Don't get pregnant in South Dakota!

The night Bush got "re-elected," my friend Thao and I looked up how old (and presumably close to death or retirement) all the then-sitting members of the Supreme Court were. Because she was relatively young, we didn't worry about Sandra, the conservative judge who sometimes voted with the "liberals." It seemed, then, that the worst we could expect was for a conservative Chief Justice to replace the conservative Chief Justice. What a quaint worry that seems now in the face of 2 new regressive justices who will undoubtedly rule monstrously in upcoming suits over South Dakota's abortion laws.

On the day of Bush's second inauguration, which happened days before both the anniversary of Roe v. Wade and my birthday, I wrote this very bad (i.e., it is didactic doggerel) poem, which now, too, seems quaint in its anticipatory anxiety. Once again, this administration has astounded me by besting my worst fears.


Inaugural, Unwanted, January 2005

Complaints of cold at the Capitol.
The mezzo-soprano slated to sing "Bless this House"
after the inaugural address
frets, to NPR, that the cold may spoil
the song's singular high note.
NPR is quite the confessional today.
Now, an officer's wife, giddy-to-be-there, shivering
admits to having bought her dress at JC Penney.
Then the president's voice blights NPR
and my car, my commute, a blight
like a hundred-thousand police cars.

"Protect the unwanted," the president says.
The soprano's got nothing on Chief Justice Rehnquist
whose strange new mouth, a plastic-tube throat
swore the president in, new voice whistling
with unwanted saliva.
Unwanted, the president now calls these fetuses,
the euphemism a reminder that Rehnquist
will not live out these years.
"Protect the unwanted."
As though being unwanted
hurts anyone before the inaugural moment of life.

Unwanted is a homeless child or an ugly woman;
I was the first and now the second
and we are monstrous twins
etiolated by plastic-tube veins
in which our pulse is the tumult of police cars
sirening always the fear and threat of loss.
"Protect the unwanted."
In four days, my birthday will come,
In four days, the Capitol will fill again
as Roe vs. Wade turns exactly one year my junior.
One year, one thin membrane, such small obstacles
to saving our mothers and us the dooms
of one another.

The Capitol has become a carnival-house of sanctimony.
Four days from now, the red state voters
will paint red roses like pox on their cheeks and blight
the cold with placards and the megaphoned echo
"Protect the unwanted."
As if our mothers, at fifteen,
would have disposed of us for sport,
the way Scalia and Cheney kill ducks and elk,
the way the president kills Iraqis and soldiers and the officer
whose shivering wife now sits at the inaugural
in her JC Penney best.