THE DAY ROE V. WADE WENT AWAY

by Susan Cossette

by Ed Hall

This is where I woke up,

sweaty, in beige underwear

a dirty nightshirt,a

my hair in moist tendrils.

 

The light barely comes in

through the grey shades.

When it does,

there is dust in the light.

Skin cells, pet dander float.

 

There are black wool robes,

hung on an iron bar along the cement wall.

The cats claw and climb, then flee.

 

Dark-robed figures point at me

and put the red hood over my head.

Judges, all of them.

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, Vita Brevis, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press), Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press), and After the Equinox.

BEFORE ROE V. WADE

by Marsha Owens

i knew that girl

who rode my bus,

raped by her uncle

who told us dirty jokes.

neighbor women whispered...

only twelve, gone to the home.

 

i knew the home

out of town

on the highway, for girls

who got themselves pregnant

like they caught a cold

for not wearing a jacket.

 

i didn’t know

the girl i passed downtown,

defiant chin lifted to catch

cooling air in the wrinkles

of her shiny black neck,

like road tar melting

on a hot july day, baby

in her 14-year-old belly.

 

i knew my whiter-than-white

neighborhood looked away

as i hung my white blouse 

in the closet,

coat hangers jangling

impatience like little girls

who just want to go outside

and play.

 

 

Author's Note: I came of age in the 1960s, and suddenly the world was upended... Vietnam, birth control, and in the 70s, RvW. The 1950s seemed like ancient history in many ways. I grew up in the South in a white neighborhood, but we didn’t use the word ‘segregated.’ Black people lived ‘downtown’ or ‘in the country.’ Now I feel like I’m living in a time warp as Roe v. Wade is, apparently, about to be overturned, and African Americans are once again, being lynched. 

Marsha Owens is a retired teacher who lives and writes in Richmond, VA, and at times, along the banks of the beautiful Chesapeake Bay. Her essays and poetry have appeared in both print and online publications including The Sun, The Dead Mule, Huffington Post, Wild Word Anthology, Rat’s Ass Review, Rise Up Review, PoetsReadingtheNews, and The New Verse News. She is a co-editor of the poetry anthology Lingering in the Margins, and her chapbook She Watered Her Flowers in the Morning is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

IT’S PERSONAL

by Martha Deed

for Ruth Bader Ginsburg

It's spring 1973 and the trees are budding
on 111th Street along the south edge of Columbia
and I, ripening also, am walking home
from the obstetrician's office at St Luke's
The walk is weekly now
Ready
Pass by a smiling female undergraduate
She waves and says
"Next time you will have a choice."
Yes
She does not know
This time I did have a choice
though others haven't
and while pregnant
I met with women at the clinic
(We negotiated my obvious condition delicately)
as I sent them to Puerto Rico or elsewhere
our male director having said
Psychotherapy is not the answer
for women who've been raped
or secretly abused
and so we linked with doctors*
who had licenses and safe offices

Five women
We looked at each other
We saw each other
We understood that what is good for one
could be catastrophic for the other
We understood that freedom does not include
dictating what should happen to someone else's body

but only what should happen to our own 

*Our clinic utilized Clergy Consultation Service.

Martha Deed, PhD has published two poetry collections (Under the Rock, 2019 and Climate Change, 2014, both with FootHills Publishing) 5 other full-length books, a half dozen chapbooks since her retirement as a Psychologist, dozens of poetry publications.  Her work is frequently anthologized. She received a Pushcart Nomination from The New Verse News in 2011. Lives on the Erie Canal in WNY.

A GIRL STORY, CIRCA 1960

by Marsha Owens

We rode the same school bus,
but Trudy had boobies.
Like a scrub bush by the road
she sat alone, her face pressed
to the window. Some boy
always dropped in beside her
like he was doing her a favor.

One day, she didn’t ride the bus,
her absence an exhale never missed.
Mom said she went to the home
out on the highway where girls
go who get themselves pregnant.

Christina in English class got all As,
went to church, went all the way
& got herself pregnant, shameful
they said & she watched her boyfriend
march in graduation, then in Vietnam.

I saw a movie, smokey, sharp needles & dark
alleys, men jumping in & out of cars,
off & on girls with hollowed-out eye sockets,
pain screamed like life caught in a trap.

