reproductive justice – Writers Resist

Choices

By Alice Benson

“Watch me, Gram,” Tammy yelled, waving her arms and leaping into the air.

Janet smiled, watching her granddaughter bounce on the trampolines. At ten years old, Tammy was athletic and graceful and loved nothing more than playing physically active games.

Janet took out her phone, set it on record, and tried to catch Tammy’s graceful arcs. What a lovely girl. Then Janet snapped a few photos and sent one to her son to show him how happy Tammy was.

Because Richard had tried to stop her from being with Tammy. He almost hadn’t allowed them to see each other. She remembered their hard conversation.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for Tammy to spend time with you.” His mouth was set in a firm line, but his eyes looked sad. “You hold a lot of beliefs that will have a harmful effect on her life.”

“I don’t.” Janet was adamant. “I only want good things for Tammy.”

“You support our current president. He’s building a horrible culture for girls.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Janet’s frustration rose. Even as a little boy, Richard had been too serious for his own good. “I’m not crazy about everything he says or does, but he doesn’t mean all that stuff. He’s like a performer. You just have to ignore the parts you don’t like. He’ll bring inflation down. I can barely afford to buy groceries anymore.”

Richard shook his head. “I don’t believe he’ll bring down prices, but even if I did, I wouldn’t trade cheaper bread for my daughter’s safety.”

“I’m not doing anything to hurt Tammy. You worry too much; you always did. Your daughter will be fine. Everything will be fine. You’ll see.” Janet was positive she was speaking the truth. “The only ones who have anything to worry about are the criminals. He’ll take care of them.”

“Mom, he bragged about assaulting women. Those were his actual words. He was recorded.”

“That was just locker room talk. All men joke around like that.”

“I don’t joke around like that.” Richard paused. “Would you like it if someone grabbed Tammy?”

“Don’t be silly. You know how the other side likes to exaggerate. They’re always picking on him and making stuff up. It’s not fair for you to keep my only granddaughter from me because you and I don’t agree on politics.”

“This is so much more than politics,” Richard said. “This is about supporting someone who is actively working to make the world less safe for your granddaughter.” Richard’s voice rose and he stopped. His eyes closed briefly. “Have you listened to any of his supporters—all those young men who say such hateful things? They want total control over women, including women’s bodies.”

“He can’t help what people say.”

“Mom, he encourages them. He repeats their disgusting words, and it’s all over the internet. People talking like that puts Tammy in danger.”

As usual, Richard was getting upset over nothing. Janet blinked back tears; she just wanted to have a nice time with her granddaughter, but this conversation was hurtful for both her and Richard.

Two days later, Richard called to relent. “Tammy really wants to see you, Mom. She misses you. But don’t say anything about politics. I mean it, nothing at all.”

Janet agreed, just happy to spend time with her girl. They went to lunch at Perkins, Tammy’s favorite restaurant, because she could get hashbrowns made just the way she liked. They went shopping, and Janet bought her a new dress and some cozy pajamas. Their last stop was Adventureland, an indoor trampoline and play park, where Tammy could run and jump to her heart’s content.

“Let’s go over here, Gram.”

Janet followed Tammy and watched as she went into an area enclosed by nets hanging from the ceiling. The trampolines were about a foot off the ground, with kids jumping on either side, tossing balls at each other. “Gotcha,” Tammy yelled as she picked up a ball and threw it at a boy, hitting him in the chest. He caught it, laughed, and turning full circle, took aim at someone else.

Janet recognized the game was dodgeball, but the kids were bounding, shouting, and throwing balls at each other in a generally chaotic way.

One bigger kid, he looked to be about fifteen, started throwing harder, appearing to aim for people’s heads and faces. Then he walked over to a smaller boy and just grabbed the ball out of his hands.

“Hey,” Tammy shouted. “Stop that.”

Tammy was a strong believer in fairness and kindness, and she always stood up for the underdog. Janet admired that, but she mostly wished that Tammy would just mind her own business and look the other way. That’s what Janet did.

The bigger kid turned, dropped the little kid’s ball, walked over to Tammy and snatched her ball out of her hands.

“Give that back,” Tammy yelled.

Janet was about to call Tammy out of the play area, when the boy turned and grinned. “You’ll get this back when I say. Haven’t you heard? It’s your body, my choice.” He drew his arm back and hurled the ball, hitting Tammy full in the face. She stumbled and fell backwards.

Janet ran over and knelt beside her. Tammy sat up, tears running down her face, and Janet pulled her into a hug. “Are you okay?”

