Multigravida

Three of my eggs hatched out. Just like me
and my brothers, they were all different.
One broke, I woke to find it bleeding
out of me; one I raked out early
living years on a yard with no sun;
and one came out my boy, who calls
me up from cities in the nighttime,
singing his life story through the cord.

“Multigravida,” in version titled “Family Resemblance,” is reprinted from PRAIRIE SCHOONER, Fall 2000, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright © 2000 by the University of Nebraska Press.

© 2005 Judith Arcana

Thoughts about my writing life by Judith Arcana


You Don’t Know

You think I didn’t care about that baby,
didn’t wonder if we’d like each other
when she turned fourteen;
didn’t think he’d follow anywhere
his older brother went.
You think we take them out, like gangsters;
disappear them, like generals.
You don’t know how
it works then, do you?
You don’t know what
sits on both sides of the scale,
what it means to decide:
what I got and what I gave,
gave that baby I didn’t have,
baby who couldn’t make me laugh –
applesauce upside down on her head;
couldn’t make me cry –
taking his first step right off the porch.
You don’t even know that this is not about regret.
You don’t know one blessèd, I say blessèd, thing about it.

© 2005 Judith Arcana


Women’s Liberation
                              – for Esther

Every week we went to a meeting,
but not like now. No one stood up
and said, My name is Jane and I’m
an abortionist. No. Because we didn’t
want to stop, we weren’t trying not to do it.
We sat in apartments, passing the cards.

One card is Sandy from West Lafayette,
eighteen years old, coming in on the bus.
She’s got about sixty-three dollars, she thinks
she’s nine weeks pregnant. The next card is
Terrelle, who’s thirty-two and angry. Her
doctor gave her an IUD that didn’t work;
he says there’s nothing he can do.
Here’s Mona, fifty-four years old, has one
hundred dollars, wants to keep this secret
from her family. And Carlie, a long term –
twenty weeks pregnant, may have ten dollars,
twelve years old like Mona’s youngest – she
got herpes from her brother when he did it.

Every week some of the cards were passed
around for hours; none of us wanted
to counsel those women, take one
into her life. The longest of long terms,
they lived far away, had no one but us,
no one to tell, no one to help, no money.
They needed everything. Cards went around
the room while we talked: dilation, syringes,
xylocaine, the Saturday list. At the end
of the meeting, all the cards were taken.

© 2005 Judith Arcana

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