Author Archives: Jendi Reiter

Missing Angels

The Dec. 11 issue of People Magazine reports on the Missing Angels movement, a group of bereaved parents who are lobbying state governments to issue birth certificates, as well as death certificates, for their stillborn babies. Founder Joanne Cacciatore, an Arizona social worker, recalls the pain she felt when she called the state’s bureau of vital statistics for a birth certificate for her daughter, who was born dead on her due date, and “the woman on the other end said, ‘You didn’t have a baby, you had a fetus.'”

Parents like Cacciatore say the certificate helps them grieve because it acknowledges that their child was a real person whom they lost. Abortion rights activists won’t stand for that:


In most of the bills, a stillbirth is defined as the unintended intrauterine death of an unborn child of at least 20 weeks’ gestation – problematic, according to Elisabeth Benjamin, director of the Reproductive Rights Project of the New York Civil Liberties Union, because “a child would have rights independent of the mother. We prefer the word ‘fetus.'”


Now, I don’t pretend to have a solution to the abortion dilemma, but this kind of cognitive dissonance is unsustainable. I thought feminism was about listening to women’s voices and validating their experiences. If the only way to make abortion acceptable to the American public is to pretend the baby never existed, pro-choicers have to wave away the deepest sorrows of women who feel they lost a wanted child, either to medical mishap or violence. What’s next? Should women feel guilty about putting sonograms in their baby albums? I just don’t understand how it can be a “baby” if you’re happy about it and a “fetus” if you’re not. And neither would most people, I suspect, if forced to look straight at the issue.

Poem: The Man Comes Around

He lifts up the chipped stone,
strokes the tousled grass,
its scent never greener than when crushed.
He breathes soft as feathers
on the blue, abandoned egg.

He watches the salmon feed on the glittering flies
and the coarse-furred bear feed on the salmon.
Quicksilver as thought chasing error,
rough as desire blanketing thought.

He shears the glacier like a lamb,
the seas split by a blade of ice.
He lies all day in silken paralysis
in a spider’s web.

He is a dead tree, a frigate
of green moss and mushrooms.
He falls like a tree in the fire,
the crack of a legion of snapped lances
as the blackened pines topple.

He cools like smoke,
plays disappearing games with the wind.

He sucks up the soil hungry as a worm,
as a diver drinking in sweet breath.

Spring shoots up green, the spear points hinting
of an army marching underground.
His voice is red as the hollering tulips.
His voice is white as the crash of ice
on the melting river.

He breaks the sun like bread,
shares the warm pieces around
in his burnt hands.


     published in The New Pantagruel, Issue 2.2 (2005)

New Site Launched

Welcome to the new JendiReiter.com, which differs from the old JendiReiter.com in that (1) it is a blog, and (2) it has no content. I hope to do something about (2) presently. My older poems and legal articles from the old site will be migrated over in the next month or so. Meanwhile, check out my other web ventures to find markets and contests for your poetry, or get your consciousness raised good and hard.