HIS ABORTION POEM

by Dick Altman

Source: “Abortion” by John Bartlow Martin from the May 20, 1961, issue of the Saturday Evening Post.

he’s the golden boy

of parent/teacher/friend

the boy wanted on everyone’s side

the scholarship boy

the grad school boy

the golden boy

who in that familiar moment

of uncontrolled/youthful rapture

watches his golden prospects

for the future turn to dross

                      *

the Viet Nam draft

breathes down his neck

he still hasn’t found a job

(too educated, he’s told)

he’s not married

(though one day he will

marry the woman

he impregnated)

they are neither ready to marry

nor ready to have/support children

abortion is illegal

Roe vs. Wade is nowhere in sight

                       *

he reaches out to his composer father

who reaches out to friends

in the music business

an address and phone number

in Harlem surfaces

no names/no receipts

the golden boy borrows

from his father enough cash

to pay for a semester of college

the young couple agree

this is their only alternative

they discuss their mutual anxiety

she—they agree—must make

the decision

                         *

they never talk about what exactly

took place on the fourth floor

of the Harlem walk-up

she’s bleeding profusely by bed time—

in the emergency room by next morning

a spontaneous abortion the doctor calls it

knowing it wasn’t

whatever made the embryo abort

likely ended her/their prospects

of ever having children

Roe vs. Wade would not be decided

for another nine years

Politico’s revelation the Supreme Court

may overturn the decision

shatters him to tears

 

Dick Altman writes from New Mexico. His work has been widely published in the United States and beyond.

FLYOVER

by Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory




As the F-16s flew over Newark,
I wondered how many of my grandfather’s friends
who, too, lied about their ages in order to enlist

flashed back to Normandy,
whether the walls of ICU rooms at University Hospital
dissolved into the photographs he’d kept
Matryoshka-ed within boxes in his attic
until they were discovered by me,

exhaustion-emptied and grasping
for any signs of him I could still see
after both he and his Emily left the Earth,
but before the house was shuttered.

How many prayed
to trade one invisible war
for another,

the virus for vanishing neurons,

and wished
to change their ages
this one last time
to escape the draft?

Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory is a defense journalist and poet who was born in New Jersey and subsequently transplanted in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. She holds a B.A. in English Literature and Writing from New Jersey City University and an M.S. in Journalism with a Health and Science Reporting Concentration and a National Security Reporting Specialization from Northwestern University's Medill School.