Unlike the statistics above, our stories help humanize the theme of abortion, and this week we are sharing five of them, in poetry and prose, by Mileva Anastasiadou, Andrea England, Vicki Cohen, Heather Mydosh, and Penny Perry. Like every piece in the issue, each abortion decision is unique and intimate, and it is owned by only one person, [...]
By Mileva Anastasiadou She’s not that young, already in her mid-twenties, when the double lines appear on the test. She is careful enough most of the time, yet that’s how it goes; life happens and spoils all plans. At first, she’ll panic. That doesn’t mean much, her boyfriend will say; everybody panics at the prospect [...]
By Andrea England The baby born into a subway toilet between Harvard and Porter Baby with the too-big head and ears that flap in the wind from a smack Baby addicted to crack turned blue as a bruise in his birthday suit Baby unwanted and doesn’t know why His father raped his mother Baby taken [...]
By Vicki Cohen I am a nurse-midwife. For over thirty years, I provided prenatal care for pregnant women and welcomed new life. It was mostly happy work, but sometimes I’d find myself worrying about the women who lived in poverty or suffered from substance abuse, the thirteen-year-old who didn’t know she was pregnant until too [...]
By Heather Mydosh For Indiana HEA 1337 Eve is a common punch line in the joke against women with her penchant for the forked tongue and listening to more than one authority figure, but if we peel it back a little further to rectilinear Pandora, bless her, created first among women by temperamental adolescent gods, [...]
By Penny Perry Mother couldn’t have known what to do. She was only twenty-five, drove her big sister, Leona, six weeks pregnant to the doctor’s in L.A. Leona squinted at California bungalows, backyards with orange trees. She thought about her husband home worrying, her baby waiting for her. She told my mother about her screenplay, [...]
By Robert Walton “Mamichu, it’s cold!” I looked at Ivar. I looked at his knobby lump of a head, at his lips lying beneath his broken nose like twin dead slugs, at his eyes glistening beneath his granite ledge of a brow, eyes so small I never knew their color. There was no pleasure in [...]
By Amirah Al Wassif once upon a time there was an ancient place called "Amon” village that very far spot where everybody talks about the river legend that very far spot where everybody knows how to distinguish the smell of fresh bread there, at the Amon village where all the folks live in their dreams [...]
By Pedro Hoffmeister It’s beginning to snow in Tucson and it’s 65 degrees in Seattle, Washington in February But our president says... He’s tweeting about… And we should listen to him because he’s the best president we’ve had this entire year. That’s a fact. He’s our man. Our leader. Another fact: Lori Loughlin, Felicity Huffman, [...]
By Beth Levine Imagine that this letter S floats off the page becomes a strong rope that wraps your hands together behind your back, like officers do before putting someone in the back of a police car. Imagine that this letter S floats off the page and becomes a second strong rope one end wraps [...]
Track the nation's mass shootings at the Gun Violence Archive—and what a horrible shame that the site exists.
By DS Levy A young man travels out of state where it’s possible to buy a gun, no questions asked. He buys an AK-47. The transaction is easier than getting the driver’s license that allows him to navigate across the desert highway. If you want his story, read his manifesto on Instagram. This story is [...]
