I watch three old white men on the news talking
about abortion how it’s no big deal for a woman
to get a bus ticket and travel to another state.
It’s trending on X, these old men in their suits and ties
with their limp cocks tucked away under the table
their small hands gesturing or resting on the table.
I’m hemorrhaging rage, thick red as postpartum blood.
And now Arizona has upheld a draconian Civil War-era
abortion law proving that the past does come back
to haunt. I almost bled out after my daughter’s birth.
I’ve never written about this. It took a helicopter
and two D&C’s to save me. A hundred years ago
I would have died of childbirth. I marched for the right
to choose in my 20’s only to lose it in my 60’s
I’m hemorrhaging rage, thick red as postpartum blood.
In the middle of yesterday the moon eclipsed the sun.
People were brought to tears as they watched
in their special protective glasses. People on both sides
of the aisle equally moved by the night of day.
The darkness I speak of is different. It digests everything
good and fattens the libidos of men.
I’m hemorrhaging rage, thick red as postpartum blood.
Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press) a 2022 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal finalist and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press) a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book ‘Must Read,’ and the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate). Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Chicago Review, Poet Lore, Salamander, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Philip Booth Poetry Prize and Samuel Allen Washington Prize, she is poetry co-editor of MER.
