Gin Bottle Cap Contraception

I am the grand-daughter of World War II prison camp survivors. My grandfather and grandmother met in Buckingham Palace where my grandmother was presented at Court at one of Princess Elizabeth's garden parties. They met later, again, in Hong Kong where my grandfather held a medical office in Kowloon. The attraction was undeniable. They married and enjoyed parties at Shing Moon, my grandmother wearing black burma silk evening gowns and hobnobbing with the British "dirty little foreigners" who enjoyed the high life of the Empire's global reach. She befriended the niece of Emperor Pu Yi and frequently joined her for tea within the labyrinthian compound of The Forbidden City. Theirs was a life of luxury.

After the Japanese seized Nanking, my grandparents ignored the warnings and invitations to evacuate sent from the British Crown and moved north. My uncle was born in Swatow, my father in Tongshan. In Tianjin, miles from the unrest and terror of Nanking and Shanghai, they continued their privileged lives. As the violence neared, my grandfather stood with the Chinese and built makeshift clinics for those wounded in the relentless shellings. He planned his move to join the resistance in the 8th Division Army. Hitler invaded Poland. Fellow passengers on the Trans-Siberian Railway learned of disappearances of Jewish friends and loved ones from reports gleaned at stations where men sipped vodka that evaporated in the space between flask and lip. The war did not touch my family directly until one afternoon, the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed. The Japanese commandante entered their home, pissed on the carpet and declared the family's home and everyone in it property of the Rising Sun. Three days later, they were marched 100 miles to a prison camp called The Courtyard of the Happy Way.

1200 prisoners lived for three years in the small compound. They devised jobs, schooling, sports programs and food rations in order to maintain civility and normalcy. There were councils and black markets. A group of Trappist monks formed alliances through the barbed wire electric fences with local farmers who appeared to pray with them while rolling fresh eggs under the fences into the monk's woolen robes. All aspects of "civilized life" continued even in the ever-present terror of captivity by bayonet and constant surveillance. For the women and the men, both married and un-married, other aspects of life continued, the private ones where love and desire found purchase in the quiet, unbayonetted spaces of the night. Of course people made love in the prison camp. It was solace. It was peace and comfort as well as hope that the human heart could transcend the nightmare of war.

My grandmother was near her death when she at last started to tell me the details of the internment. I sat with her for hours. Among the details she shared was the issue of contraception. She told me she used a gin bottle cap as a barrier method. Of all the stories of scorpions appearing on her children's arms and legs and how she'd stay up all night swatting the deadly creatures from their tender, jaundiced skin, of the stories of the guards lining the children up against a wall and aiming their weapons at them as ways of ensuring the adults would follow every rule, the imagined sensation of a metal circle pressing up against a cervix and possibly turning to injure the man during intercourse is a profound metaphor for what life in a prison camp reveals about how humans cope with restriction. I think of the power of love and its will to bring people together in sacred union, to heal us, and without proper methods, possibly injure us with toxicity and laceration.

My grandmother was Catholic. Being pregnant in a prison camp where healthcare was minimal was a deathly option. Bringing a baby into a confined and freezing world where electric barbed wire defined the perimeter and where rotten vegetables were the only food, and of this there was a criminally limited supply for the 1200 prisoners: these realities made contraception a necessary "sin." But she would insert the gin bottle cap. It was the only method available. This is a measure many people adopted when they were cut off from the usual supply of birth control. They would try anything.

In even the most dire situations, women will maintain control of their reproductive destinies. It is not something even the longest arm of the law, or the commandante in charge of any prison camp, can command. If the conversation surrounding employers' provision of hormonal maintenance medication now must include notions of aspirin-between-the-knees concupiscence, then it must also contain the real-life stories of the ends lovers will go to under even the most terrifying circumstances to engage in love. Love is not lust. And love-making is not prostitution or vile. It is a force of life, and in the pursuit of happiness it is a healthy, beautiful and sacred means of having a full life.

I only know how to respond to the current paradox regarding employers' rights to disinclude birth control pills from insurance coverage with a story. Stories provide truths deeper than political rhetoric. They ground the high-pitched voices in real-life. In the story of women and men, there is no realer story than that of balancing life, love and when to bring children into the world. It is a story that belongs to both women who bear the child and to men who make love to women knowing that a child could possibly result from such union. It is a story, perhaps the only story, that at its very core belongs to both men and women, and a story through which lives change remarkably.

