planted death in me like a seed.

  “You’re cold,” he said, “come on, we’d better get you home.” Scrutinizing my face in the light, hands on the wheel, tough, better this way. In my deflated lap there was a purse, suitcase. I couldn’t go there, home, I never went there again, I sent them a postcard.

  They never knew, about that or why I left. Their own innocence, the reason I couldn’t tell them; perilous innocence, closing them in glass, their artificial garden, greenhouse. They didn’t teach us about evil, they didn’t understand about it, how could I describe it to them? They were from another age, prehistoric, when everyone got married and had a family, children growing in the yard like sunflowers; remote as Eskimos or mastodons.

  I opened my eyes and sat up. Joe was still there beside me; he was holding on to the edge of my canoe.

  “You all right?” he said. His voice came to me faintly, as though muffled.

  He said I should do it, he made me do it; he talked about it as though it was legal, simple, like getting a wart removed. He said it wasn’t a person, only an animal; I should have seen that it was no different, it was hiding in me as if in a burrow and instead of granting it sanctuary I let them catch it. I could have said No but I didn’t; that made me one of them too, a killer. After the slaughter, the murder, he couldn’t believe I didn’t want to see him anymore; it bewildered him, he resented me for it, he expected gratitude because he arranged it for me, fixed me so I was as good as new; others, he said, wouldn’t have bothered. Since then I’d carried that death around inside me, layering it over, a cyst, a tumor, black pearl; the gratitude I felt now was not for him.

  I had to go onto the shore and leave something: that was what you were supposed to do, leave a piece of your clothing as an offering. I regretted the nickels I’d taken dutifully for the collection plate, I got so little in return: no power remained in their bland oleo-tinted Jesus prints or in the statues of the other ones, rigid and stylized, holy triple name shrunken to swearwords. These gods, here on the shore or in the water, unacknowledged or forgotten, were the only ones who had ever given me anything I needed; and freely.

  The map crosses and the drawings made sense now: at the beginning he must have been only locating the rock paintings, deducing them, tracing and photographing them, a retirement hobby; but then he found out about them. The Indians did not own salvation but they had once known where it lived and their signs marked the sacred places, the places where you could learn the truth. There was no painting at White Birch Lake and none here, because his later drawings weren’t copied from things on the rocks. He had discovered new places, new oracles, they were things he was seeing the way I had seen, true vision; at the end, after the failure of logic. When it happened the first time he must have been terrified, it would be like stepping through a usual door and finding yourself in a different galaxy, purple trees and red moons and a green sun.

  I swung the paddle and Joe’s hand came unstuck and the canoe went towards the shore. I slipped on my canvas shoes and bundled up the sweatshirt and stepped out, looping the rope to a tree, then I climbed the slope towards the cliff, trees on one side, rockface on the other, balsam smell, underbrush scratching my bare legs. There was a ledge, I’d noticed it from the lake, I could throw my sweatshirt onto it. I didn’t know the names of the ones I was making the offering to; but they were there, they had power. Candles in front of statues, crutches on the steps, flowers in jam jars by the roadside crosses, gratitude for cures, however wished-for and partial. Clothing was better, it was closer and more essential; and the gift had been greater, more than a hand or an eye, feeling was beginning to seep back into me, I tingled like a foot that’s been asleep.

  MOURNING SICKNESS

  T. Thorn Coyle

  A sense of losing something

  In the darkness

  Before light

  Opens your eyes.

  Raspberry. Comfrey. Valerian. Yarrow.

  A woman’s way

  To heal herself.

  A woman’s way to mourn.

  Ways to stop the bleeding.

  Blood flows so easily sometimes.

  This as winter sap.

  I sacrificed my son today.

  Dark, fertile earth,

  too cold to grow

  such tender seeds.

  Shifting into nether world.

  Preparing land to bury

  is tilling land for birth.

  Dirt black, bloody fingernails.

  Powerful hands.

  Hoe. Break. Carry. Cover.

  Walk the knowledge of the Dead.

  Wrap the spiral

  shoulders broad

  in starshot mantle.

  Pressing soft the loam,

  my feet walk true.

  I face the dawn.

  LULLABY

  Claressinka Anderson

  I do not know if it is ink or blood

  running down my thigh,

  like the bird on my windowsill—

  it escapes me.

  How could I know that the simple act

  of moving a candle from one room to the nex
t

  and smelling it unlit

  would return me abruptly

  to the place where I once held my belly

  and thought I was home?

  I was given a brown swan for a flower,

  long and graceful with a beak of fur.

  Its wings are green stalks,

  its legs are leaves

  falling around mine.