After a moment, Janet could feel Tammy’s head nod against her chest. “I’m all right. I just lost my balance. It didn’t hurt that much, but what a mean boy.”

“Yes, he is.” Janet looked around, but the kid was gone. The other children were focused on their own games.

“I’m ready to leave.” Tammy stood and walked out of the dodgeball area.

Janet followed close behind. “How about some ice cream before I take you home?”

“No thanks, Gram. I just want to get going.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” A prickle of anxiety poked at Janet. It wasn’t like Tammy to turn down sweet treats.

Tammy nodded, but she paused. “I guess ice cream would be all right.”

They walked over to the refreshment stand, got two chocolate cones, and found an unoccupied table.

“That boy said he got to make choices about my body,” Tammy said. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, it doesn’t.” Janet took a small bite of ice cream and shivered. She was hoping that Tammy hadn’t understood what that stupid kid said.

“My mom and dad always say that no one can touch me without my permission.” Tammy gazed at Janet. “Isn’t that true?”

“Of course, it’s true.” Janet’s stomach twisted with discomfort. She wanted Tammy to stop talking about this whole subject. What was the point?

“Then why did that boy say he could do what he wanted with my body?”

“I don’t know.” But Janet was lying, and for the first time in many years, she wondered if maybe her son wasn’t overreacting.

The chocolate suddenly scorched her tongue and became pure bitterness in her mouth.

Alice Benson (she/her) lives in Wisconsin with her wife and their dog. She recently retired from a job in a human services field; previously she spent over thirteen years working with a domestic violence program. Her short work has appeared in a variety of publications. Both Alice’s novels, Her Life is Showing and A Year in Her Life were published by Black Rose Writing. She wrote a middle-grade novel with her granddaughter, Trapped in a Tablet, which was published in May 2025 by Watchful Wizard Press. For more information, visit Alice’s website.

Photo credit: Rita Hogan via a Creative Commons license.

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Self-Congratulation

By M. M. Adjarian

Texas women love and curse with fatal bless your hearts. Sun burned plains enclose them, their multi-colored bodies corralled in

branded jeans. Tender cuts on man-sized platters piled high to heaven with heaping sides of disrespect, they live to be consumed and then discarded

like Porsha Ngumezi. Doctors wouldn’t scrape her womb and she bled out, screaming, young and black. No charity for her, she left this world in Houston

just like Josseli Barnica, who died while Catholic and brown. The green card in her purse meant life but not liberty because heartbeats from a dying fetus mean a one-way

trip to glory. Nevaeh Crain, pretty white girl with a butterfly tattoo in a sundown town could tell you that if sepsis hadn’t starved the pink from all her organs.

Meanwhile hypocrites under Hippocratic Oath cull women’s bones to pick their teeth in self-congratulation because in Texas, praise Jesus, the right to life abides.

M. M. Adjarian has been published in such journals as the Baltimore Review, Verdad, South 85, Grub Street, The Ekphrastic Review, Eclectica, Crack the Spine, Across the Margin, The Courtship of Winds and North Dakota Quarterly. She is currently working on a collection of semi-autobiographical poems based in the Major Arcana of the tarot, and she lives in Austin.

Photo by Matt Brown via a Creative Commons license.

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Crying in Texas

By M.R. Mandell

after “Kissing” by Dorianne Laux

Crying as they hope for blood,
crying as they flush the strips,
crying as they hide their bumps.
They are crying in bathroom stalls,
behind Sugarland’s Kroger store.
They are crying on Houston corners,
outside the boarded-up laundromat.
They are crying in each other’s arms,
at the Hampton Inn off Highway 10.
They are crying in their Walmart
uniforms, and their Ann Taylor
suits, in their Wrangler jeans,
and Zara boots. They are crying
alone, on the edge, salt burning
their skin. They are crying as doctors
turn them away. They are crying
harder than before,
before the pious Robes lied.
Crying as they hope for blood.

M.R. Mandell (she/her) is a poet living in Los Angeles. A transplant from Katy, Texas, she now lives by the beach with her muse, a Golden Retriever named Chester Blue (at her feet), and her longtime partner (by her side). You can find her work in Chill Subs, Boats Against the Current, The Final Girl Bulletin Board, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, The Bloom, JAKE, Roi Fainéant, sage cigarettes, Anti-Heroin Chic, Stanchion Zine, Fine Print and others. She has works forthcoming in Drunk Monkeys, unstamatic (photo), and Olney Magazine (photos)

Photo credit: Ernesto Andrade via a Creative Commons license.

