Abortion I
2023-04-11

***

I went my entire education
without being handed a box
with plastic fetuses in row,
each one with more time to grow
before being aborted
and potential life snuffed out,
deemed nobody's loss.

Now I know the lesson was fake,
that far more time it takes
to grow to that kind of size,
that at that early of a stage
it's dubious they feel that pain.
(You have no right
to force me to provide
for you with my body against my will.)
Barely aware of being alive,
much less the difference
between the light
of consciousness
and the dark that came before.

A lima bean Dad did abort.

Buried it with his two hands.
With two hands, the dirt he ferried
from backyard, wiped on his pants,
powder, mud, dust, root, clump.

"Your time in the womb is up.
A promise that come a decade
I so hastily made
not thinking of the future
I must now with no regrets break.
Dissolved the ties with pop of pill
so that no blood must my hands spill.
The damage to you is only collateral.
The benefits are all addressed to me."

Bury my heart
in the backyard,
leave it behind
in the move to different sky.
It still beats.

It still beats.

It still beats.

It still beats, Dad, did you know?
Far away where my feet
no longer legally can go.
I was so young, only sixteen,
at the start of my journey,
without warning come
to an ending abrupt.
The story that is written
without thought
of plot
or pacing
and only one character half-fleshed out, you her effacing.

I can only wonder
into what I would have grown
if this hadn't happened,
if you'd just left me alone.

***

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (c) Vane Vander