Mifepristone

Breath to glass like she always is during afternoon thunderstorms, palms pressed down against her guts.

She and the cat both noses to the open window, scent of the sun going down, warm asphalt to cold wet grass.

The apartment has been too quiet today. I have only been here to watch.

The bleeding continues from last night, she lays claim to all of it, the blood is no one’s but hers.

It rained all day, gray sheets that kept the nausea down as she keened out over our neighbor’s rooftops.

This is the morning we have bought ourselves, we can be nowhere but here.

When she stands in the bathroom doorway, little moth in overgrown wings, I can see her breathing steadying.

She has been everything: pounding, heaving, pleading, trusting.

She weathers the storm, inhabits each moment. The blood is no one’s but hers.

The list expanding on its own

A girl head back and wheeling under the starlight that starts to look like fluorescent bars.

She is tired of wondering, waiting, she would rather be swimming, stealing.

When they talk to her, are they the soft-gentle-dangerous of a parent speaking to a toddler?

How can she be sure that the law of gravity still applies?

The clock is moving backwards now, its traitor hands envisioning a world where she is not.

She breathes deep: diaphragm, shoulders lifting, playing the counting games that Nancy taught.

They are speaking still, but the words slide, sideways, grazing against her ears and making no impact.

Milk is on the grocery list three separate times, the grocery list is scrawled into her inner thighs, where no one else can help her read it.

There are church bells, somewhere, not here, but still she can hear them.

Her ears ring, she thinks angels are probably silent, and that’s why the men in the Bible were so afraid while the women took peace, took strength, took harmony.

The shower is a bodily horror, ten thousand pinpricks on skin that sloughs off too easily.

How can she be sure that the law of gravity still applies?

White men in white coats who want her to five things she can see, four things she can hear, but

When she says what she sees, what she hears, they shake their heads, goats in the field, bearded in distrust and illness.

She smells the swisher sweets Marshawn used to smoke, she wonders what his afterlife smells like.

Gravity must apply, because the feeling ebbs, the tears still fall straight down.

Who is touching me? She screams. Lightning behind her eyes, thunder between her ribs. More awake than alive.

I was born with Orion hunting over my head. My skin is the color of the Midwest late winter, my eyes the color of light pollution refracted in industrial smog and falling snow.
I too am a hunter, proud and shouldering up among the predators to ease my hunger. The hunger is carbon-based, salt-scented, the taste of steel and sweat.

if i still know you tomorrow, i will want to keep learning you; i will want more of your stories, more of your jokes, more of your laughter in my ears.
if i still know you next week, i will want more experiences of you: let us go together into the old and the new, to see and revision all that we could know.
if i still know you next month, i will want a deeper understanding of you; what is truth, if not your dark eyes? where is truth, if not between us, face to face?
if i still know you next year, i will want to love you better: help me learn the best ways to support you, give me opportunities to keep showing up for you.
if i still know you in the next decade, i will want you. i will want your reactions, your intentions, your ideas, your journeys, your dreams. i will have wanted you, every day for years. and i will still want to walk by your side.

i have struggled with the parlance of the new genealogy: for the resurgence in popularity of naming your ancestors, naming their presence in your body and your instincts and your desires. i have struggled for years with any closeness with my family: i have broken those bonds in irreparable ways, in needed ways, in freeing ways, and the result is a gulf that cannot be bridged, a freedom that cannot be removed.

i think that all my ancestresses followed the rules. i think they lived hard, and worked hard, and raised families that were complex and damaged and normal. i think my mother, and her mother, and her mother raised daughters who followed the rules. straitlaced is not a metaphor when the only four-generation photo we have is three women in corsets and a baby.

i imagine that they died silent, that they simply quieted down, worn out, worn away. i imagine their frail hands, pale as the parchment paper they lined pastry pans with, folded across their sunken bellies, old cotton as their last embrace. i imagine that they followed the rules even in death, keeping their secrets and their sins and the sins and secrets of others. i imagine that they died silent because their last words are on my lips.

the christian scientist gets an abortion

Throwing off bell curves and bell jars since high school, I have lived and suffered all of what you praise me for now. I have testified in front of my mother and my legislators  the same number of times. Why can’t you see me?

I have written, over and over and over, of all the ways I was hemmed into preordained ingredients, sewed piece by piece after a pattern and baked into place, and I have been lying to myself the whole time.

