Dear America by Maya White-Lurie
Twenty years ago, when the doctor cut, cut, cut me from my mother, he held crying strawberry-cream caked me at arms length and said to my father, “Tell her what you’ve got.” Father creased his brow, eyed the fresh-cut umbilical chord, blubbered to my mother: “It’s a boy. I know we hoped for a girl, but he’s beautiful, beautiful...” The doctor roared: “Look again, Dad!” My parents wept in joyful harmony with my cries of cold confusion – I was hungry for breast milk – but you’d think daddy had never seen a vulva before! Oh, does that make you uncomfortable? When I say vulva, vagina, clitoris, uterus, do bugs scurry up your spine? Are you scared of me because I’m proud of mine? Well, get over it – this is my body – I’ll use the words I choose, words that fit like the sweater Grammy knit. Just try to pull out those stitches, shrink the seams. You can’t. And if you try to wash my mouth out with soap, I’ll stare you down and spit the suds in your eyes. Since you’ve decided to dissect my words like the Jane Does chilling in line for the crematorium, I’ll tell you, time is precious; let’s save a few seconds. I am a masochistic poly-picto-tricho-dendro-stigmatosapiosexual human, with an unquenchable quest for complete equality, and a stubborn search for a room of my own – lockable preferably – I am a sister, not bound by blood but by love, and I am a boat slicing through dangerous seas, at my back the gale force of three centuries of formidable foremothers who took up arms against their oppressors with the same limbs that lifted little ones. Don’t give me that look, the up-down-nose-wrinklehead-tilt as you slide away to say: “So, you’re one of those… feminists…” The label sticks to your tongue as you look at me like I’m an apricot rotting at the back of your fridge, forgotten. “Oh, I see….” Yeah, 21
Amendment 2013.indd 21
9/10/13 8:35 PM