It is understandable that in a prison camp where my five year old uncle was court-martialed and made to sit in a bamboo cage in the hot sun for a day for missing role call and where primitive means of cooking and healing wounds replaced modern conveniences, women and men had to resort to metal found objects as barrier methods during sex. It is not understandable that alternatives to this would not be made readily available in a civilized country where electric barbed wire does not define our place in the world.


sketch source: http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/NormanCliff/Books/Courtyard/p-chapterIndex.htm

The Font Poem I Wrote Live on Twitter Answering My Own Question

I want a Twilight font that drips blood and snaps in two when deleted.
I want a Romantic poetry font that has birds in it and damp chunks of moss.
I want an Art Deco font in which I will type in blue terra cotta tile.
I want a Lascaux Cave font comprised of berries, blood
and the sounds of wild animals outside the cave.
I want a Marcel Marceau font that says nothing and still makes the reader weep.
I want a Beethoven font that no one can hear and
a Chagall font that flies, painted red, above the page.
A Sartre font in which when I write I love you it doesn’t mean you are in a cage.
I want a zen font that vanishes in the wind.
I want a Camus font that carries no meaning.
I want a Malthus font with a bug in its mouth.
Design for me a Darwinian font. Let the words eat each other.
And then eat the page.
An Edith Piaf font that sings for the Resistance.
A Billie Holiday font that prints only in blue.
A Lao Tzu font. It is made of water, fire, some dirt and a soft breeze.
A Simone de Beauvoir font that men and women will forever read differently.
I want a Ghandi font that carries the salt from the ocean
so the people may have salt.
I want a Martin Luther King Jr. font. All the letters are different colors!
And a Vaclav Havel font that never makes any sense.
And still becomes the president of fonts.
A Marie Antoinette font! (the letters at first are decorative, then only partly there)
I want a Winnie-the-Pooh font that wanders off into the woods.
And I want a Van Gogh font that makes my words worth a million dollars
though they come from a poor place,
a small room with a chair and a broom
and a window filled with sun.
Who can make a Sartre font I can’t get out of?
A Kerouac font that breaks open a sentence like a firecracker?
A Picasso font that is cruel but people will love it anyway?
A Dali font that drips down the page?
A Duchamp font that looks like any other but it is by Duchamp.

A Riot in the Heart: My Six Months on Match.com

Yes, I did it.

I am a 42 year old single mother with a Masters degree in Poetry and I went on Match.com. I'm also a Taurus, which I add because they ask that on Match. I also add it because I am about as earth-bound and stubborn and unchangeable as they come. And I never thought I'd turn to the Machine for a date. But I did.

In hindsight, I did it well.
In hindsight, I ran it like a well-prepared high school science student.

But when I recall certain moments, I have to face to truth. There is no such thing as dating from a purely rational perspective. I got sucked into it. At times, the machine ran my life. At other times, the men it "brought to my door" got to me, for better and worse. Hundreds of them have written to me. I didn't always write back. Thousands were paraded before me above little boxes that let me check "yes," "no," "maybe." I sent them in droves into the no-pile, mostly because they weren't wearing shirts, or because they provided photos of their car or because they lived an hour away in Tennessee. I can recall the faces as I write these: all these men among the 7 million men on match.com. I can't quite bring myself to burst into a girl version of Julio Iglesias paean to all the girls he loved before. I didn't love them, any of them. I saw their pictures, and I imagined (it's kind of impossible not to) what kind of a person they were. If they said, "I'm looking for a good woman," I got an idea.

With some, I corresponded on and off for the entire time. They never asked me out. I never suggested they do so. We just occasionally wrote to one another. They were the sleepers. They were almost my friends.

I went out on more dates than I care to count.
By the end, I walked away from dates the way I walk out of movie theaters, sometimes moved or shaken, often wondering why.

I got enormous crushes on men who may or not have deserved it. I learned it was so much about me and my own projections, and I took a little break. I wanted to be thrown. I wanted to experience the "riot in the heart" that Gwyneth Paltrow's character speaks of in Shakespeare in Love. After a time, I realized that maybe the really nice turf salesman in _______ maybe doesn't really search for the same thing. He wants a girlfriend he can relate to. Not a literary dynamo, a woman who finished college. I learned I had enough imagination in me to turn a guy just struggling to make it through dinner before his shyness caused him to break into sweat appear as an answer to my prayers.

What my prayers were: a relationship where I could curl up with a man I love and feel his arms around me at the end of a day, a relationship where we could prepare a meal together and peacefully devour it, and then do the dishes, read some books, tuck my child into bed with a story before we ourselves turned in.

Something this quiet and safe and yet still with the riot in the heart. Was it possible to have both? Was it possible from a date or two to have any idea whether person #572 was the one for me?

The BeeGees Poem

On Finding Out the BeeGees own the Priory where Joan of Arc was Sentenced to Death I Write a Poem using 40 titles of their No. 1 Hits

(I'm posting this in honor of Robin Gibb's announcement of his battle with cancer. Thanks, songman for songs that always cheer me up! The BeeGees are the only band to have number ones in five decades.)

