Tag: abortion

Crying in Texas

By M.R. Mandell

       after “Kissing” by Dorianne Laux         

 

Crying as they hope for blood,
crying as they flush the strips,
crying as they hide their bumps.
They are crying in bathroom stalls,
behind Sugarland’s Kroger store.
They are crying on Houston corners,
outside the boarded-up laundromat.
They are crying in each other’s arms,
at the Hampton Inn off Highway 10.
They are crying in their Walmart
uniforms, and their Ann Taylor
suits, in their Wrangler jeans,
and Zara boots. They are crying
alone, on the edge, salt burning
their skin. They are crying as doctors
turn them away. They are crying
harder than before,
before the pious Robes lied.
Crying as they hope for blood.

 

M.R. Mandell (she/her) is a poet living in Los Angeles. A transplant from Katy, Texas, she now lives by the beach with her muse, a Golden Retriever named Chester Blue (at her feet), and her longtime partner (by her side). You can find her work in Chill Subs, Boats Against the Current, The Final Girl Bulletin Board, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, The Bloom, JAKE, Roi Fainéant, sage cigarettes, Anti-Heroin Chic, Stanchion Zine, Fine Print and others. She has works forthcoming in Drunk Monkeys, unstamatic (photo), and Olney Magazine (photos)

Photo credit: Ernesto Andrade via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Secrets in the Gazebo

By Penny Perry

For my Aunt Leona Heyert Tarleton
who died at age 33

 

We are looking at the mockingbird
in the lemon tree. This is the first day
of my cousin’s summer visit.
I wriggle closer to her.
“I know how my mother died,”
my cousin whispers.
The gazebo is the place for secrets.

My Aunt Leona was almost famous.
She wrote plays that were on Broadway,
did crossword puzzles in ink. On a cold
spring day when silly girls wore sundresses
and shivered, Aunt Leona wore a smart
wool suit and pinned a spring violet
on her lapel.

Wendy’s mother died when Wendy
was only seven months old.

My cousin squints at the sun shooting
off the adobe tile roof. This is the first day
of her summer visit.
The jasmine smells sweet. She is thirteen.
I am eleven.

“She had an abortion,” Wendy says.
Her eyes are bright. She loves telling me
things I’m not supposed to know.

“A-bor-tion,” I repeat. Grandpa taught us
to sound out long words.

Grandma calls my cousin an orphan
even though she  has a father.
“My mother didn’t want to have a second
baby so soon.”
“A baby?”
“It wasn’t a baby.
Your mother drove her to the bad doctor.”

“She wouldn’t do that.”
“But she did.”
I blot my wet face with my sleeve.
The excitement has left my cousin’s eyes.

Now I know why sometimes Mother
locks the bathroom door, turns the water
on full blast. She thinks I don’t hear her cries.

Wendy has long legs and her feet
touch the ground. My legs dangle
and the tie on the right sneaker has come
undone.

 

A seven time Pushcart nominee, Penny Perry has published a poetry collection, Santa Monica Disposal and Salvage (Garden Oak Press). Her novel Selling Pencils and Charlie, also from Garden Oak Press, was a finalist in the San Diego Book Awards in 2021. Her new poetry collection, Woman with Newspaper Shoes, was published June 2022 by Garden Oak Press.

Photo credit: “Polite Notice on Studded Door” is by Morning-meadow Jones, an American junior high school dropout, who later went on to realize her full potential and drop out of college too. She is a mother, migrant, and multi-media creative, practicing all manner of arts from her home in Wales, UK. She recently launched her writing career at the age of 51. Foolow her on Twitter at @Morning_meadowJ.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

 

A Simple Act

By Erin Edwards

 

It is a simple act to stand in the middle of the road. Simple, but effective. A car either has to stop and wait or run you down—and it just wouldn’t do for a hearse carrying the body of a former government official to accelerate towards a woman in the middle of the street.

Making a scene wasn’t something I’d planned. I hadn’t even been paying attention when they’d announced the route for Eric Marshall’s funeral procession on the news. Events simply collided, leaving me the perfect moment. The universe implored me to do something.

The route intersected my walk to work. Barriers prohibiting pedestrian access to the road lined the pavement, except at the crossing. There, two police officers simply held up a rope, keeping us all back. We were expected to stand in silence. Once the cars passed, they’d let us through, they assured us. But Eric Marshall had never let us rest for one moment once he stepped into office. What right did he have to a peaceful forever?

I didn’t want to wait until the cars had passed.

I looked around at the people bowing their heads, waiting respectfully for the procession to drive by. But Eric Marshall had done nothing to earn my respect.

