You tell yourself it won’t touch you
Or your children
It simply cannot
In your white house
White street
White town
White country

I once lived in a beautiful
White house
Broken ceiling
Come right down

The man and his minions
They fixed it right up
Things that shift and fall

He said

“Now it looks like white people live here”

But they didn’t

Hell, you say when you hear the story
A little girl found dead in a dumpster

You want to believe
It will not touch you

But it will.
Because white people live here
Oh, did you think I was talking about your skin?

Too easy
The color of

…the flag you raise
Quick surrender
Our children for a song,
Nursery rhymes and fairy tale

Wolves all real.

When I think about abortion I think about the people I know who have had missing family members because someone chose to abort a child.

Hard obsidian stories with no happy conclusions. Just a space where a child should have been.

The etymology and meaning of abortion is worth examining, not just for it’s history or boundaries but the duality of it’s meaning.

In medical terms a miscarriage is referred to as a “missed a-b” or an “a-b” that necessitates surgical extraction.

I have had one of each.

The first was a molar pregnancy.

I went to my first ultrasound expecting see filigree images of a little person. There were none. There were only signs of a child who had been there (however briefly), and the molar tissue left behind.

I knew something was wrong but no one–neither doctors nor techs, told me anything. I left the hospital dazed and…