It was God whom she needed to show how deep
was her love, and for one night only, spirits
having flown, she was named guilty, doomed

to stand, sticks and specks, against the flames'
shadow dancing. Did she think, did she hear
alone the melody, through the still waters of

her timeless, god-connected mind for whom the
bell still tolls, knowing a love so right, the words
in the night, in the night we love, we know how

to do it? Did a horn section blast out the hard beats,
shout out as the ropes lashed her wrists, the words
nobody gets too much heaven no more? Did she

expect to get saved by the greatest bell? I just want
to be your everything, God has said, demanding that
we the little islands in the stream invite his jive talking

in exchange for the sort of immortality that often has
come too soon. You win again, the saints must always say.
Don't forget to remember, instructs God, before letting his

words of "you and I," heard one night only through the still
waters of the mind, feeling like ESP, disappear like a woman
consumed by fire. This is where I came in, says God,

running down a list of Number Ones who answered,
served and died, as the world saw a new morning, and alone
now tries still, shouting from beyond: I've gotta get a message

to you, crying out, singing: If I can't have you I don't want
nobody, baby. And God shouts back, Love you inside out
but we, still thinking we are islands in the stream, like Juliet's

Romeo don't get the message in time. And while this may indeed
sound like a tragedy, love still is so much thicker than water.
Great spirits have flown, having learned how can you mend

a broken heart. And the answer has always been to keep
stayin' alive, and know even among the flames that consume
you like a Saturday Night Fever, you should, like you started

a joke, for the record, in Massachusetts, anywhere, like a
ghetto supasta, no matter what your lonely days, lonely nights
may leave you, you should be dancin'. Yeah.

The Book of the Ferris Wheel Whose Axis is Sun and Moon

A Sunday evening, an anniversary of an act of war,
my daughter and I ride the ferris wheel at the Mountain
State Fair where we’ve seen a man with an impressive
belly covered with a t-shirt that reads, “I approve of myself.”
We’ve seen the father on his cell phone while he spun
with his family on the Tilt-a-Whirl and a pair of sunglasses
fallen from the chairlift onto the white plastic roof of a tent
as we passed over the white plastic roof of the tent.
We’ve seen the young goats and the Brahman Bulls, the
enormous rabbits fluffed and prized. All the things that
give milk and meat, all the things that devour them.

As our little cart reaches the wheel’s top and begins
its move forward toward the descent, it jounces and my
daughter reaches for me. “I’m afraid of heights,” she
remembers, “Don’t let go of me.” We’ve timed our ride
for the perfect minutes, the sun had broken the mountain
of clouds above Mount Pisgah. Silver light pours
through everything like a liquid we’d all drunk willingly,
together, kneeling at the mass of farm animals and
assertive t-shirts and signs that read “not responsible for
dart-related injuries” people walk by in a deep trust,
a trust that no one will go crazy tonight, all the bolts
will hold, and the calf born this morning at 7 a.m. will,
in fact, live to one day be also on exhibit in a pen in a
tent at the Western North Carolina State Fair because
this is where everything belongs right now, illuminating
itself from within each great circuit breaker flipped on high.

In our little cart that rocks with the wheel's tick
tock of its own bright and timeless clock, I press
my hand into hers rested on her small 8-year old knees.
In the West, the sun is setting. “Look, the moon,”
she points to the East. Together we revolve there high and
low above the earth, the thing on the cosmic bead-thread.
Suspended, we ride the axis of night and day, dark and light,
cloud and the world that moves beyond cloud that breaks
open at times to show us it holds us as we circle the
loosely grinding September night.

For Piya (Beloved) and Jiya (Heart) Patel

--for the children murdered by their ill-medicated mother on August 27, 2011

The city will remember your smiles, beloveds,
and carry them in its heart.
The shapes of your small hands will always be beloved,
grasping at the world you were just coming to know by heart.

The city will invite you over to play, beloveds,
when the mountains are changing
as they are always changing our hearts.

The city will sit on the edge of your bed, beloveds,
read you your favorite story until it knows it by heart.
And the city will peek in on you at night, beloved,
and watch the rising blankets as you breathe and listen to the beating of your heart.

Though we now let you go to be with the spirit, beloveds,
we will keep you here in our spirit in our hearts.
We will watch you grow, beloveds.
We will remember you when our hearts delight in play.
Our children will remember the name of your most beloved fruit.
They will know how high you could swing on the playground with a racing heart.
They will mark their hearts with your beloved names
because you’ll be the ones that are always missing.