The police officer guarding the crossing looked the other way, and there was my chance. I ducked under the rope and bolted for the middle of the road.

The procession was forced to stop. The car of a prominent government official, even a dead one, hitting a woman in front of dozens of cameras was unthinkable. The funeral was being streamed to the nation, but it wasn’t Eric Marshall’s show anymore. I looked around and saw the policemen frantically discussing my presence. Tackling a woman to the ground on live television wasn’t an option either, but I knew it would only be a few moments before they had the cameras turned off so they could haul me away. I needed to make it more difficult for them, so I sat down and laid back, tucking my arms underneath me to make myself harder to grab.

The tarmac was warm, cooking in the sun. I rested my head, feeling the uneven surface through my hair, and ignored the commotion around me. No one raised their voice—this was a funeral, after all—but there was plenty of debate. It would probably only be minutes before I was dragged away.

If I’d planned it better, I would have worn a long red cloak and a white bonnet, just so my stance on Eric Marshall’s politics was clear. He had stood in the way of so many women and their health, their right to choose. He’d convinced everyone that criminalising abortion had saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of children, but no one thought to mention the women who died as a result of the bill. Some were lost to backstreet abortions. Some took concoctions the internet promised them would end a pregnancy but wound up ending their lives. And some women just couldn’t take it.

I had heard stories of women placed under house arrest, under twenty-four-hour suicide watch, because they were deemed a risk to the foetuses they carried. Eric Marshall would turn us all into handmaids, if he had the chance. It was only right that someone stand between him and eternal rest.

The sky was cloudless and far-reaching above my head. I wondered how long it would be before I got to see it again—I knew I’d be heading to a police station rather than work when they moved me. I was contemplating whether they’d give me a chance to contact my flatmate and explain my absence at home, when I heard a yell.

“Another one!”

Before I had time to register where the shout had come from, someone skidded across the ground and stopped beside me.

“Sorry,” they said with a giggle. “I didn’t think that through.”

I turned to see another woman. She was far closer than I’d normally be comfortable with, but I appreciated the show of solidarity. From my limited vantage point, she was dressed for work, in a pencil skirt and floaty shirt with billowing sleeves. I wondered if she’d shredded them during her shaky landing. Despite any damage she might have done to her clothes or herself, she was grinning.

“Hi.” I laughed, a little manic. “You know they’ll arrest us for this?”

“Yeah, I figured. But if there’s two of us, it’s harder for them,” the woman said, shrugging. “I’m Daphne.”

“Allyson,” I introduced myself. “Thank you.”

We were at rather an awkward angle to shake hands, but instead Daphne threaded her arm through mine and linked us together. If they tried to drag one of us away, they’d have to take us both.

I didn’t ask Daphne why she hated Eric Marshall. She could have just hated the way he had knocked over the first domino—there was already talk of having women of childbearing age assigned to a guardian, whether that be a family member or partner, to ensure she “acted responsibly.” It was only getting worse. There was always the chance her hatred was personal. She could have lost a friend, a family member or a loved one. It wasn’t the kind of thing you asked someone when you’d just met and you were lying on the burning tarmac in the middle of the road in front of a funeral procession.

They must have shut off the cameras, because a police officer came to stand over us. The sun shone behind his head, backlighting him so all of his features were sunk in shadow.

“All right, ladies, you’ve had your fun. Show some respect, get moving,” he ordered, waving his hands like he could waft us away like a bad smell.

“This is a protest,” Daphne said, her voice stronger than mine would have been.

“This is a funeral,” the officer replied.

“You see a funeral; we see a celebration of the loss of our human rights,” Daphne shot back.

She tightened her grip around my arm. Despite the sun, I stared right up at the officer’s face, jaw clenched. Leaving quietly wasn’t an option.

The officer huffed and walked away. The debate on how best to pitch us out of the road was growing loud. I could hear shouting and radios, as they called for backup and argued over strategy. They didn’t want to make martyrs of us, but every second we were left there was another moment that Eric Marshall was rotting in his coffin.

I turned to look at the hearse, only feet from me. The black paint was glossy enough that I could see my face in it. There was me, there was Daphne, and there was what seemed like miles of empty road. If I had planned any of this, I would have brought handcuffs to lock myself to the grill. We likely had mere moments before we were picked up and tossed into the back of a police car.

“It was nice to meet you, Daphne, I said. “Thanks for doing something stupid with me.”

“Oh, I don’t think it’s over,” she said.