IF I was brought up to believe that man is god’s perfect image and likeness

AND that angels are god’s thoughts passing to man

AND who I am is a crumbling wreck of fabric remnants strewn across the shining linoleum of my mother’s house

AND the thoughts that live with me are those of adherence to chemicals and all the ways that sex and violence leave the same taste in the mouth

THEREFORE what conclusion can be drawn but that I have been lying?

IF I have been an addict my whole life

AND addiction is a disease

THEN my entire upbringing has failed.

But still. Who has lied to whom? And who has failed?

The history of my body reads as an opening in the earth, a growing chasm with unknown depth, a quarry they’ll mark as dangerous, for others to keep away. Synonymous with fail, the action of aborting has defined me in ways I can’t quantify. Two is a wrong number, when the outcomes have been manifold. One partner is a wrong number, when the ramifications have touched every partner I’ve had since.

have i gone crazy: a checklist

When people talk to me, are they using a regular tone of voice or the kind of tone one generally reserves for irate toddlers?

When I look around, are objects generally behaving according to the law of gravity?

When I check the clock, is it a chronologically later time than the last time I checked the clock?

Am I breathing from my diaphragm or has my breath always been hanging out somewhere between my shoulder blades?

When someone speaks to me, am I processing their words in a way that enables me to respond?

Why is milk on the grocery list three separate times? Nancy said lists would help have I listed enough things?

Am I actually hearing church bells? Is there a church within earshot?

Have I been able to care for my body adequately today? Have I eaten? Have I showered?

Where is my action plan? What did I say that I would do in these moments?

Have I called Nancy too many times this week?

Have I done a grounding exercise? What can I feel, taste, hear, hear, hear, hear

Am I injured? If yes, can I feel it? Am I reacting appropriately to the injury? If no, where is all this blood coming from?

MarShawn isn’t here, why do I smell his cigarettes? Can dead people still smoke?

Is someone telling me where I am? Is it likely that I don’t know where I am?

Who is touching me?

Am I safe? Am I safe? Am I sane?

we have both learned, you and i, the hard lessons of penance for our decisions. for years spent in wrong endeavors and the years of absolution that come when the end result is wrong: the doing and undoing, the pushing and stalling. the need for a catalog of what we've had to swallow, the lists of wrongs we've righted for ourselves and for others.

these are my confessions:
that i have taken pride in your presence: that i am proud to offer you my broken spine and tangled mind.
that i lust for you: that i write sonnets for your hands, couplets comprised of your eyes and mouth, gospel rhythm for the twining of your legs between mine.
that i have a wandering heart: that when you touch me it leaps to your fingertips, following you across my skin and aching for closeness.
that i am gluttonous: that i will eat memories of you for each meal, soak up every spare minute in your day, chase down every dream you seek and present them with apples in their mouths, shining, on a golden platter.
that i have transgressed, and that i will transgress again: i have broken every trite norm that stood between me and my absolute love for you, that i will violate history and geography and meteorology to predict a beautiful future in which we are whole, and easy, and purely ourselves.

bless me, lover, for i have sinned, and will sin against any deity who crosses the path i lay for us. bless me, lover, with more grace, and forgiveness, and all the time you will allot me: i am grateful for every moment.

there are always freckles across the bridge of your nose, i wait for the dimple in your left cheek to appear. i promise i will not take so long, this time.

i wax full for you, a lunacy all my own: distemper that is immediate, flourishing, rose-colored and thick with the many lives light lives while it travels to your eyes. i circle you, pulling on you, with gravity for hope.

there are always flecks of green and gold in the dark of your eyes, there is always one loose curl along your jaw. for you i return, and return, and return.

I would do so much more for your voice than just listen. The dark doorways of your eyes and your words, walking me up to them, will you let me in? I am here, I am here for you.
I wait for the lilt of your laughter, the rising capriciousness of your voice, an octave up and explicating all the ways I deviate for you. Tell me again where the poetry lies, between your hands and mine. The hot of your mouth, the soft of your skin, and all the ways you see me: I will always stop for the timbre of your song.
What could be more of a blessing? The intonation of you overlaid in my life: that I could see through the golden spectrum of you, a warmer vision of the future, a gentler self in my shining later days. That you would hold my hand through all of this, and on the other side, we will both taste honey and daffodils.