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Amendments

By Amy Cook

We hadn’t had a proper winter, but spring arrived anyway, confoundingly on time. Whatever you might have read about autumn in New York, the first morning the rows of tulips open on Park Avenue, or when the purple hyacinth spirals up through a neighborhood garden, or that cloudless April morning when the cherry trees first spill with the glut of blossom, those are the days I wish would linger. I turned forty-three in late March, right before the weather turned.

Filed: March 7, 2023. Florida Senate Bill 300, Pregnancy and Parenting Support: “prohibiting physicians from knowingly performing or inducing a termination of pregnancy after the gestational age of the fetus is determined to be more than 6 weeks, rather than 15 weeks.”

On the morning of Thursday, April 13, 2023, a week after it had been passed by the Florida Senate, the Florida House of Representatives took up the bill.

That day, in New York, the Central Park weather station measured a high of 90 degrees, breaking a record set in 1977. Old and potbellied men loitered by the Hudson River, shirtless, broiling. I took off my shoes and sipped greedily at a raspberry Arnold Palmer. The café at the pier is seasonal, but, like Brigadoon, miraculously opens on days that call people to the water.

At the river, I’m streaming the House of Representatives on my phone, and they race through nearly fifty amendments, all proposed by civil servants seeking to dull the law’s vicious scythe. Each amendment is allowed consideration for two and a half minutes.

“Will the sergeant secure the balcony please?”^[1]

It is certain the abortion ban will pass. The Florida House of Representatives has one hundred and ten voting members present on this day, and they will vote for the bill by a nearly two to one margin. Still, as is their right, ordinary Floridians have come to Tallahassee to protest the ban, which has exceptions for rape, incest, and human trafficking—provided you can prove it. With documentation.

I live in a building that is two blocks from the Hudson, less than a mile from Bethesda Fountain, and a mile and half from the reservoir. And still, I often feel parched. This particular Thursday, the water is desperately choppy, as if at war with the summer vibes the sun is trying to gift. A week from now, I will be lying in a hospital, a female radiologist swiping the ultrasound thingie (instrument? wand? scepter?) across my right breast where an unidentified mass waits to be named. The screen displays charcoal and ivory waves that undulate, tip and teeter. I stare at them, feeling sticky and warmed by the ultrasound gel. The radiologist gives me a cursory glance, every now and then.

“Black women and birthing people will be most affected by this abortion ban.”

We have become careful, of late, to say the things that go without saying, because it is worth it to have them said aloud. We waste time and capital sparring over the substitution of words, while the Slenderman creeps at the edge of the forest, leering at his prey. And prey are everywhere. My friend, who has six-year-old twin boys, recently asked them what their active shooter drills are like. They go to an elite private school that can afford security, and still, they prepare. Attention is paid.

The heat will last just a few days, before pulling us back, making us glad that we hadn’t installed the air conditioners just yet. I will still go down to the water to read and write, in the chill and mist, not wanting to be wasteful of the hours. Above me, vehicles fly up the Hudson River Parkway, heading out of town.

“Sergeant, will you secure the chamber and remove the gallery?”

It is impossible to tell how many protestors have filled the statehouse, but I can hear them being removed, one by one. Two days ago, an organization called Equality Florida issued a travel advisory, warning fellow Americans that Florida is no longer a safe place to be, especially if you are a person of color or queer or perhaps just unprepared to become the victim of random gun violence.

“Please [accept] this amendment so we don’t re-traumatize sexual assault victims.”

“I understand we’re banning books, so y’all might not have read all of that.”

“We are thinking of situations that have not been contemplated by this bill.”

Not a one of the amendments passes, of course. I play with my pink strappy sandals, on the ground, next to my chair. At some point this summer, I’ll get a pedicure, but today my feet are repulsive. My mind wanders. The amendment people are wasting their time, I think, and their breath. Going down with the ship. But history is filled with truth-tellers on the Titanic.

“This is a friendly amendment.”

“Read the next amendment!”

“Any . . . further outburst and the sergeant will remove you, and we can proceed with our business.”

When my youngest niece was born, just after midnight on August 12, 2021, she was almost two weeks late. Every day past her due date, I teased my brother that the baby was waiting for our late grandmother’s birthday; that Grandma Barbara was somehow orchestrating the delay. Hannah Rose was a perfectly average-sized newborn (indeed, born on the day that she now shares with a great-grandmother she never knew), but it stands to reason she wasn’t actually late. Rather, a physician had perhaps miscalculated how far along my sister-in-law actually was. It’s not an exact science.