I could hear a grin in her voice and when I turned to see what she could possibly be smiling about, I found her looking the other way. At the crossing where I’d originally snuck through, there was a whole group of women. There had to be twenty or thirty of them, all pushing forward against a row of police. The officers had abandoned the rope they’d been holding up and were trying to create a wall of riot shields.

Our anger had been building for so long. Layer upon layer of it, another spark added to the fire each time we felt the restraints of Eric Marshall’s policies: the men-only bars and restaurants we were banned from for our own safety, the TV adverts begging us to take care of our health to ensure thriving offspring, the poster campaign that screamed “A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE HOME!” It was enough to drive anyone to rage. They say that a woman can display superhuman strength to save a child, but no one ever realised that she could do it to save herself, too. She just had to be pushed far enough.

I watched, sideways and half-blocked by Daphne, as the group of women burst through the line of police. Once one had breached the blockade, they all piled through the gap before it could be closed again. Shouts of victory and glee rang out as they ran towards us. Suddenly the empty road was a sea of bodies, clustering together and grabbing on to each other so no one was left vulnerable.

Information was shared through the crowd as quickly as people could speak the words. The official broadcast had been shut down, but social media livestreams had almost immediately started up in its place, shared by onlookers from nearby buildings. The world was watching.

Any lack of a plan on my behalf was immediately rectified by the women around me. They shared the number of a protest support line, reminders to go limp if someone tried to lift you, orders not to give personal information even if arrested. No one had any doubt that we would all be taken into custody, that Eric Marshall’s funeral procession would eventually continue, and he would be laid to rest. But first, we would make our stand.

 

Erin Edwards is a dedicated Londoner and compulsive writer, most often found in an archive or at the theatre. She is committed to providing the world with more queer content and is currently working on far too many different projects to do just that. You can find her Twitter at @EEdwardsWrites.

Photograph by Victoria Pickering via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist:

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Mother’s Letter to Her Best Friend

By Penny Perry

June 5, 1942

Dear Isabel,

I drove my sister to the doctor’s
in Los Angeles. It all happened
so quickly. I promised to bring her
a chocolate phosphate when
it was over.

She joked with the nurses.
Told them if she puked
from ether she would buy
each of them a pair of nylon
stockings.

She insisted on ether because
her friend Hannah had told her
an abortion would be too
painful without it.

In the waiting room, I picked
up a movie magazine.
During the next ten minutes
I heard a harsh breathing
as though she were gasping.
I told myself she would breathe
differently under ether.

A nurse rushed to the telephone
to call emergency.
My knees collapsed.
I remember the sounds of sirens
on the street, footsteps on the stairs,
the horrible hissing sounds
of the oxygen tent.

I remember words like
“her pulse rate is low.”
“She has a seven-month-old baby
at home.” “Isn’t it a pity?”

Finally, the doctor came out
and said “Your sister is dead.”
The bastard didn’t even have
the sense to shut the door.
I could see her head thrown back
on the table.
He told me to stop screaming.

 

Penny Perry has received six Pushcart nominations. Garden Oak Press published her first novel, Selling Pencils and Charlie, and a collection of her poetry, Santa Monica Disposal and Salvage. New poems are forthcoming in Earth’s Daughters, Lips, the Paterson Literary Review, and the San Diego Poetry Annual. She is the fiction/nonfiction editor of Knot Literary Journal online.

On the Front Lines

Fiction by Kit-Bacon Gressitt

You look in the bedroom mirror, small enough to deny self-adoration, and pull your brownish hair into a ponytail. Tight, like Mother used to do it. You turn to the bed. Your clothes are laid out on sheets held in place by perfect hospital corners. You dress in practical layers, to accommodate the variable temperatures of the daylong vigil you perform every Thursday. First, your underthings, then flesh-tone tights and a plain white t-shirt. Next, the pleated blouse Mother used to wear, when you held the vigils together, and ski pants, a modest one size too large. Finally, a nice worsted wool skirt you found at Goodwill for a dollar. It’s a bit matronly, but you top it off with your 12-week ultrasound hoodie.

You strap on your choose-life fanny pack, loaded with crisis pregnancy tracts and embryo dolls; take the bigger-than-life-size fetus parts poster in one hand and your calico-covered Bible in the other; and you march to the local abortion mill. Battle ready. Here profit motive thrives under Satan’s leering eyes and abortions are marketed to the vulnerable—to provide lucrative embryos for ungodly research. You believe this with all your heart because that’s what the tracts tell you.

