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Abortion
Counseling
I have been looking
forward to this
sterile, safe place
where women are
trained
to be gentle and quick.
Their job is not to
judge.
He is with me.
I had to let him come—
he’s
paying.
The door opens into
an antechamber.
The
receptionist sits behind two layers
of bulletproof glass.
The glass is the first thing
that scares me:
a
reminder that people have been killed
for doing what I want
done to me.
***
Sheets and sheets of
information—
stark black type detailing
side effects,
signs of problems,
how not to end up here again.
What
it will feel like during and after.
Buy maxi pads: there
might be bleeding.
The cool, objective tone of twelve-point
font.
The standard thickness of paper.
***
The
counselor has straight
brown hair. Her desk is steel.
I
forget her name
immediately. She asks all the questions
my
parents wanted to, but didn’t.
I hate her.
***
The
doctor is blonde.
She doesn’t meet my eyes.
She
arranges her instruments and dilates my cervix.
She runs the
machine, which sounds like a compressor.
She tells me things,
like
Now you’ll feel my touch.
Now you’ll
feel a pinching.
Now it’s almost done.
The
counselor holds my hand
so I won’t scream or run away.
I love her
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Why
People Have Affairs
The most Edenic
moment of my life,
the year I spent away from genteel
Northeast suburbs,
away from college, ivy, and reliable
cars,
picking tomatoes and weeding on a farm in Colorado,
the
day-long moment spent away from the farm
on the ridge
overlooking it,
hiking in the dark carrying pans and
blankets,
spreading those blankets and curling together like
coyote cubs,
waking in the morning to his face fresh with
mischief,
making love, naked and shameless under the great
sky
as though we lay on the altar of a cathedral,
learning
he had remembered the condoms, and my favorite
tea for
afterwards.
The best part: remaining naked all
day,
following the shade around the ponderosa pine,
reading
aloud and talking about nothing memorable,
simply being in the
most honest way we knew how—
which, of course, was a
lie
because he was engaged and I was a lesbian.
In Oregon,
a woman was waiting for him.
In Connecticut, a woman was
waiting for me.
is it really betrayal if the pine trees
don’t care,
nor the scrubby oaks, nor the
boulders—
wouldn’t they give some sign if what
they witnessed
was wrong?
Years later I saw Brokeback
Mountain
and I was back there under the wide Western
sky
pinned between thighs of wild mountains
by the honesty
of outlaw kisses.
I recognized those men as
myself,
their passion as what we shared
away from
obligation and work
in a place to which we can never return.
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Faithfulness
I arrived at his party smelling of her, the woman
who’d fucked me in dormitory light with no candle, no
romance, just an “Oh my god—” Then with a
“we’re late,” she pulled me out of the room. I
found him where the crowd spilled into snow and skeletal
moonlight. He handed me a beer and his latest book I wanted to
father the next batch of those poems, wanted to be immortalized
for breaking his heart. The world shimmered, she disappeared, I
grabbed the lapels of his black wool coat, but he wouldn’t
kiss me. He was inside a poem, fifteen years old, it was that
memory when he got stood up. Everything horrible repeats itself.
He said, “Your girlfriend’s coming,” and
shuffled away, the sexiest train wreck to ever grace the earth.
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