What it feels like to tell your child about the loss of your/their human rights

The day Roe vs. Wade was overturned,
I detached,
a power cord ripped from the outlet, until my charge ran low
and my mechanical movements slowed, my function automated.

Fold the throw blanket. Plump the pillows on the couch. Pick up the laundry. Turn the dial;
close the lid. Pull out the meat for dinner, let it thaw until the juices bleed red on the plate,
oil the pan and let it sizzle. In between everything, double over a kitchen chair, dish towel in hand, tear streaks blotching my face until I cannot hide the pain from the kids running indoors. I modulate my voice, but they hear the cracks, the off-pitch tone and then they want to talk to my face not my back as I keep turning in the other direction because once they see, it will be real.

It will be real that one day, if my child is pregnant and due to our genetic condition
she faces the risk of hemorrhages, she may be forced to bear that child even if she dies
the next minute like I nearly did twice. And I think of their sweet faces and all that another pregnancy would have cost us, would have made me miss about them, the times
they would have reached for me and grasped air, found vacancy, if their father hadn’t agreed
to the vasectomy because I was scared that to be with him meant I would face death a third time.

And yet—vasectomies fail and every day, mothers die in childbirth and now my children must
weigh every choice and the scales are out of balance and how do I tell them, and the meat
is charred in the pan, the washer buzzing, their faces concerned, and the chair wobbles
under my weight, but I stand up and say that Mommy is feeling sad
because they overturned a law today that said a person could have choices to protect themselves or their children if they needed to by having a medical procedure that sometimes is needed when…and I list all the reasons and they ask: why did they do that?

Turning in my Purity Rings: An homage to Nadia Bolz Weber*

In the 1990’s, I felt the fervor,
a pledge not to take a lover.
Instead, to seal my legs with honor,

the Church held out a pen.
It wrangled young people in,
judged their worth and defined their sin.

Then it imparted lessons of shame
to the youth who scratched their name
as though desires are sins to claim.

I, committed to this endeavor,
opted in as I would never
submit but to God, the Father.

Two years later, when my lover
discarded me for another,
ring abandoned on the counter,

I confessed, as if my love was rent;
in my pure heart there was a dent,
a sin for which I must repent,

a bloody sacrifice: my virginity
upon the altar of misogyny,
spoiled because I did not “marry.”

Mary said yes, yet in their obsession
they explain her conception
was immaculate intervention.

This is why no one yells: Oh Mary,
OH MARY, in a moment of ecstasy.
Instead, we submit a plea,

Oh God! We scream on the precipice.
We climb the steps of the edifice;
then are cast out of bed, back to Genesis.

*True Love Waits pledges were employed by Christian and Roman Catholic churches in the 1990’s to promote abstinence, and often involved wearing a purity ring as a reminder of one’s promise. Lutheran minister Nadia Bolz Weber disapproved of the damaging effects of shame within purity culture and requested those who wanted to discard their pledge and ring to turn them in to her whereupon, she and artist Nancy Anderson created a sculpture of a vagina from the rings and presented it to Gloria Steinem.

Forced Birth

Distended belly
swollen with words,
the skin stretched taut,
the words, gnawing.

It is hard to breathe;
they are growing so big,
kicking at other organs,
writhing and twisting at the cord.

The pressure mounts,
the sharp points of each letter pierce.
Watch them ripple as they move,
watch them shudder.

Words were implanted here,
words which must emerge
or be released.
But, they were not meant to be.

If I didn’t consent to speak,
if these words formed against my will,
I need not utter them aloud,
or bring them where they are unwelcome.

Except, you knead the flesh around them.
You cross my legs and
force me to lie with them,
to witness their growth.

These words aren’t meant to be.
I know this.
But you pry open my mouth
and grab my throat, squeezing.

You press your knee down
and the words scream out:
words of generations of words
with nowhere to turn.

I watch you break open
the protective caul.
Words that are not my own
shriek; another set of lungs

filled to the brim.
I never wanted these words.
They developed under duress.
You clamped and wrested them from me.

Now they suckle,
drain out the air and marrow,
and take up space that was meant
for other words to be said.

Pamela Mathison-Levitt is a chronically ill, disabled poet and homeschool mother living in the DMV. Her work often explores themes around her Unitarian Universalist faith, chronic illness, relationships, and mental health. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming in the following publications: Exposed Brick Literary Magazine, Mid-Atlantic Review, Literary Mama blog, Emerald Coast Review, The Anthology for Appalachian Writers, and the Mighty. You can find her work on Insta @pmmlevitt or Facebook at Lines and Branches.

Image: Rlmabie at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons

Touch

From our family bones make marsh-duff
soil, salt, a kingdom of seedling, stalk—
Drinking purple dawn, we wade in the strange
autumnal songs, swallow sunshine, sweet corn
skin, raze the lawn, rub pollen from our sleeves,
weave dandelion & puzzle-grass & when
night falls we wait for the raccoons,
their noses so close we almost touch—
The woods burn & we rearrange our plots
of marl & clean & drink & hope that some eye
in the sky sifts what we have made from time
& lifts one silken brow before the thunder
returns. From our bones, make tide pools,
blood moons, O of a newborn’s lips—

You Did not Begin With Me

As ash after rain
becomes shelter,
a bird-bath’s hollow,
the shape of a womb;
as dirt becomes humus,
vine, vineyard, pew
of scents, incense,
myth, you did not
begin with me.

You grew
your own heart
as the wind
carves time
into bark,
& blows
new seedlings,
surprise
in the palms
of starved
gardeners—

To cultivate things
unknowingly is easy:
sweat, scars,
ruminations,
faith as overgrown
& golden
as dandelion
crowns, which I
picked from
the lawn
heading into
the hospital
on the day
you were born.

O Has a Mouth

My grandmother loved to roam the forests of her mobile home & drink
the air. When she died, I searched for her everywhere: in the space between
notes of a song, in the caesura, & the dusk, in the wind under an owl’s
wing, how it wheels toward the kill— With one word or look she could
calm me. If she had to, she could drown me with her hands.
Whole-body terror: wave after wave that wrecks, reshapes
whatever it touches— I am remade better: time-capsule: filled & filling.
Beside my son’s bed, the conch, its roar tells the same story:
from its burrow, a snake whirls inside a fish’s mouth,
then winds inside the winding intestines of a shark, around
whose throat is wound a shining wire— Heartflesh sold on a platter. We eat
to remember. How the earth swallowed her whole, will swallow us all,
gleaming mouth of dirt & stone closing our throats. When my son
was born he seemed too meek to resemble her, but when we heard
his violent, desperate cry, we knew— She did not stay in the ground for long.

Barbara Schwartz is the author of three books of poetry, a chapbook Any Thriving Root (dancing girl press, 2017) the collaborative collection Nothing But Light with poet, Krista J.H. Leahy (Circling Rivers, 2022), and the hybrid memoir, What Survives is the Fire, forthcoming from Alternating Current Press in 2024. A finalist for the 1913 Poetry Prize, Barrow Street Book Prize, and Alice James Award, What Survives is the Fire was adapted for the stage and selected for Boomerang Theater’s First Flight New Play Festival in 2018. Barbara has chronic myeloid leukemia and is an advocate for children with disabilities. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, NY.

Image: Ryan Hodnett, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons