WITH CHILD

by Jan Chronister

Arizona for Abortion Access supporters carry photographs of women who died because of abortion bans during the 35th annual All Souls Procession—a two-mile long march for community members to honor ancestors and loved ones who have died—on Nov. 3, 2024, in Tucson, Ariz. (Mario Tama / Getty Images via Ms. Magazine)

Click to see "Rest in Power: A Running List of the Preventable Deaths Caused by Abortion Ban" by Roxanne Szal,  Ms. Magazine as of November 26, 2024.

At one time

being pregnant
was a dangerous
condition to be in.
 
I would have died
in childbirth like my 
grandmother
if I’d given birth
a hundred years ago.
 
My daughter, breach,
but barely six pounds.
Small enough
for the doctor to
reach in, position her
for delivery.
How would it have ended
without his help,
called in from fishing,
smoking a pipe.
 
My son’s cord
wrapped around his neck.
Intervention again.
A healthy baby boy is born.
 
The third time
I miscarried.
Doctors took care of me,
nuns ministered
to my soul.
 
No laws prevented them
from saving me.

Editor’s Note: Women NATIONWIDE can still receive safe, effective & affordable medication abortion services via the ASafeChoice Network of physicians. 

Jan Chronister splits her year between northern Wisconsin and southern Georgia. She has authored three full-length poetry collections and ten chapbooks. Her most recent is the fifth annual chapbook recounting the year through poems. Jan poetry appears in numerous print and online journals and anthologies. She also enjoys helping fellow poets publish their work.

HEMORRHAGE BOP

by Cindy Veach

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.

LIFE EXPECTANCY

by Martha Deed

Gravestone inscription: Erected in memory of Mrs. Kezia Cutter, wife of Mr. Richard Cutter, departed this life Dec. ye 1788, in ye 63rd Year of her age. "Watch ye, that live, for ye don't know / How near you are to death. / Or what may give the fatal blow / To stop your fleeting breath."

Life expectancy in the U.S. fell in 2021, for the second year in a row. It was the first time life expectancy dropped two years in a row in 100 years. —NPR, August 30, 2022

You could die of a sudden attack in church
be run over by a buffalo in Montana
be felled by a tree if you wielded an ax unwisely
or TB, smallpox or Typhoid
in a bomber over Northern France
starve
drown at sea
die in childbirth
fall off a horse or a runaway train in the Rockies
be kicked by a Union officer’s horse between battles
be killed at Deerfield or in Narrangansett Swamp
by a rogue at a card game in Deadwood

Death was just around the corner in those olden days
Everyone knew that life was a delicate thread
stitching oblivion before birth to oblivion after death
survival provisional and linked to mere chance

The old-timers knew
You can’t turn your back on death
Death can find you any place any time

But now—now we 21^st Century descendants
in a time of shrinking life expectancy
think we control our destiny
having survived hiding under desks
to fool the atom bomb

Now we do not await the trickiness of Fate
Now we have to look for the nearest exit
the place to run, hide or fight
at the grocery store or church or school
because we have turned nasty
or have not silenced others who have turned nasty—
the nastiest among us declaring supremacy
and the right to kill at will
die quickly on the street
or slowly by telling all the scientists
to go to hell

Martha Deed's poetry has appeared in The New Verse News and most recently or forthcoming in Moss Trill, Mason Street, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Grand Little Things, The Skinny Poetry Journal. Her poetry collections Under the Rock (2019) and Climate Change (2014) and a third collection forthcoming from FootHills Publishing. She is a retired psychologist who makes trouble with poetry inspired by crises and other mishaps around her house on the Erie Canal in Western New York.