TWO DECADES BEFORE IT WAS LEGAL

by Sarah Brown Weitzman

Under a morning sky like curdled milk in a blue bowl

my childless friend of 40 years confesses to a 1953 abortion.

 

She was fifteen.  She was a virgin.  She had been beaten.

into submission.  She had been raped.  She gave

 

$100. to an elderly Carribean woman who laid her

hips on a rough, grayed towel, spread her knees apart

 

to stuff a narrow rubber hose cut from an enema bag

and stiffened with a copper strip up into her womb,

 

packed the cavity with wads of cotton, all tied together

by a string like a tampon.  “Tomorrow pull the string

 

and everything will come out.”  Three bright drops of blood

on the towel, the color of induced labor hours later.

 

The wall of her womb pierced.  Peritonitis. Hospital.

Penicillin.  Police.  But she was free of that unwanted child

 

or any child she could never have now.   Her nipples oozed

droplets of sour milk staining her bras for weeks after.

Sarah Brown Weitzman was a past National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Poetry and twice nominated for the Pushcart Poetry Prize.  A finalist for the Academy of American Poets First Book Award contest and the Foley Prize, Sarah has had poems published in hundreds of journals and anthologies including North American Review, Rattle, New Ohio Review,  Mid-American Review, Poet Lore, Potomac Review, Miramar, The American Journal of Poetry, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her fifth book Amorotica was published during the pandemic by Main Street Rag.

POTASSIUM CHLORIDE

by David Chorlton

(CNN) -- A double murderer was executed in Florida Wednesday night, becoming the third man put to death in an American prison during a 24-hour period. All three died by lethal injection.

A gurney stands still on its wheels
beneath a square of light intense enough
to reveal a human soul.
The floor is polished so clean
it floats from wall
to unblemished wall.
There’s a pillow,
freshly cleaned, and straps
no grief could ever break
to contain the spasms
when the clock shows time
coming to an end.
A neatly-typed protocol
describes every step
from cooking the final meal
to escorting witnesses away,
but has nothing to say for an instance
of the cocktail’s failure,
as if it had been written for a firing squad
and could not describe a dead man
spitting bullets out.


David Chorlton came to Arizona in 1978 after living in England and Austria. He has spent more than three decades stretched between cultures and writing poetry, the pick of which has just appeared as his Selected Poems, from FutureCycle Press.