Tag: abortion poem

Abortion Stories from Writers Resist

Unlike 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 person, the person who is pregnant.

To those who feel confident they know better than the people to whom the decision belongs, we invite you to learn otherwise, and then join us.

Writers Resist is passionate in our support of reproductive justice—and we are in the majority—but we must do more to assure that across the United States abortion is legal, accessible, and safe for all.

 

The chart is from Pew Research Center.

Coat Hanger Song

By 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 taken

and fostered and fostered and

jailed for no crime of his own

Baby who commits suicide at nine

with a needle spooned from the shelter

of homelessness

Baby hit by the hunger of

water just to be wet

Black baby White

baby

Baby nursed by wolves or cats

Baby who killed his mother and

died anyway in the NICU of  broken

hearts or the

Baby kept in a shed of his own

milk and blood

Beaten like a drum, in the back

alley of our glorious forsaken nation.

 

Andrea England is the author of Other Geographies (2017, Creative Justice Press) and Inventory of a Field (2014, Finishing Line Press). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Potomac Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Fourteen Hills Review, and others.. Most recently she had the honor of being a Writer-in-Residence at Firefly Farms (SAFTA). She lives and works in Kalamazoo Michigan, where she teaches English and Creative Writing for various universities and organizations. To learn and read more about her and her work, visit andreajengland.com.

Photo credit: Photo by Palash Jain on Unsplash.

Dark Spaces

By 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 gods,
she had it even worse—at least Eve
knew what the apple looked like,
could touch it, fingertip trace its cheeks
and test for firmness. Fondling wouldn’t
have done Eve in, but all Pandora
had to do was crack her box
for the proverbial peak.
She couldn’t have known
what was in there, what could take root
in the world outside herself.
If she could have known,
of course she wouldn’t have
opened it and damned herself
to a notoriety which outstrips her gods.
Still we punish women who look
inside themselves to see
what seeds we bear, what traits,
what crooked stems and strains,
and we damn with new laws
those who slam the lid back down
and seal up in their cups and vessels
that which they will not tend and grow.

 

Heather Mydosh is a professor at Independence Community College in southeast Kansas and a recent graduate of the Stonecoast MFA at the University of Southern Maine. Her work has appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, After the Pause, 99 Pine Street, The Corvus Review, and Kansas Time + Place among others. Visit Heather’s website to learn more.

Painting credit: From the 1951 film Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.

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 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 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, 1942.
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 currently has poems in Earth’s Daughters, Lips, California Quarterly, Patterson Literary Review and the San Diego Poetry Annual. Garden Oak Press will publish my novel, Selling Pencils and Charlie in Spring 2020. “Floating” was previously published in Penny Perry’s poetry collection, Santa Monica Disposal & Salvage (Garden Oak Press, 2012).

Photo credit: Photo by Ava Sol on Unsplash.