ANTI-APOLOGY

JESSICA LANAY

For Sebastian

I had the abortion in Texas, of all places. A person, just a person now, left me at the clinic, and went to work, after accusing me of sleeping with her husband. There was so much milk, blood, and sugar. Is abandonment a medical history? Because what is in my veins holds. I shook you from my tree when you were still mostly seed. I bled down desert purple highways; my body said no as a swamped environment; the mother next to me on the city bus tearing up, I was so pale, I was disappearing. This isn’t an apology, but I keep explaining what happens to poor Black women who are unexpectedly with child. I want to take a poll of how many of us sleep on couches while trying our best to be so invisible that we didn’t need a welcome. You are not here because what I had to give you was still a pile of other’s failures and my misunderstanding about my responsibility to those failures. The only time I understood femininity was when I had something I needed to steal; my need made it mine. I want you to understand something about your mother, something in their body died before you blinked in the fish net; I was already a sky with rare rains and exoskeletal life. I hear you giggling in my dreams. I watch you twist the bathroom door handle. And while my choice was correct — I wonder at the difference between terror and being forgiven.

ABOUT YOU

JESSICA LANAY

And anyway—how would I tell them? My mother prophesying herself grandkids. When my aunt was a cocaine addict maybe she would have said, “Love who loves you,” but now as an addict of Jehovah, certainly not. In either way, you don’t and won’t fit. Your grandmother asks from her wicker backed chair in her kitchen veneered with raising three children and nine grandchildren if I am your girlfriend. When I don’t answer, she insists, “Esa chica vive como no tiene rumbo!” She isn’t wrong. But I can’t bear the smell of spring that demands I get my shit together, stuffing colored silk down my throat. I examine the pictures of your grandmother, perfect in her white dress; generations of sepia accomplishment and the color of lemon-oiled wood. Your dead grandfather’s smile unsure in his youth, like yours. I can’t move forward and I can’t go back. My thoughts as persistent as sea foam breaking and burbling—wanting simple things—you prove that loving me back is not simple; it seems natural in the narrative of my life that you would not. Your grandmother tells you, “I like her.” Your body my noose. Girlboy, burying your face in my chest in a room full of people and asking, “Where are you going? Why are you leaving?” And it is unfair. Just a palm full of you, a sliced piece of you. Lay cinnamon on my tongue, smack my face, and yank me to knee by my hair. Cleft or compass me. How do I pray to god for you without offense?

JESSICA LANAY is an art writer, poet, librettist, and short fiction writer. She is a frequent contributor to BOMB Magazine. Her poetry can be found in Poet Lore, Indiana Review, The Common, [PANK], Prairie Schooner, and others. Her debut poetry collection am●phib●ian won the 2020 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize from Broadside Lotus Press. Her short fiction can be found in Tahoma Literary Review, Duende, and Black Candies. For BOMB Magazine she has interviewed artists such as El Anatsui, Howardena Pindell, and Rirkrit Tiravanija among others. She is a 2018 recipient of a Millay Colony Residency. Also, in 2018, Jessica Lanay was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her poem "Milk. Milk. Milk," that appeared in The Normal School.

Originally published March 2021 in poiesis 2.1 by w the trees.