  1“Beneath love,” comes from a poem by Loretta Manill. “Corazón blue, corazón red, corazón negra” comes from a song by Desiree.

  2The women named in this prayer do not have to be physically present but should be asked beforehand for consent. Each one should light a candle when she is ready to call the child into being.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Editing an anthology of this scope, and over such a long period of time, necessitates the help of many, many people. I am immensely grateful that in this case the people were so wonderful.

  Over the two decades it took the project to become a book, innumerable helpful and well-informed people helped me locate works to include. Early members of the Discussion of Women’s Poetry Listserv were the first to hear and respond to my calls for abortion writing in 1999, and a number of those useful recommendations are included here. Richard Peabody kindly shared research from his 1995 coedited literary anthology about abortion, Coming to Terms. Poets Joy Harjo, Barbara Hemming, Charlotte Mandel, Ellen Moody, Meg Reynolds, and Susan Tichy each recommended contributors or contributions that made their way into the book. Ellen Bass, Moira Egan, Rusty Morrison, Smita Sahay, and the Binders of Women Poets Facebook group all helped by sharing the announcement and spreading the word.

  Dr. Karen Weingarten shared a rich list of abortion literature. Kit Bonson graciously connected me with winners of the abortion rights poetry contest organized by Split This Rock in Washington, DC. Dr. Rochelle Davis educated me about Saniyya Saleh and Leila Aboulela. Adrienne Pine traced down powerful contemporary writings from Latin America, and Sarah Leister offered her translation skills at short notice. Dr. Kristen Ghodsee, Dr. Agnieszka Mrozik, and Ursula Phillips led the way to Zofia Nałkowska’s Granica (Boundary). Mary Pradt at the St. Francis College Library used her considerable research skills to track down obscure texts. When herbalist Susun Weed heard about this book, she gifted me with a rare copy of Deborah Maia’s extraordinary Self-Ritual for Invoking Release of Spirit Life in the Womb: A Personal Treatise on Ritual Herbal Abortion.

  Deep thanks to Shikha Malaviya for connecting me with writers from India and Pakistan—including those for whom reproductive autonomy is more a matter of the freedom not to have an abortion than it is a matter of the freedom to have an abortion. Many thanks to Mo’afrika Mokgathi-Mvubu and her organization Hear My Voice, which is devoted to developing young spoken-word artists in South Africa, for assistance in curating poetry from South Africa. Thanks to Georgia Saxelby and Glenys Livingston for their invaluable aid in finding the texts from Australia. Thanks to Julie Wark for wonderful help with translation and for connecting me with Indigenous writers. Thanks to Leyla Josephine for urging me to include work from Northern Ireland and setting me on the path to connect with writers there. Thanks to Sarah Clark, T. Thorn Coyle, Althea Finch-Brand, Josh Davis and Elliot Long, Mason Hickman, Joy Ladin, and Trace Peterson for their help with my repeated efforts to track down transgender contributors.

  Dr. Lauren Margaret MacIvor and Dr. Cornelia Dayton generously helped with finding and understanding early American texts: Martha Ballard’s Midwife’s Diary and Abigail Nightingale’s deposition in Rex vs. Harrison (these fascinating pieces had to be cut in the end for space, but I list them here as a resource for those interested in the history of abortion).

  I am also grateful to all those who have supported the book in other ways. While I was directing the Stonecoast MFA Program, my research assistant, Teal Gardella, did top-notch research work for the anthology; it would never have gotten off the ground without her help. Another Stonecoast writer, poet Autumn Newman, helped get the book moving after a hiatus and provided powerful moral support as I intuited its structure.

  Connecting with feminist sheroes was a wonderful side benefit of this project. Thanks to Gloria Steinem for her staunch belief in the book’s value at the beginning, for emailing me in the wee hours, and for putting me in touch with potential backers for the book. And thanks to Jennifer Baumgardner, Alicia Ostriker, and Robin Morgan for their kindness and to Faye Wattleton for her good words of support.

  Thanks to poet and editor Mahogany L. Browne for connecting me with the fabulous Haymarket Books community. My editors there, Nisha Bolsey, Julie Fain, and Maya Marshall, brim with professionalism, great ideas, sound judgment, patience, and inspirational enthusiasm. I feel blessed to work with you. Also, thanks to Fred Courtright for stellar and steadfast permissions support.

  Thank you is not enough of a word to acknowledge my beloved husband Glen Brand’s contributions to this project. Glen’s incredible support included donating weekends to help set up the Kickstarter, keeping an eye out for relevant articles and news, gracing my prose with high-level editorial feedback, pitching in with data entry, providing yeoman duty in the kitchen, offering a shoulder to cry on when things got overwhelming, and reminding me to put out a call for much-needed volunteers—and then coming through once more after I woke up on the morning the manuscript was due and realized the book needed a timeline. Thank you, Glen, for your many extraordinary gifts.

