Your Uterus is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

When I was eight, my mother asked my late Grandpa Sowecke his thoughts on abortion. He said whole-heartedly, It's a woman's right.

I asked the universe to stay in Toledo, Ohio, for one-more year, post-BFA. Someone opened the clinic door, and abortion was writhing, lively on a gurney.

For abortion, I have admitted to planting prickly pears amongst the peach trees. I have soured everything. I mash my grievances for jam. Siphon my curiosities, my thoughts, my opinions. I have been demeaned and harassed, called killer, whore, man-hater. Believe it or don't.

I spare you.

I devise complex sentences to divert attention from my blatantly, obvious places of employment: the Center for Choice, the National Abortion Federation, the DC Abortion Fund. I muse over working at places your mother dreams about, so you can take me home.

My romance is a dimly, haunted paperback by Fydor Dostoyevsky. My mother and father, sister, brother, and several best friends have suggested I save my love-affair with abortion for a second date, but my heart has a swinging door, and I am a flaming storyteller inside. A tender mother.

I bottle my octomom for abortion, tie her in white jackets.

This Saturday I counseled eight women. Five obtaining surgeries, two obtaining pills, one referral for Monday. Two cried. seven laughed. All eight displayed various signs of residual regret, guilt, shame. One was in a hurry. Six paid credit-card. Two paid cash. The one waiting for Monday was forty-dollars short.

One woman had private, insurance-coverage for elective abortion. After scrutinizing every possibility of losing her privacy, she opted to override her insurance-coverage with a full, cash payment because she did not wish to see the word, abortion, on an insurance statement thirty days from now.

Cops came toward the end of the day, and I was asked to interrupt a counseling session regarding medication-abortion to tell two, seemingly-uncomfortable-with-abortion police-officers that one of my patients paid $400 in twenty-dollar-bills for her $385 balance on a surgery with general anesthesia. I returned a five-dollar- and ten-dollar-bill to her while she was seated in the waiting-room prior to her surgery.

Somewhere between her surgery, fentanyl, versed, and moseying to the bathroom to change her pad, she lost the ten-dollar-bill. Another woman lost an ipod. Both were irate and drugged and probably found their lost items when they got home. The cops were mouthy.

My patient-interrupted felt she'd handle the pill well because her menstrual periods were often painful. She was a negative blood-type. She'll almost always have to get the Rhogam shot.

Meanwhile, instead of obtaining abortions, actual abortion patients could have been calling C-span, or something, to voice their opinion on abortion prior to congressional sociopaths taking a moment to politically and historically spit on women's faces before proceeding to vote for bullshit.

Mermaid Ancestry

When I straighten my limbs head to toe, I am afraid I will topple down the hill but I choose to live my life in love.


Venus by Michael Parkes

Somewhere over the Beltway

Summer hit me like a fever. Swine flu broke when I was sleeping at an international hostel. I bleached everything, swabbed my nostrils with Neosporin and prayed. I returned home to a city blooming like a rash, met a kindred, aesthetic spirit and my heart soared into delusions of grandeur. Then, my doctor was shot.

Ever since, I have been shoveling a shallow hole in a sand storm, watching words jump out of me onto the screen, sweating in my sleep. Coked on water and air laced with human sloth—I weep until my lids are bloated. My thin skin’s bruising softballs for the season. I leave my windows open for angels to fly in.

Washington’s sun is a city-state, a warrior with a helmet and roses. Its foliage glistens, waltzes and howls. Its flowers—gorgeous, sophisticated, gleeful, mad, darling school children.

Recess.

I am wondering without abandon when the fuck the fancy pants on the congressional floor will situate themselves into a circle and talk about real things happening to real people right now.

Democracy. Salad bowls. Scarlet fever. Determination. Abortion.

HoooooooohHuhmmm.

Out of Sight/ Out of Mind

Remember the good, old days when Grampa was still alive to tell you about the good, old days when he walked four miles in the sleet and snow to get to Sunday school every single godforsaken Sunday? Automobiles were like airplanes. New machines. Cloud makers. Tiger pouncers.

Don’t remember?

Perhaps you’re the one who cut me off in the crosswalk driving your smooth-moving sedan this morning—slithering slyly through, leaving an invisible breath of cancer in your wake while the cross light was blinking for pedestrians.

Perhaps you consider your car a belonging, your faithful shelter, your style, your statement. Your freedom. Your courage. Your friend. You prefer a certain color vehicle with certain seating and certainly you’ll spring for the dope sound-system, the heated seats, the voice-over navigation—because you can. You also drink bottled water, bleach your pipes and preserve your edibles in plastic containers. Don’t like the direction the water flows? You build a dam.

We approach the intersection at the same time—two people, humans who are uniquely authentic and worthy. I am walking. You feel your car that blows deadly exhaust into my pores is a part of you. You’re to the right, so you have the right of way. Right?

