Mimi Iimuro Van Ausdall--writer and teacher

There Are Girls Like You in Japan

You stuff your bag into the overhead compartment. You sit down across the aisle from your mom who has planned this trip to Japan, her homeland, in a last-ditch effort to gather and pull the thin string that holds your small family of mom, dad, sister, and you together.

“There are girls like you in Japan,” she once said. You had come out to her maybe a year or two earlier shortly after graduating from college. “Just wait ‘til I tell my brother.” She shook her head in a “Damn, I got a defective one” way. You marked this as progress from her earlier responses, which ranged from sobbing to donning a gold cross necklace. “You’re not Christian,” you remember stating. “I pray every day you will be change,” she said. You said nothing about Buddhism’s underpinnings in the idea of change.

Parenting In Low Light

I couldn’t see the babies’ faces, their expressions, and couldn’t even necessarily tell which end was the head and which the toes without awkwardly reaching out toward a baby–sometimes hitting flannel sheet, sometimes nicking a cheek, sometimes finding the adorable roundness of baby rump. It might sound sweet, this blind reaching, but to me it felt that I was being smacked in the face with my disability: I was blind. I am blind.

As Long as Turtles Live

My gay house is her body. Tall. I call it beautiful. She laughs and says, “No, squiggly.” Beautiful, I say. “Squiggly,” she insists. Beautiful squiggly. We make love every time we see each other. Her body becomes my home. The walls that help protect me, warm me. We will love each other for as long as little turtles live. Her back combines with mine to build a home for the mushy hurt of our guts. A safe place to scream, to come, to cry. We fence our fingers together. Then, the sperm enters her and the nausea begins. We go to Santa Fe. She is maybe six weeks pregnant. I kiss her. I try to coax her into body interest on this baby moon, but her tummy rumbles. Two fetuses suck her blood and marrow. She is nauseous every second of every day. Hyperemesis gravidarum, the doctors say.