Choice Words by Annie Finch

Author:Annie Finch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2020-02-09T16:00:00+00:00

THE VIRGINITY THIEF (A LETTER TO MY MAN)

Thylias Moss

Dear H,

I’m sixty-five, retired, mixed-race with one term-pregnancy—my son, who is thirty-seven, the best son anyone could ever want—and I’m an award-winning poet, Professor Emerita at a major research university where I was Full Professor of English and Full Professor of Art and Design, and finally in Love with the finest man on the face of the earth, you, a poet also, a life made possible because I had an abortion following my loss of virginity: rape at age fifteen that resulted in pregnancy fathered by Charles Jones, twenty-five-year-old deacon in my mother’s church, and director of the choir I was in.

I can’t tell you why I didn’t fight, instead giving in to paralysis. Each rough ripping of a button breaking in that harshness, mother-of-pearl molar and canine destruction like being bit into with rotting teeth, green at the gumline like Patrina’s, seemed more a misapplication of makeup than deliberate placement of gum disease finding its rot path. No way did I want anything like that to touch me!

D-Con assuring himself that no pregnancy could happen if I sat up, still draped in smelly blanket so semen could run down my legs in a carnivalesque application of cheap lotion. Smelly blanket over me like cloth privacy shield in case he was stopped and could easily explain just taking soloist home from Assembly Baptist Church, just alphabet: ABC.

To get home, I had to run, as he didn’t drive me. Made me get out of the car, I was glad to escape, ten baths weren’t enough; I didn’t stand up straight, found scoliosis out there also, specious muscle relaxant, repackaged snake oil oleo. Blue choir robe stained with a narrow stream of semen twisted as a poisonous snake, the full length, my virginity snaking away, subdividing into tributaries, snakelettes, seeking hem, him too for hellfire; I had very long natural fingernails, at least I could’ve scratched his face, but I didn’t want contaminated fingernails. I didn’t want to touch him anywhere. I wouldn’t get to give it to someone I chose (and I didn’t choose till you). Contaminated robe. That too I burned. Backyard ritual of fire (although I was terrified of matches), always plenty around because my father smoked Pall Malls, my hair having been caught in stove’s flames when I was eight, my signature braids burnt. Crispy.

But no period. Two weeks passed and no blood. I tried to tell D-Con that I was pregnant. What else could it be? Trying also to be back in school. Trying to talk with the only possible man, but he or his wife hung up the phone every time. I persisted. I wanted him to know what he’d done. My body was thickening with his baby, despite what he wanted to think. My large breasts swelled even larger. I kept calling and eventually he agreed to take me to his wife’s OB-GYN, all the bumpy ride hiding me under the ragged, stinky blanket, as if never washed.

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