ANYWHERE BUT HERE

by Pamela Kenley-Meschino

The foetus of a brain-dead Georgia woman [Arianna Smith] who is being kept alive to carry out her pregnancy is continuing to grow, the woman’s mother said late Monday, days after the controversial case exploded into the national news and sparked questions about the ethics of using the state’s anti-abortion law to keep a woman with no chance of recovery on life support. —The Guardian, May 20, 2025. Photo of Arianna Smith and her 7-year-old son from the GoFundMe page set up on behalf of Arianna’s mother.

Her body a vessel for the child 
who will never know her,
or for no one at all.
Alive, but not alive, her breath 
transported through tubes, 
her young face disappeared 
in a shroud of wires, a funereal tangle
of melancholy inflicted upon her. 
 
Anchored in place by law, 
her heart beats a death march,
countdown to an end she might 
long for if she could say,
if she were anywhere but here.

Pamela Kenley-Meschino is originally from the UK, where she developed a love of nature, poetry, and music, thanks in part to the influence of her Irish mother. She is an educator whose classes explore the connection between writing and healing and the importance of shared stories.

GHOULS

by Lynn White

Is it ghoulish

to think

that life 

is more

than a small collection of cells

in a uterus.

Is it ghoulish

to think

that 

the life of the mother

and the spillage

of her blood

count for less

than the small collection of cells

in her uterus

that are unable to bleed.

Is it ghoulish

to think

that infant life

needs love

as it grows

and support networks

and things that cost

society

dear

through life

if it does not supply them.

Is it ghoulish 

to ask

how 

the highest court

in the land

was taken over

by ghouls.

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality and writes hoping to find an audience for her musings. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including Apogee, Firewords, Peach Velvet, Light Journal, and So It Goes.

THE ART OF THE HANGER

by Anita Pulier

Abortion rights supporters protest outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday. Credit: Valerie Plesch for NBC News.

Momma taught us to hang up our coats

tidy our rooms

and so we became familiar with them

Now that gang of robed men

and one godsmocked woman

remind us of the skills

we honed in the 60s then

abandoned when Roe freed us

to seek health care

in hospitals or clinics

where decisions

about our bodies

our lives

our futures

were ours

and we could safely

refuse to carry a doomed fetus

refuse to sink into poverty

refuse to empower rape and incest

now

untwist the sturdy wire

from its frame

squat, push it in

deep

scrape around

bleed

remember even 

their God still loves you

but they

don't give a damn

Anita S. Pulier’s chapbooks Perfect Diet, The Lovely Mundane, and Sounds of Morning and her books The Butcher's Diamond and Toast were published by Finishing Line Press. Anita’s poems have appeared in many journals and her work is included in nine print anthologies. Anita has been a featured poet on The Writer's Almanac.

SACRED

by George Held

The governor’s statement places
the key word, “God,” in the place

of emphasis, at the end, where
it makes the most of her pious case

but most offends those who question
when a fetus has become a “life”

or even doubt there is a god,
at least one who can give sacred gifts,

and those who believe that a woman’s life
is her own to join in sex with whomever

she wants and once pregnant whether
or not to delete that tiny comma without

the intervention of the almighty state.
What sort of Handmaid’s Tale

is ‘Bama spinning here now that its Senate
and the Court are packed with Medieval

men of the Right who consign women
to the stove and the marital bed,

where all conception is authorized
by a Fundamentalist Godhead.

What country is this where theocracy
struts its stuff in public and democracy

hides under the bed to avoid
a vengeful thrashing? My count-

try, ’tis of me, I sing, sweet place
of Liberty, of thee I sing . . .


George Held, a frequent contributor to TheNewVerse.News and other periodicals, has received ten Pushcart Prize nominations and published or edited twenty-two poetry books.

LIFE AFTER THE DECREE

by William Aarnes

“I Have a List of Replacements for the CDC’s 7 Banned Words” —Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, December 15, 2017

The first weekend after the decree
that public norms and preferences
should determine what we know,
my wife and I jokingly wondered
what we should call
the life she’d been carrying
(the sonogram doesn’t show
much of anything).

That Sunday my gleeful parents
skyped to ask us to fly down
to celebrate how the country
was returning to its senses.
They were overjoyed to think
that those unwarranted Social Security
deposits could finally stop
(the wealth that Mom inherited
is just the coolest thing).

By that Wednesday I’d concluded
that my—what would be the right word?—
changeling research assistant  
had stopped coming in to work
(not that I minded,
since any fool could see
that the data we’d been collecting
on the social causes of indigence
didn’t prove a thing).

Now, on the subway, on the streets,
in the building corridors,
on TV, at the gym,
at the construction sites,
in all the classrooms,
even in the military,
everybody’s become a white heterosexual
(thank goodness my DNA test
and particularly my father’s
don’t mean a thing).


William Aarnes lives in South Carolina.