You bungee-cord the poster to a tree and take your position between the clinic entrance and the parking lot. You’re armed with the assurance that you’re doing God’s righteous work, as Mother taught you, witnessing for life, sidewalk counseling would-be abortion victims, guiding them away from mortal sin, toward salvation. You adjust the bunched-up layers around your waist while you await the poor misguided mothers, bearing their precious preborns to slaughter. You know they will come, as they do every week, in numbers that torment your heart with the horrid image of God’s beloved innocents torn asunder by evil and torturous tools in the hands of Death’s doctors. But you are stalwart, determined to rescue a life from the great abyss of immoral destruction.

The clinic opens, the women and girls—not so much younger than you—begin to arrive, and you gird your supplies—they are comforting. Mother was so much better at this.

You take a breath. “Excuse me,” you say as you step before the nearest sinner heading for the door. The young woman looks sad. She wears immodest jeans from which she’ll soon burst forth in the full flower of maternal fertility—if you can lead her to Jesus.

“How many weeks are you?” you say.

“Huh?” the girl says, wires dangling from her ears to a front pocket.

“How many weeks pregnant are you?” You give her your kindest, most eager smile.

“Hmm?” The girl frowns, pulls a phone from her pocket and, without looking up, says, “What?”

“Do not renounce God’s miracle growing within you,” you say. “Already it feels. Already it knows life. Already it loves you.”

She stares at you, says nothing. She needs you.

“I know you’re scared and confused, but don’t succumb to the fear of your situation, to the temptation of an easy solution. In truth, it is not easy. There are better ways. God has sent you his love and support—through me. Choose life for your preborn child.”

The girl pulls the wires from her ears. “What did you say?”

“Choose life,” you repeat. You put down your Bible and pull a tiny plastic embryo from your fanny pack. “Look, this one, this one here is probably the size of yours. Choose life for the blameless gift God has given you, and you will receive his endless blessings. Choose life for your baby and heavenly eternity for yourself.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the girl says and steps around you.

“Please wait!” Mother taught you how to deal with denial. You must use extreme counseling technique. You grab the girl’s hand and drop to your knees. “You needn’t be afraid. Turn your heart away from the evil of abortion. God’s innocent fruit grows in the garden of your womb. Don’t let them suck it out to rot in the bowels of evil!”

“Gross.” The girl pulls away from you.

You hold on tighter. “Don’t do this,” you say. “We’ll help you through your pregnancy and then—”

“Yeah?” the girl says, “and then what?”

“Then the lord will provide.”

“Yeah, right.” The girl snickers and pulls harder. “Let go of me.”

“No, please.” You try not to, but you cry. “Listen to me.” The girl hesitates. Your nose drips. You look up at her and think of Mother. “Before God formed the sinless one in your womb, he knew her. His hands shaped and made her. Would you now turn from the wonder of his love?” You wipe your nose on the sleeve of the ultrasound hoodie and wrap yourself around the girl’s calves.

“You’re nuts.” The girl struggles against your embrace. “Let go—let go!”

“I can’t. Jesus wants me to save you. Please don’t murder your baby! Give your preborn the gift of life!”

The girl yanks one leg free, puts her foot against your chest and pushes you backward. “Cool your shit,” she says. “I’ve got a killer UTI—stay the fuck out of my way.”

You gather yourself and get up from the sidewalk, brushing dirt and leaves from the nice Goodwill skirt, tidying your ponytail, and you wonder if the clinic switched the weekday it murders unborns. Nausea quivers through your belly at the thought of having to change your routine. The routine you and Mother performed together every week. Mother, who didn’t abort you.

“Have a blessed day,” you call after the girl.

She’s already inside.

January 22 is the anniversary of the Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision guaranteeing women the freedom to make their own private reproductive decisions. It’s also Kit-Bacon Gressitt’s birthday, which has long seemed significant to her. Spawned by a Baptist creationist and a liberal social worker, K-B inherited the requisite sense of humor to survive family dinner-table debates and the imagination to avoid them. As a result, she’s a feminist writer, she supports unrestricted access to affordable abortion and other reproductive health services, and she’s an LGBTQ rights advocate. She also birthed a child of color, who’s taught her a lot about white privilege and intersectionality. An erstwhile political columnist with an MFA in Creative Writing, K-B is now an occasional Women’s Studies lecturer. Visit her website, Excuse me, I’m writing.

