Writing is an act of resistance
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The President Signs the Criminal Justice Reform Act
Jack Mackey, prison industrial complex, prison reform, criminal justice reform, end mass incarceration, PoetryBy Jack Mackey In the Oval Office dripping in rehearsed applause from the full-pocketed and the bloated paid to do a job by corporate wardens enriched by a three-strike law that scooped up traffic violators like escaped farm animals surrounded by billionaire brothers who bought a conscience on closeout after years of dictating to…
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Abortion Stories from Writers Resist
reproductive justice, Writers Resist news, reproductive rights are human rights, abortion poem, abortion stories, abortion essay, abortion is still legalUnlike the statistics above, our stories help humanize the theme of abortion, and this week we are sharing five of them, in poetry and prose, by Mileva Anastasiadou, Andrea England, Vicki Cohen, Heather Mydosh, and Penny Perry. Like every piece in the issue, each abortion decision is unique and intimate, and it is owned by only one…
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How to Disappear Completely
Fiction, reproductive rights are human rights, Mileva Anastasiadou, abortion story, abortion is still legal, reproductive justiceBy Mileva Anastasiadou She’s not that young, already in her mid-twenties, when the double lines appear on the test. She is careful enough most of the time, yet that’s how it goes; life happens and spoils all plans. At first, she’ll panic. That doesn’t mean much, her boyfriend will say; everybody panics at the…
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Coat Hanger Song
reproductive justice, Poetry, reproductive rights are human rights, Andrea England, abortion poem, abortion is still legalBy Andrea England The baby born into a subway toilet between Harvard and Porter Baby with the too-big head and ears that flap in the wind from a smack Baby addicted to crack turned blue as a bruise in his birthday suit Baby unwanted and doesn’t know why His father raped his mother Baby…
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On Abortion
abortion is still legal, reproductive justice, Essay, reproductive rights are human rights, Vicki CohenBy Vicki Cohen I am a nurse-midwife. For over thirty years, I provided prenatal care for pregnant women and welcomed new life. It was mostly happy work, but sometimes I’d find myself worrying about the women who lived in poverty or suffered from substance abuse, the thirteen-year-old who didn’t know she was pregnant until…
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Dark Spaces
Poetry, Heather Mydosh, reproductive rights are human rights, abortion poem, abortion is still legal, reproductive justiceBy Heather Mydosh For Indiana HEA 1337 Eve is a common punch line in the joke against women with her penchant for the forked tongue and listening to more than one authority figure, but if we peel it back a little further to rectilinear Pandora, bless her, created first among women by temperamental adolescent…
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Floating
reproductive rights are human rights, abortion poem, abortion is still legal, reproductive justice, Poetry, Penny PerryBy Penny Perry Mother couldn’t have known what to do. She was only twenty-five, drove her big sister, Leona, six weeks pregnant to the doctor’s in L.A. Leona squinted at California bungalows, backyards with orange trees. She thought about her husband home worrying, her baby waiting for her. She told my mother about her…
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Mamichu
By Robert Walton “Mamichu, it’s cold!” I looked at Ivar. I looked at his knobby lump of a head, at his lips lying beneath his broken nose like twin dead slugs, at his eyes glistening beneath his granite ledge of a brow, eyes so small I never knew their color. There was no pleasure…
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At the Funeral of 50 Barefoot Men
By Amirah Al Wassif once upon a time there was an ancient place called “Amon” village that very far spot where everybody talks about the river legend that very far spot where everybody knows how to distinguish the smell of fresh bread there, at the Amon village where all the folks live in their…