Roe v Wade

An Antipoem

                        -for Nicanor Parra

If we compress space & time 

itki* takes us back to the Parisian coffeehouses 

& tobacco dens of the Enlightenment

where debate was the addiction

Where the entrenched religious

& young turk rationalists duked itki* out

denying or defending the New World

bestseller of the day:

Relations des Jésuites de la Nouvelle-France

(aka Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit

Missionaries in New France 1610-1791)

released annually in 70 some volumes of Latin

French & Italian

These vigorous disputes

against a backdrop of the Old World’s

embrace of the divine right of kings 

centered on pressing arguments

for & against liberté, égalité, fraternité

Enlightened catalysts 

that led to the French Revolution

& inspired the American one

As Graber & Wengrow explain

in The Dawn of Everything (2021):

“...scandalized missionaries frequently

reported that [native] American women

were considered to have full control

over their own bodies, and that

unmarried women had sexual liberty

and married women could divorce at will.

This, for Jesuits, was an outrage.

Such sinful conduct, they believed,

was just the extension of a more general 

principle of freedom, rooted in natural

dispositions which they saw as inherently

pernicious.”

So itki* is today with our

johnny-come-lately 

neo-Jesuit “orginalists”

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* “Ki” is a grammatical neologism Indigenous science writer Robin Wall Kimmerer advocates for using in place of “it”, “its”, “it’s” or “itself” to help correct English’s objectification of phenomena. The neologist term is harvested from the last syllable of a longer word in Potawatomi for an “earth being.” As a pre-school teacher I learned that we humans learn best by going through the known to the unknown. Instead of substituting “ki” for “it”, I’ve chosen to add the Indigenous neologism to our neutral English pronoun as a suffix, changing the way we speak of things in English from inanimate to animate. Indeed, that syllable, “ki”, is a Potawatomi suffix meaning “from the living earth.” Thus, itki means that even gender-neutral objects are in some way alive.