  Kate Carey, Alicia Cole, Kai Karpman, Lauren Korn, Alexis Quinlan, and Savannah Slone were the generous volunteers who stepped forward in response to my call for help with the manuscript. You are amazing people for doing that. I’d especially like to acknowledge three of the volunteers whose cheerful enthusiasm and generous willingness to help reminded me continually of the importance of our goal and kept me aware that a project like this is really about community. Kate Carey donated her lunch hours for many weeks and did a stellar job coordinating contributor information. Savannah Slone volunteered her brilliant design, production, and social media skills with extraordinary energy over numerous aspects of the project; please check out the Choice Words Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for Savannah’s beautiful and inspiring pro-choice memes. Last but not least, Alexis Quinlan stood with me through the difficult last stages of manuscript preparation, sharing her eagle eye for copyediting, kind patience through some aggravating formatting situations, and a number of fabulously creative and helpful editing suggestions. I couldn’t have imagined better help than the three of you, and every reader of this book is in your debt.

  Without Kickstarter, this book would not exist. Immense thanks to Margot Atwell for superb advice and guidance, and to the 487 Kickstarter backers who literally made this book possible. Your generous donations will fund the permissions costs to enable the book to be published and to attain the stretch goal of donating copies of Choice Words to clinics in states where abortion rights are under attack. An especially warm, hearty, and loud shout-out goes to the Kickstarter donors who went the extra mile for this book: A. B., Claressinka Anderson, Brautigam, Kate Baldwin, Pat Benson, Amelie Brown, Rebecca Burton, Desiree Cooper, Carolyn Dille, Jessica Epperson-Lusty, Luise Erdmann, Michael Herron, Paula Kamen, Erin Keogh, Jennifer MacKenna, Amanda Maystead, M. McDermott, Adele Ryan McDowell, Sue Jones McPhee in honor of Julia G. Kahrl, Ph.D., Alice Liddington Moore, Carol Muske-Dukes, Anita Nalley, Patti Niehoff, Deborah O’Grady, Maria Carra Rose, Seth M. Rosen, Sharon Shula, F. Omar Telan, Joyce Tomlinson, Toni, Waffles, Kate Warren, and Elizabeth Wrigley-Field.

  Finally, I would like to thank the Choice Words contributors, an extraordinary community I was delighted to get to know during the editing process. Many of you shared writing you had never shown to anyone before. Others wrote new pieces for this anthology, sometimes telling stories you had waited years or decades to tell. Some of you came back with repeated drafts, considering my suggestions and patiently revising until the piece was finished. It’s been wonderful getting to know you, and I ho
pe to meet you at the launch readings. And to the many writers who sent work that couldn’t be included, I want to thank you also; your courage and creative energy are part of this book as well.

  CREDITS FOR REPRINTED TEXTS

  Leila Aboulela, excerpt from “Make Your Own Way Home” from The Arkansas International 3 (Fall 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Leila Aboulela. Reprinted with permission.

  Kathy Acker, “Don Quixote’s Abortion” from Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker. Copyright © 2002 by Kathy Acker. Reprinted by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  Ai, “Abortion” from Vice. Copyright © 2000 by Ai. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  Lauren K. Alleyne, “Gretel: Unmothering.” Reprinted with the permission of the author.

  Lisa Alvarado, “New World Order” from The Seattle Star (March 8, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Lisa Alvarado. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

  Amy Alvarez, “Date of Last Period.” Reprinted with the permission of the author.

  Judith Arcana, “Women’s Liberation” and “You Don’t Know” from What If Your Mother (Goshen, CT.: Chicory Blue Press, 2005). Copyright © 2005 by Judith Arcana. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

  Linda Ashok, “My Sister Grows Big and Small.” Reprinted with the permission of the author.

  Margaret Atwood, “Christmas Carols” from True Stories. Copyright © 1981 by Oxford University Press Canada. Copyright © 1986 by Margaret Atwood. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press Canada and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

  Margaret Atwood, excerpt from Surfacing. Copyright © 1998 by Margaret Atwood. Used by permission of Penguin Random House Canada Limited and Curtis Brown, Ltd. All rights reserved.

  Sylvia Beato, “A Good Woman Would Never.” Reprinted with the permission of the author.

  Ana Blandiana, “The Children’s Crusade” from The Iowa Review 21.2 (Spring/Summer 1991). Copyright © 1991 by Ana Blandiana. Reprinted with permission.