I’m filled with it. It’s a tension in my spine. A desire to pummel. I sick echo in the belly. A longing to turn away. A desperate sadness that women are dehumanized, that my body is not considered my own in this country.

The white female governor of Alabama is now signing a law that criminalizes not only abortion but women who choose to go out of this state to have an abortion. So, one can easily imagine how this terrorism will play out. How women will be hunted down and locked away in the institution of deep trauma, abuse, rape, and torture AKA our prison system. They will take these mothers away from their real children to lock them away if indeed this law is allowed to stand. Of course, the grand master plan is to get this to the supreme court where keg party Kavanaugh sits making it a ruling conservative majority.

Please, women, run.

Sometimes it doesn’t feel worth the effort it takes to keep on trying to say the same thing over and over again in a million different ways, hoping to be heard. Abortion is not murder. My body is my own. I have the right to own my own body and to make my own medical decisions.

Growing into middle age, there are moments now, I glance down the long hallway of my knowing –the long education of coming to know– what it is to be woman in this world. I hold on to the acute awareness, the visceral sensation, of knowing that my body is only tentatively my own. That my life is secondary to the lives of men. That because I fit into categories of privilege I am somewhat safe or safer for now. But if one, as a woman, remains vigilant in her looking, does not turn away into illusion, blow the candle light out, she maintains the knowing truth that her body is no safer than those brutalized, murdered, locked away and beaten bodies of the others who share her gender but not her class, color, status, sexual orientation and cis-bodied-identity. Or those others who have not been so lucky.

Run for office.

Please, women, run for office. Hundreds of us must run and continue running if we are to make this change possible. The white men in suits from the ruling class minority are not going to change. They work for the boss and the boss is not you.

___

Today’s thoughts:

I think of women’s art and how so much of it is called craft though the skill and expertise of say, making a quilt, goes well beyond most paintings we decide to call art.

I think of the way women tell stories—of the lyric, of the body—and how close, how intimate we draw up to our readers.

I think of the back-handed obsession with denouncing certain ways that women write—just a journal entry, a mess of self, navel-gazing.

We are not hiding behind the walls of high art or the institution of such and such,

we are teaching you a new way of knowing.

Listen. Learn how to listen.