by Mary Krane Derr
If pregnancy is two lifebodies, what does this make of the woman who through her very own means of choice aspires to prevent that innermost doubling off, its sundering through abortion?
She is no feckless snapping open that shears off all man and child flesh and bone: no vagina dentata, no “hostile endometrium.”
Nor is she a crushed in caved in carton that leaks its nothing, just kick it to the curb.
Nor is she is a symphony score whose patrons should rustle with disgruntlement because in their clueless notation system, she follows clef sign after clef sign with whole-rest measures, and they itch for her to produce the "real" music, they cannot revere her otherwise.
No, she is always her own singular lush orchestration, her own spacetime curvature of fall and rise of fullness unto herself.
Whose bright glad unbankrupt default option is so modern a wonder of the world, it has not arrived into its real name yet.
How to condense it into one word or phrase: Prefers the swish and boom of an added baby heartbeat: under her own only sparingly: if ever:
and yet does not go raging or empty or lifelessly silent: unless any man/church/state shears off the very flesh and bone of her right to this very sovereignty over *her own* person.
Mary Krane Derr does not understand why some people who profess to oppose abortion are so out to sabotage voluntary family planning rights, when expanded contraceptive coverage is essential to reducing abortion. She is a poet, writer, and musician from the South Side of Chicago. She read her work at India's 2011 Kritya International Poetry Festival. Her poems "Rubble Dream" and "At This Address" previously appeared in The New Verse News.
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