What God Is Honored Here?: Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss by and for Native Women and Women of Color

287 Pages·2019·11.892 MB·English

by  Shannon Gibney, Kao Kalia Yang

Shannon
Gibney
and Kao
Kalia Yang,
Editors
What
God Is
Honored
Here?
Writings on
Miscarriage and
Infant Loss by
and for Native
Women and
Women of Color
What
God Is
Honored
Here?

What
God Is
Honored
Here?
Writings on
Miscarriage and
Infant Loss by
and for Native
Women and
Women of Color
Shannon Gibney and
Kao Kalia Yang
Editors
University of
Minnesota Press
MinneaPolis
london
Lucille Clifton, “the lost baby poem” from The Collected Poems of Lucille
Clifton. Copyright 1987 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with permission of
The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd.,
www.boaeditions.org.
Excerpt from “The Afterbirth, 1931,” by Nikky Finney, from Rice: Poems
(Evanston: TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2013),
65– 71. Copyright 2013 by Nikky Finney. This edition published by
TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press by arrangement with
Nikky Finney. All rights reserved.
“Harlem [2]” by Langston Hughes, from The Collected Poems of Langston
Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, associate
editor, copyright 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Reprinted
by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday
Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights
reserved.
Copyright 2019 by Shannon Gibney and Kao Kalia Yang
Individual essays and poems copyright 2019 by their respective authors
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without
the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from
the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-5179-0793-8 (pb)
Printed in Canada on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator
and employer.
24 23 22 21 20 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For the women in this anthology and women everywhere
who have experienced pregnancy loss, or whose babies have died.
For all we have lost, and all we love.

what have we come to now
what ground is this
what god is honored here
— Lucille Clifton, “eyes”
(quoting from The Gospel at Colonus)

Contents
Introduction: Reclaiming Life 1
Shannon Gibney and Kao Kalia Yang
the lost baby poem 11
Lucille Clifton
Then and Then 13
Sidney Clifton
Lessons from Dying 19
Sarah Agaton Howes
April Is the Cruelest Month 23
Michelle Borok
Not Everything Is a Patch of Wildflowers 37
Maria Elena Mahler
Tilted Uterus: When Jesus Is Your Baby Daddy 45
Taiyon J. Coleman