BANNED WORDS

by Joan Colby

When words are banned freedom is vulnerable
As an undesired fetus.
Its existence is not an entitlement.
We thought freedom was science-based
Comprising the diversity
Of race, religion, gender, even the transgender

Of nuance. Not written in stone, transgender
Employs choice in a  way that is vulnerable
To the notion of diversity.
Imagine that a fetus
Could be both science-based
And mystical. An existence less an entitlement

Than a desire. Those who feel entitled
To condemn the idea of transgender
Don’t reckon with what can be science-based
Or perception. If even language is vulnerable
To such dictates-- say the personhood of the fetus—
Then all political diversity

Will be challenged. The world is nothing if not diverse
As Darwin proved. Shape was not an entitlement
But subject to mutation like a fetus
That could be male, female or a transgender
Complexity once entirely vulnerable
To the decisions of science-based

Physicians who assigned gender scientifically based,
Or so they claimed, on diverse
Characteristics. Just like language is vulnerable.
In fact, they felt entitled
To manipulate sexual identity. Transgender
Would not be permitted. The fetus

Was a poltical victim. Its fetal
Nature denied any science based
Authenticity. Words like transgender,
Philosophies such as diversity
Would not be entitled
To exist. Thus we are vulnerable

To the designs of the pseudo science-based ideologues. Vulnerable
As the entitlements. As the fetus,
Male, female, transgender—the very concept of diversity.


Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press), Dead Horses and Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press), and Properties of Matter (Aldrich Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.

FUNERALS FOR FETUSES

by Eliza Mimski

This poster was created by Shepard Fairey who eight years ago made the iconic Obama poster that captured a period of HOPE in America. Today we are in a very different moment, one that requires new images that reject the hate, fear, and open racism that were normalized during the 2016 presidential campaign. So on Inauguration Day, We the People will flood Washington, DC with NEW symbols of hope. You can download the set of posters for free at: http://bit.ly/wtpdownloads. You can choose to support this We the People art project via Kickstarter.

1969. Nineteen years old and pregnant.
I couldn't afford to keep the baby.
In those days, before Roe vs Wade,
you had to prove to two psychiatrists
that you were mentally unable to go through
with the pregnancy.
They wrote letters to the medical board of the
hospital performing the abortion.
Insurance didn't cover the psychiatric visits.

The first psychiatrist asked if I would kill myself
if I didn't have the abortion.
I said yes, I would take my life,
even though this wasn't true.
He jotted some notes on a yellow legal pad.
He asked me little else.
The second psychiatrist asked if the sight of a penis
frightened me. I said yes. I lied that the sight of a penis frightened me.
He wrote that down.

My fate was in their hands.
They determined
my future . . .

The state of Texas now requires women
who have abortions or miscarriages
in hospitals,
in abortion clinics
or in other health facilities
to bury or cremate the fetal remains.

In Indiana, Mike Pence signed legislation
to force women to have fetal funerals
for abortions or miscarriages.
This can be carried out by the facility.
A name for the fetus during
transport to the burial ground
is not required.

Eliza Mimski is a retired high school English teacher living in San Francisco. She is still coping with the election and the news by writing poetry. Her work has appeared in Quiet Lightning's Sparkle and Blink, Fiction 365, Poets Reading the News, and is forthcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic.

OHIO BILL WOULD BAN ABORTION IF DOWN SYNDROME IS REASON

by Mary Leonard

CLEVELAND — Opening a new front in the abortion wars, abortion opponents are pushing Ohio to make it illegal for a doctor to perform an abortion if a woman is terminating her pregnancy to avoid having a baby with Down syndrome. The legislature is expected to approve the measure this fall because lawmakers endorsed by the National Right to Life Committee, which supports the bill, make up more than two-thirds of both houses. Photo: Protesters outside Preterm, an abortion clinic in Cleveland. Credit Michael F. McElroy for The New York Times —NY Times, August 22, 2015

Yesterday in yoga class, a handsome man arrived
            with his child. He placed her mat in front of mine.
 She was small, 13, 18?  with brown hair pulled back

 in a pony tail.  It wasn't until she turned
            and I saw her eyes, I knew
 she was a Down Syndrome child. As we stretched

 to the right, to the left, she was 30 seconds
            behind but kept up, didn't seem distressed,
 soldiered on, even when she couldn't do what the teacher said.

 When we did pranayama, followed by sighs
            hers were late and loud. The teacher said,
"That was very good sigh," smiled.

 The rest of us did not pay attention to the girl
             but to our own struggles with the asanas.
I looked up to see the child bend in half,

 fold over from her hips all the way down
            to her toes while the rest of us  stretched
 forward a few inches, our hands clutching our mats.

I thought about the handsome man, the father, I assumed,
              saw his athletic moves and his face
lined with worry. Where was the mother?

 Did the parents have a choice when they heard
            the fetus was Down's syndrome?

When the girl touched her toes,
             when she tried to follow,
I thought this child is a gift.

 But what did I know
            about this life: hers, his, theirs.
  I could only hope  that no law demanded,

"This fetus is a person and must be born."

Maybe difficult to think abortion with a child in front of me
            but not  difficult when a law could deny choice, making parents
 feel ashamed and dictate what life is and could be for all.


Mary Leonard has published chapbooks at 2River, Pudding House, Antrim House Press and RedOchreLit. Her poetry has appeared in The Naugatuck Review, Hubbub, Cloudbank. She lives in an old school house over looking the Rondout Creek.  Away from her own personal blackboard, she teaches workshops for all ages through Bard College.

RESERVE

by William Aarnes

Image source: UniteWomen.org

She lies on their bed,
still dressed.  She tells him.

that in this country,
if—a big if—

the penis and clitoris
are private parts,

 the uterus is not.
“My womb,” she explains,

patting her abdomen,
“is public domain,

one of millions of reserves
set aside to attest

to some people’s belief
that any fetus

has more sanctity
than any mother.”

She rubs her brow.
“Gives me a headache.”


William Aarnes lives and writes in South Carolina.