“An Ohio woman has sued a Chicago-area sperm bank after she became pregnant with sperm donated by a black man instead of a white man as she and her partner had intended. The woman is seeking damages and wants to ensure the sperm bank doesn’t make a similar mistake again.”
– Associated Press
Here is exactly what you took from me:
one less awkward glance
in our direction, a mumbled dyke
rusting over on an arid tongue
like an idle piece of factory machinery –
a commonplace in vast, oxidized Ohio. This
just my way of saying I know how hate
operates – it sits all around me,
waiting to hum with gainful employment.
I am a woman in love with a woman;
I know the things I’m supposed to
sew, those I can’t sow but want to
every time I cramp
inside the curse of anatomy,
though it is my body’s calling a man
to someplace he’s unwanted. I guess
what I really wanted, in those moments,
was to see my face
inside of another face: that is the joy
God must’ve had when man and
womankind were clean mirrors,
though I’d kiss the blood spilled
from my body to get her here,
into my arms – her mother’s arms –
but you took that moment from me,
my let there be light,
you fraudulent salespeople,
you unintelligent designers!
I can hear the machines at work
as I hum my daughter to sleep;
have you any idea how woefully
unprepared I am to mother
her affliction? My father used to work
in a steel mill. Growing up,
he used to beat up black boys with his fists
for the sport of it, to see if they
were really men and fought back –
tell me, am I supposed to let him
hold this child, pinch her curls
between the vise of his fingertips,
trying to make them straight like our own
or what was lost with me?
There are some things a comb can’t conquer.
I tell this girl stories at night, I tell her
she could be anything she wants
except what I wanted,
and I try not to believe it,
or that she’s here, my blood
and browned as if she were left in the sun
too long after a fistfight
along the road of my last name,
that road which lead me
to this neighborhood
for a stylist who can untangle
all of this fear I’m feeling,
my car parked outside,
humming, an exit purchased
the same way we purchased our ways out
of filth in Cleveland
and Youngstown, the way
we purchased a male sample
and got a baby girl, beautiful
but visibly less than what we’d
bargained for, earning us one more glance
of disapproval than we got yesterday
before the newest plant opened
the next town over. Our highways
hum with truckers’ horns now,
a sign that industry has returned,
or perhaps, never left us completely.
The American heartland is such
a resilient place, you know –
it fights against what it has to,
and so will we, damn it. So will we.
Photo by Austin Beeman
