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.

KYIV/SAN FRANCISCO

by Susan Gubernat

Tanks roll in again, wheels oiled by the slick substances

of nightmare. Across the street, thousands of miles away,

the flower stall opens this morning, spreads its wares

all the way to the curb. Yellow tulips, blue hydrangea.

The flower seller, Ukrainian, must know her business,

as she knows her politics. Once I thought she was 

Russian. I’ve eaten my mistake again and again, buying

her flowers in all seasons: poinsettia, Easter lilies—

expensive but they survive beyond the supermarket brand.

Around her shop the stores have been looted of jewels,

of toothbrushes and toilet paper, but no one has stolen

her orchids, their cat mouths yawning, or the tiny cacti 

in small clay vessels a child might hold up, beg for,

as if she could carry home a star. I don’t have words

for the shopkeeper. I want to bury my face in her shoulder

and weep or cry out. Instead, we talk about how dried

protea blooms can last. You string the fresh ones upside

down. Like bodies of tyrants, I think, in the marketplace.

Susan Gubernat's most recent book The Zoo at Night won the Prairie Schooner prize and was published by the University of Nebraska Press. She lives in San Francisco.