Because it’s unlikely the nation will see anything from the new administration akin to President Obama’s 2016 commemoration of the Roe v Wade decision, it is reprinted here:

The White House
January 22, 2016

Statement by the President on the 43rd Anniversary of Roe v. Wade

Today, we mark the 43rd anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, which affirmed a woman’s freedom to make her own choices about her body and her health. The decision supports the broader principle that the government should not intrude on private decisions made between a woman and her doctor. As we commemorate this day, we also redouble our commitment to protecting these constitutional rights, including protecting a woman’s access to safe, affordable health care and her right to reproductive freedom from efforts to undermine or overturn them. In America, every single one of us deserves the rights, freedoms, and opportunities to fulfill our dreams.

Reading recommendation: The Cider House Rules by John Irving.

Embryo doll photo credit: Anthony Easton via a Creative Commons License.

Floating

By 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 LA.

Leona squinted at California bungalows,
backyards with orange trees.
She thought about her husband home worrying,
her baby daughter waiting for her.

She told my mother about her screenplay,
a murder in the Braille room of the public library.
Then, she sat silent, her long fingers tangled like kelp.

The doctor glanced at his medical license
framed on the wall behind him,

said he was afraid to use ether.
Leona jutted her famous Heyert jaw:
“My friend Ruth told me to insist.
With ether I’ll float above the pain.”

It was hot that June morning, 1941.
No air conditioning. My mother
in the waiting room thumbed through magazines.
Big-eyed Loretta Young on the cover of Life.

It happened fast. Ether, a busy housewife,
pulled down the shades.

The doctor waved my mother in.
White face, head back, Leona was no longer breathing.
The ribbon in her dark hair floated in the breeze of a fan.

………………………………………………………

Penny Perry is a five time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her first poetry collection, Santa Monica Disposal & Salvage, was published in 2012 by Garden Oak Press. Her new collection, Father Seahorse, will be published by Garden Oak Press in 2017.

Reading recommendation: Santa Monica Disposal & Salvage by Penny Perry.

A Poem by Rae Rose

The Other Day I Peed on a Stick

and when I peed on the stick I knew my blood was like poison.
When I turned 18, I had just started my medication, I peed on a stick, called a number
from the phone book to see if I could afford an abortion without anyone knowing.
It was a pro-life group with a deceptive name, the woman begging me to keep the baby.

So I told my mother. The doctor she took me to stuck his head in the room, said “Congratulations, you’re pregnant.” Shut the door. The woman who filled out my outtake form rattled on about her midwife. Her face changed. “You’re happy about this, right?”
She slowly drew hearts around her midwife’s name.

I wished those hearts could work some sort of magic —

make my blood less like the poison I was just beginning to know.
My mother’s aunt died of a back alley abortion. My mother wrote a poem about it called, “Floating,” because as she bleeds to death she is floating above the pain. Or maybe it was the ether that killed her. All sorts of things could kill you from an abortion back then.

At 22 my mother’s future mother-in-law said, “I can get you an abortion, but you have to say you’re crazy.” But my mother wanted him. In fact, my mother has wanted every pregnancy, especially the miscarriage. She has his mobile hanging above her bed.
A group of tiny ceramic bears in bowties that clink sweetly, quietly.

The other day I peed on a stick and when I peed on the stick
I knew my blood was like poison, but without my medication, I’ll go crazy.
I’ll never be the girl in the movie who throws up, pees on a stick, then says,
honey? I’m pregnant! And runs to her lover. Buys bitty shoes. Buys bitty hats.

I’ll never read aloud to my belly, then deny doing such a silly thing.
I won’t look into a tiny face and see a glimmer of me, of my mother, of my husband.
I won’t be looking at someone I will love forever. Someone to give the world to.
Someone for whom I’d make sure the world was something to fall in love with.

Trump is the President-elect. I peed on a stick and when I peed on the stick I knew
my blood was like poison and I’d spare a child all sorts of deformity, sickness.
I waited the two minutes you have to wait, wondering, what if he changes everything?
What if someday I can’t get an abortion, my blood like poison?

Will we use the phrase “back alley,” keep notes for other women of doctors who perform
the operation? Could I become a story my nephews tell? Another aunt with a tragic end? Will I float above the pain? Right out of the world I’d try to make magical for my child
if my blood was nothing, wasn’t anything like poison.

……………………………………………..

Rae Rose is a California poet and essayist whose work has been published in Cicada Magazine, Lilith Magazine and The Paterson Review, among other literary journals. Her book, Bipolar Disorder for Beginners is an account, in poetry and prose, of her struggles with that disease. Marge Piercy characterizes it as “powerful and emotionally charged.” Rae earned her MFA from Goddard College and is a poetry editor for Writers Resist.

Reading recommendation: Bipolar Disorder for Beginners by Rae Rose.