Supreme Court folly

I was a love child. I have lived my life owned by no man, always my body, my terms. The men of my life knew better than that, and if they didn’t that that was the end. I was an accidental child, a mad scramble at sunset in the backseat of a Ford atop Bolinas Ridge overlooking the lagoon. The ocean is my mother, the bay, an artifact of the San Andreas Fault, the natal waters from which all life comes. The amniotic fluid of  byrazoan and seasponge, laminaría, coralina and copepod. I am not someone’s chattel. Perhaps this is why I never married, though I had offers enough.  And my body offered the fruits of its womb, a fecund harvest, before I said no three times, before my body listened. The genetic code is strong and the urgent blueprint to codify ourselves unto the next generation. I said no. I have never had to codify my choices. My body, myself. I was a child of the Roe vs. Wade era. I was also the product of an accident in the backseat of a car at sunset. My mother did not survive the onslaught of 50s that demanded broodmare wives. After the third baby by yet another man, a miscarriage of justice began during a time of coat hanger abortions. She said she wanted every one of her children, but her body was not able to collect rent when it was due. Then her mind. She aborted fetuses that could not survive the onslaught of the times.

6/29 Write On! with Sue Terence

I censored this part:  My grandmother had eight babies, she had little choice while my mother was careless, or didn’t care, dropping off babies like so many bags of groceries on my grandmother’sdoorstep. 

My mother told me that I was always wanted, always loved. That much at least is true, but she was unfit as a mother and the state took her last baby who had MS. One day the crib was empty, no warning. Her mind slipped and she never gained traction again. 

I was afraid to pass on the gene pool. It’s not that I didn’t want children. My father, an alcoholic had a son who, when rent became due, was an addict, who had a son, and so on. At least the son was put up for adoption, so small threads of our gene pool survives onto the next generation despite my best efforts to stem the tide, that imperfect gene pool that begat, and continues to beget so much family horror. 

My mother was famous for one-night stands and my second half-brother, raised as a cousin, managed to raise a family, but his addiction was something he could not shake, and so he was in and out of prison and that third time's a strike law, pushed him to take his own life, a shotgun to the head. 

So though I had no children, the family is traumatized and the lineage continues through my gene pool, though not my own. I know this is not a poem, it’s confessional, but maybe a poem will come later. My life story has always been too raw for the synthesis of art, though it is also the core of my being. My children are my art, or that which survives me. My life is a non-negotiable demand of words. 

• This piece was a spillover from a Patrice Vecchione workshop: Write your life open, ...