Category Archives: parenting

Calvarium 4

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At the beginning of the black-tie fundraiser (325-1675 dollars a plate, depending on your commitment to “the cause”), the organizers have a basket full of random names, (where did they come from? Who were/are these people?) to the current batch of servers-take one and pin it on they say, so they do and for this night they are foreign to themselves-Renata, Consuela, Xavier…instead of Pam, Ashley, and Rob… They have to remember these temporary identities when beckoned or chided by the plate-holders.  As when, mid-dessert, a tray falls, sudden show of violence, shattered porcelain, all those scrumptious (expensive) eclairs.

Wasted.

Calvarium 1

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the girl-woman in the kitchen takes her time, cracking the dome of the speckled egg with patience and surgical precision, holds the broken pieces together so that only the white can slip through, the round, intact yolk cradled in the serrated halves of a thing once whole and intact which could have been another thing entirely or…an omelet, a quiche, the whipped interstices of meringue, or these lovely macaroons scooped dough into her piping bag from the sterile bowl on the counter, suburban kitchen, tinted carnival colors, creamy in the middle.

Cathedral in the water

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I see the two hapless, arbitrary, even hypothetical plastic children’s toys descending to the depths, their lovely, efficient tunics, interchangeable hair helmets, ridged plastic arms and hands thrust out marking each fall deeper through zones of habitable waters-here, the last hint of light, here the very last marine mammal, here the beginning of cold and dark and heavy as words we have never know the way he did-“my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  All because something that was always supposed to be

Real

Alive

Heavy 

Has gone missing-reduced to light metaphor and toy architecture, the constant illusory ability to cup thin streams of water in human hands…I am losing you, losing you, mostly hypothetical plastic figure of a child, while at the bottom rests this drowned world–drowned streets, drowned trees, inky human figures curled in fetal positions inside this drowned

Cathedral in the water of

big infinite sea.

Could have been a song

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I told myself pretend it is music after all the women’s voices are poignant, the story they tell is haunting-haunting the way a song might haunt you words very simple, sung to a child go to sleep, child, go to sleep, miles and years and day away from the moment you will remember for the rest of your life-a knock on the door-changing everything.

Rocket Girl

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you float for a time in the “even so,” casually, miraculously, inexorably growing limbs and features and organs, that all-important beating heart.  No one tells you meanwhile in “Houston…we have a problem” or that the problem is something you  cannot (would not)

unmake you

/girlness /not boyness, your binary /identification /of /gender 

Will be enough to terminate the mission

… when all along you have done your best in the beautiful floating weeks of the “even so”

You matchless irreplaceable girl-in-the-now, girl-for-a-moment

Until mission control

Aborts, aborts

Letting you

tiny dancer, rocket girl

Go.

The Countries I Have Lost

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A country, just like a single old-left-foot-house-slipper can be metonymous.  This-for that, quid-pro-quo, how-did-I-ever-lose-you?-metonymous. Hit me at 2 am, sharp intake of breath too hard to connect it all with proper punctuation metonymous.  I once accidentally cut your hand in a car window metonymous.  When I met you I thought you were the crazy one metonymous. Lost in Pittsburgh a million years ago metonymous.  With you the reason for years of silence had to be different metonymous.  

The countries I have lost all have proper names, stable addresses, no missing slippers.  Us-and-them, before-and-after countries cheerfully conventional, intentionally respectful, naturally leery of the once-familiar mendicant whose metonymic wholes have been for good or ill

Irrevocably set free.

jeop•ard•y

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orgin: Old French, ieu parti (evenly) divided game

ME- iuparti

The term was originally used in chess or other games to denote a problem, or position in which the chances of winning or losing were evenly balanced, hence-

“A dangerous situation”

From “jeu”-a game which derived from Latin “jest” see “joke” and “divide”

Taboos

200. What common crime against children is universally under-reported?

400. What is the FBI definition for rape?

600. What is Planned Parenthood’s policy on rape and incest victims?

800. What constitutes “consent?”

1000. What happens to fetal remains in rape and incest situations?

Famous Rape Survivors

200.  Who is Jane Fonda?

400.  Who is Oprah Winfrey?

600. Who is Tim Roth?

800.  Who is Queen Latifa?

1000. Who is Lady Gaga?

Rape Victims in History

200. Who was Joan of Arc?

400. Who was Elizabeth I?

600. Who was Virginia Woolf?

800. Who was Lawrence of Arabia?

1000. Who is Maya Angelou?

Feminism and abortion

200. What country has the highest number of gender-selective abortions?

400.  What cultural biases enable gender-selective abortion?

600.  What medical device is used to determine the gender of fetuses?

800. When is the gender of an unborn child visible?

1000. What are some common social problems associated with sex-selective abortion?

Current Events

200. What famous NYC newspaper reported on a 10 year old incest victim in India?

400. What famous British news agency reported on an Indian rape victim seeking a late-term abortion?

600. What is the common redress for incest survivors in India?

800. What state did the 10 year old incest and rape survivor hail from in northern India?

1000. What survivor counseling, services, and support can a 10 year old Indian rape victim expect from local and national governments?

Final Jeopardy

What are common stereotypes, misconceptions, and prejudices perpetuated in general which hinder the prosecution of sexual predators and marginalize their victims?

What was it 

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what was it, mute, inanimate object perched on the counter in the messy late-night kitchen as she finally sweeps up the spilled beans, tosses them out into the night, contemplates both what usually lurks there and if they will grow, sprout, tangle up into vines, vines to block the sun, spin to the clouds where the approximate-rhythmic giant dwells, mocking science, mocking long-dead Darwin, Glutton-clubbing, maggot-and-squirrel devouring Darwin whose mortal life has coiled to dust but whose immortal one is hot, vivid, fierce

Survival of the fittest…

Televising the Language of Sexual Aggression 

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Years ago I believed the cotton-candy fiction that it was enough for incest survivors, child abuse victims, and rape victims to just tell someone your story.

After 8 years of practicing this advice on behalf of the victims of intimate crime, I can say it is not enough.

If you tell your story, you will be marginalized, ostracized, judged.

If you tell your story, little or nothing will happen to your abuser.

If you tell your story, you still might not be able to stop the abuse…

…ostensibly because it is more fiscally and emotionally economical to ignore abuse than to intervene.

Which is why the recent statements made by American celebrities Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher (about oral sex and incest respectively) are all the more transgressive.

In making these comments both men display a complete disregard for the position of  sex crime survivors and perpetuate the connection between anger and rape culture. 

Many of us were denied consent in this process. We did not watch either show but were nonetheless exposed without  consent to the barrage of media with explicit descriptions of comments laced with both anger and intent to shock and offend.

Shock is a function of trauma.  Our minds buffer traumatic events with shock. When we cease to be shocked by what is trauma-inducing, we allow these things to become commonplace, accepted.

Yet it is categorically unacceptable for men  of power and privilege to use their position in front of a national audience to transmit language that is verbally abusive and supportive of rape culture.

I understand that both Colbert and Maher disqualified protective language they would have extended to Clinton or Obama (and their daughters) because anger now fuels their discourse on Trump.

However in the process they have exposed a frat-boy, locker room mentality which not only has no place in intelligent dissent, it automatically signals to the already marginalized and disenfranchised victim of sexual crime-“you are not safe here.”

And that is shocking…or it should be.