Back in my dorm I hung up my blouse,
coat hangers jangled impatience like little
girls who just want to go outside and play.

Marsha Owens lives and writes in Richmond, VA. Her work has been published in The Wild World Anthology, Streetlight Magazine, Huffington Post, and others. She co-edited the anthology Lingering in the Margins.

THE POWER OF WHITE MEN

by Ashley Green

Hours after the Alabama Senate voted late Tuesday to ban abortions in almost all circumstances — including in cases of rape and incest — women’s rights activists and abortion advocates said the decision to approve the nation’s strictest abortion measure has energized them. Knowing that the bill was designed to challenge Roe v. Wade, they are gearing up for the fight. The Senate’s approval of the legislation in a party-line 25-to-6 vote Tuesday sent it to Gov. Kay Ivey’s desk. . . . Ivey signed the law Wednesday.” —The Washington Post, May 15, 2019. Photo by Chris Aluka Berry/Reuters via Aljazeera, May 15, 2019.

Twenty-five fingers slide between
Alabama’s legs as the white, male
gaze of the white, male monster
searches Her face for panic.
Women can’t be trusted
drips from its twenty-five mouths
and its fifty corners upturn as its
red tape tongues wraps themselves
around Her body.
They pull Her toward the stench
of the past that blossoms
at the back of its throats.
Her sisters' cries
echo from the darkness
of the monster’s shared gut.
She can hear the dying
of Georgia, Kentucky and Ohio,
of Mississippi and Arkansas,
as each plummets backward
in time behind the teeth of
the white, male mouths
sitting on the white, male faces
of the white, male monsters
destroying the country.


Ashley Green is a Southern California writer, poet, and feminist.

ON NOTICING HOW MANY PRO-LIFE MEN ARE SMOKERS

by Julie Steiner

Sing about the sanctity human life has.
Preach with all your passion: Abortion’s murder!
Afterwards, wind down with a soothing ciggie,
     smug in your maleness.

Suck the calming poison that causes cancer.
Taint the perfect organs your Maker gave you.
Human life is precious in women’s bodies.
     Not in your own, though.

Slowly self-destruct, in a way that rules out
making any life-saving gifts to others.
Maim your liver, pancreas, kidneys, heart, lungs.
     Damage them. Waste them.

Vandalize these treasures, so you and others—
patients needing transplants—will perish sooner.
God made women vessels of life, not you, right?
     Men don’t get pregnant.

Smoking? That’s your medicine. Helps you function.
Helps you fight anxiety, which unmans you.
If you quit, you’ll crumble. Complete your mission!
     Think of the children—

millions—who will live when abortion’s outlawed.
(Care about them only until they’re born, though.
Vote against the programs that help support them.
     Kids are expensive.)

Think of justice: women should feel the birth pangs
God assigned to Eve, in His perfect wisdom.
Sin and death were caused by a wayward woman.
     Women should suffer.

Virtue equals maleness. Its root's the Latin
vir, “a man” . . . not homo, “a human being.”
Eve is evil. Punish, control, subdue her,
     adamant Adam.

Let your male self-righteousness rise like incense.
Smoke like that proverbial chimney, built on
hearthstones far beneath you, where women labor.
     Tower above them,

fiery martyr. Fume at the fallen females.
Wheeze your hymns to Him—to Almighty Maleness.
God forbid that women should say, as men do,
     This is my body.

Julie Steiner lives and writes in San Diego. Besides the TheNewVerse.News, the venues in which her poetry has appeared include the Able Muse Review, American Arts Quarterly, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, First Things, Rattle, and the Rat's Ass Review.

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.

WOMEN KEEP ON COUNTING

by Tricia Knoll

Image source: I love it when I wake up in the morning and Barack Obama is President.

For regular women like me
it’s possible to set an alarm
on any computer to remind
what day is most likely
what day is a bit late
what date is too late

Counting, getting to plus five
and no blood; we have been there,
regulars and irregulars
worrying
keeping silences

the want to be mothers
the can’t be mothers
the victims of others

the girl I knew
had to go to Mexico
and came back bloodied
sick and sterile
rocking in a chair
with her teddy bear

that was a long time ago
and women keep on counting


Tricia Knoll was a young woman before Roe v. Wade. She saw first hand the disintegration of a wonderful woman from a butchered abortion. Tricia Knoll is a Portland, Oregon poet.