I have this crazy-ass incredible dream where personal automobiles are banned from the district within certain limits. Everyone walks, rides bikes, scooters, skateboards, roller skates, soapboxes on wheels, busses and trains. It’s so fascinating how quiet and fresh it gets. Even prairie girls can sing. Only the sirens! and birds, the wind, people’s breath. It just clicks one day—cars! for every body!!? The fumes are completely unnecessary in this city. We ask too much of our earth.

So everyone stops.

I also have a crazy-ass, far more patriarchal and shitty, terrible and wretched, alternative recommendation for eradicating this toxic, wasteful nuisance: If you cut-off a pedestrian ever, under any circumstances, you are then prone to an entire obliteration of the exterior smoothness of your precious, gas-guzzling, chemical-emitting, loud-mouth, pristine, glean machine at the next stop. Wooden bats will be stationed like mailboxes, like fire extinguishers, like trash cans at every block, and if a pedestrian ever feels for one moment that their space was punctured or their breath was tainted, they are encouraged to rid themselves of unjust violation and the grief endured over loss of cancer-riddled loved-ones allllll over your precious belonging until you prefer to walk.

The trees have enlisted.

Businezz not so cazsual

Yesterday I wore soft white-washed blue jeans for three hours in the morning and my dear friend with the same name as my sister who I have known for years commented, Oh! I’ve never seen you in jeans.

I only have one pair. 

I eventually changed into a dress to explore downtown Chicago and pined to be alone and artful after a few days of a crowded room of trouble-shooting, humor, love, wine and whiiiine. Everything about abortion. Abortion is life.

I wanted to see the Lake. I wanted to reach the point where the water began—vast and humongous so I could give myself to the sky. The skyscrapers align to delight the beholder of eyes most impressed with invention and geometrical complexity, art in a most unique form.  Solid, crisp, authentic. The bean. Everything. Everything is huge.

I venture to cities all about the country and discuss amongst a limited and expertise tight-knit community—Abortion. Abortion occurs so often—sometimes celebratory, sometimes tragedy, everything in-between—and amongst so many different and beautiful people that I am exposed to so much of everything in my daily aspirations and then during these disszcusszions.

I feel as though I could stretch into even more than two.

The lake is open and blue, and yes, clear, and sailboats float and the clouds collect in patterns and everything is open. Everything is flowing and brisk and fresh.  Everything in the sky, in the lake.  There are glass towers then quirky sculptures, a blues festival and fountains like islands. Then all of sudden there’s the sea. I gave myself to the damp grass, the woven sky, the lively lake.

Gave everything to everything. Artfully naturally. Super natural deities. My most casual dreams.

 

They call death heaven only sometimes

My parents would not allow me to watch MTV throughout my youth—Trust me—I know delusion.  I thought, Pour some sugar on me, was an awfully silly song.

I also hoped the protestors would give us a week. One week.

But it has nothing to do with me. Or the women. It’s about the power our mothers have over our gestation, our birth, our existence.  

To want dignified abortion care by request is not edgy because abortion is common and I get awfully fiery but it’s not something I‘ve chosen to trouble myself with. It’s troubling.

Those who take the time and money and invest their deepest efforts to build grandiose and dangerous networks to stalk and patronize best survival practices for an evolving species are pro-life even when they’re having their abortions. Villainous, dimwit pests who wish to diminish your reproductive rights before you ever wish to acknowledge them. How we sit around and spout lines we’ve been tube-fed on how to despise women’s experiences without knowing the origin of our reference.

I do what I do because I’ve never seen so many strange and frightening folk who desecrate women’s experiences with lies about a bountiful truth dwelling under the smug heading of Pro-life, who every so often murder our expert medical directors in front of their families.

I’m so sick of hearing about the babies.

Indeed, in his lifetime, Dr. Tiller terminated thousands and thousands of doomed fetuses for real, live, compassionate, breathing women of functioning and malfunctioning families. Shooting him pixilated his spirit. Multiplied him by thousands and thousands. The fruits of his labor—sporogenesis.   

This week when I counseled women prior to their abortions despite his death, despite the ever-present rude and crazy prayer-hounds with posters of our deadest babies, I felt my heart had grown—blossomed-outward from the pit in my woeful stomach for our peaceful doctor. My heart bloomed by his words. Indeed. 

Artwork: Basimycetes by Ernst Haeckel 

Local fund fears loss of fearless leader

Dr. Tiller?, is a *question* we ask ourselves every week at the DC Abortion Fund. When the answer is, yes, we are guaranteed kind, courteous, respectful and loving justice. When the answer is, no…

We are inconsolably devastated—we have lost a resounding resolution to our most poignant cases.

Link to DCAF guest blog for the Washington Area Women's Foundation:

In memory of our angelic and wise doctor and beyond the shadows of opposition, we remain determined in our mission to provide our neighbors with dignified health care regardless of what’s in their wallet.