The city will always have a place for you, beloveds, in our heart.
In our gardens, the flowers that bloom from this summer on will be bright as your hearts.
They will belong to you
and to the beloved summer itself,
and all the bluest skies shall hold you, beloveds, 
as we now reach to touch you, beloveds,
high above the mountain, beloved in its softness,
that holds us up today, beloveds,
in its shining, loving heart.

The Mommy Moon

In 1940s movie consciousness, a honeymoon in Niagara Falls was that iconic holiday. The dream destination for beginning a life together, Niagara is the site of a millenia-old geological event. At the end of the last ice age, the newly formed Great Lakes crashed through the escarpment, forging a path to the Atlantic Ocean. Despite its being one of natural wonders of the world, Niagara Falls was commonplace in my childhood. My grandparents lived fifteen minutes away along the Parkway in a Georgian house on the river. We picnicked just above the Falls where a ruined ship rusts away in the current over the decades. "This is my favorite part of the river," my grandmother would say, "just before the Falls." I grew up with one of the greatest natural phenomena just down the road.

     When my daughter was three weeks old, I flew to Canada to introduce her to my 93 year old grandmother. We stayed in a Victorian Bed and Breakfast where my grandmother had played with her friends as a child, back when it was a private home. It was summer, and each day during the visit, I took my baby to the Falls. The following winter, I flew north again, and every six months, again. Each time taking my daughter to the Falls, standing above them in the snow or sun. When she was three years old, I started to drive up to Canada each summer to visit my mother at her cottage on Georgian Bay. She's eight now, and each year we have stayed in Niagara Falls for three days. We have stayed at the Econolodge in Clifton Hill, the "strip" where every business is an amusement of some sort: wax museum, lego museum, haunted house, fun house. This year I did something a little different.
      While looking at hotel prices on hotwire.com, I came across a "special rate" for the Sheraton at the Falls. All my life, or at least I think all my life, I'd seen the tall hotels directly across the street from the river. They had always seemed dreadfully out of reach, astronomical. I'd always dreamed of staying in one, of having Niagara Falls be something that was exceptional, something one gazes at for hours rather than sees briefly through the car window on the way to Nanny and Poppee's.  I called the hotel to book the special. I asked about the view and learned that particular rate was for a room with no window. A square space inside a building next Niagara Falls. I said no and hung up.
     But the first bit of rock had already been shuddered from its place. I called the hotel again asked the cost of a room with a view of the Falls. For a difference of $150.00 per night, I could stay at the hotel I'd always dreamed of staying in. Or I could be smart and stay up the road at a hotel that could be anywhere. I couldn't really "afford" an extra $300.00. I hung up. I returned to work, thinking of my paycheck. How much I work to earn what I was considering blowing. I called again. I booked the room with the view. Then I regretted it. When my 8 year old and I walked into the room and saw the American Fall directly in front of me and the Horseshoe Falls just a little farther up, I stopped.
        We moved the loveseat from the wall to right in front of the window, which had a center portion that opened (with a good strong railing). We opened a jar of cashews and listened to and watched the roar. Me and my girl. For about twenty minutes.
          Being in Niagara Falls with an 8-year old doesn't mean sitting and staring at a natural wonder the whole time. That first evening we did the fun house, the foam ball jungle thing, the fun house again, ice cream and a walk through the town. At the end of these things, we returned to our room. Rather than it being a come-down from the various defining qualities of being at Niagara Falls, rather than being a withdrawal into the anyplaceness of a hotel room, we walked into a vista. I made a cup of tea and watched the water fall.  Naturally, we slept with the window open. The moisture from the spray entered the room with the sound. Upon waking, I stared. While my daughter slept, I made coffee I drank sitting in that love seat, gazing.

     Across the river, I could just barely make out the wooden staircase they rebuild each year, taking people to the Cave of the Winds. I watched the four Maid of the Mists perform their daunting journeys rendered neutral by half a century of repetition. I saw the passengers in their blue rain ponchos board from either Canadian or American side.  Through my childhood I'd seen these things, and I had wondered whether I would one day have a honeymoon in Niagara Falls as it seemed every girl used to dream. It dawned on me then. I was on my own kind of honeymoon, the single mother kind.
     I was celebrating my life as a mother, the kind of completion that I personally desired. My daughter was now 8 (just turned) and bright and healthy as I could wish. We have great fun together and when it comes time to correct her on anything I just use a couple of bits of sign language, and we're good. I like my job, had nearly finished my third book. I'd arrived at a good place in my life, perhaps the new "bar" that marriage signified for our mothers' generation. While my daughter slept into the daylight and the Falls roared on through their geological magnificence, I sat on the loveseat and loved it all.