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

Red Rover! Red Rover! let THE TRUTH come over

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 treees 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.

They pray for us, prey for us

I met Doctor Tiller in Victoria, British Columbia. He guided me through the process of digoxin injection over a fascinating pregnant-belly model with needles and ultrasound. His hands were warm. He was patient and attentive and described me as a natural in my approach to pumping salve into the umbilical cord and heart of a mock fetus.

Never mind that I was simply curious and was not licensed to utilize his fascinating skill and wanted to touch his hands.

He sat next to me in Minneapolis, MN, during a session regarding patient counseling at an annual meeting. During the Q &A, he was offered a spotlight to share his vast insight. He stood statuesque, valiant and jolly and urged us to proceed fearless, with love bountiful in our hearts.

When the session concluded, he offered me a few of his precious moments: we shook hands warmly and with energy and I asked with tears welling—who would provide when he no longer provided. He assured me the outcome was faith-full, that others would carry-on.

I rode in the elevator with him during our annual meeting in Portland, OR, in April. He wore his usual leather coat and sense of balance and compassion. He asked me of my evening in the city. Relentless lawsuits, harassment and recent clinic vandalism aside, he was calm. Carrying on.

He was shot point-blank in his church lobby this sun beaming morning. He was ushering and his wife was singing and they killed him in their place of peace.

I’ve had a creeping sense that something terrible would happen. I’ve begun to fear the safety of my clinic as anti-abortion extremists begin to lose their grounding in political clout but I didn’t imagine Dr. Tiller in this sense of doom. He seemed to glide through relentless opposition spiritually unscathed. I imagined him until 100. With years of peace to follow his tireless battle to be subtly, significantly good.

I could only give him these things in my merciless hope for magic: roses from the bishop’s garden, prayers 38-40 in the Bethlehem Chapel by the Way of Peace in the National Cathedral, the sunshine, the drum circle, the half moon.

Oh, Dr. Tiller. I will miss how I adore your daily perseverance, your swift and enlightening presence, your hands. Your eternal and expansive heart.