So how do the doctors in Florida know when six weeks are up?

How do the legislators know?

Still, they prattle on. Behind me, a group of young women searches for a place to sit. Most of

the good spots are gone. It’s really very hot out.

“Have all members voted? Have all members voted?”

“We have a brief introduction and announcement from Representative Caruso.”

Between the amendments, Representative Caruso, who will actually vote “no” on the six-week abortion ban, takes the time to introduce a sergeant from the Delray Beach Police Department, who is visiting their chamber today. The officer had previously been convicted of a felony, for having stolen some money from a mall in Orlando. Governor DeSantis, who will sign this bill into law at 10:45 this evening, had pardoned the man, and now the officer is applauded as a “hometown hero.”

There will be six hours of debate, after all of the amendments go down in flames. None of it means a thing. The climb is too great, the gulf too wide. I put my sandals back on, and when I get up, the group of girls looking for a seat are pleased. They have frozen drinks in hand. I head to my apartment, where I will insist we wait for the next heat wave to install the air conditioning, but where I am still free.

“Please show that the amendment does not pass. Read the next amendment, please.”

^[1] Each quote in italics was spoken by a member of the Florida House of Representatives on April 13, 2023.

Amy Cook (she/they): MFA candidate, Rainier Writing Workshop, 2021 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Amy’s work has appeared in The Advocate, Queer Families: An LGBTQ+ True Stories Anthology and fifteen literary journals. Affiliations: BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop (Advanced), New York City Gay Men’s Chorus alum.

Photo credit: Rebecca Cruz via a Creative Commons license.

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Prolapse

By Tara Campbell

The uterus is tired.

The uterus is sorry
but it can’t seem to stay
in one place anymore,
which isn’t surprising
considering how often
it’s been poked
and prodded
and pricked
by congressmen’s pens.

The uterus would like
to get in a word of its own,
just one, even edgewise
just one goddamn word.

The uterus wishes
it could remember the words
to that song you sang
when you didn’t have to worry
about your uterus all the time,
when you didn’t have to be
so goddamn vigilant,
didn’t have to keep twisting
and turning away from men
shoving laws into it
edgewise.

The uterus is tired
so very tired.

The uterus would like
just one goddamn moment
to itself. The uterus just wants
to be. The uterus is sorry
it can’t give you that.
The uterus remembers when
it was barely aware of itself
which sounds like a contradiction
but was merely a state of grace.

The uterus is small and pink
and lovely and valued
and sacred and blessed.

But no, the uterus doesn’t believe
its own press. . .
well, it didn’t. . .
well, it shouldn’t have, and now
the uterus is continually disappointed
to find it is neither valued
nor sacred
nor blessed
nor even safe.

The uterus is tired
so goddamn tired.

The uterus is sorry it’s letting you down
because now it’s letting itself down
slowly, uncomfortably—
this is called “prolapse”
and the uterus wants you to know
this is not your fault either,
and it would have told you
everything sooner, but the truth
just gets the uterus bullied,
harassed, and threatened with rape
for upsetting men
(and, when the truth
is too educational,
it just gets the uterus kicked
off the socials for “porn”).

Some days the uterus feels philosophical,
and some days the uterus feels angry—
who are we kidding,
most days the uterus feels angry
if not for itself
then on behalf of other uteruses
who are told they’re overreacting
to getting bullied,
harassed, and threatened with rape
for upsetting men.

The uterus is often depressed
but today the uterus is simply tired
the uterus needs a break
to forget how everyone
is always talking about it
even when it’s not in the room—
especially when it’s not in the room.

The uterus is tired,
and the uterus is tired
of being asked why it’s tired.
The uterus no longer wishes
to be interrogated.

The uterus just needs a little time
a little goddamn time
to itself, and who can blame it
for feeling heavy
for wanting to slide
just a little bit lower
and rest after everything
it’s had to endure.

The uterus simply wants to sit
in the warm and the dark,
mind its own business
and quietly sink, baptized
in silence, blessed
finally
with one goddamn
moment of
peace.

Tara Campbell is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse, and graduate of American University’s MFA in Creative Writing. Her publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Wigleaf, CRAFT Literary, and Writers Resist. She’s the author of a novel and four multi-genre collections including her newest, Cabinet of Wrath: A Doll Collection. She teaches writing at venues such as American University, Johns Hopkins University, the Writer’s Center, Catapult, and the National Gallery of Art.

Photo credit: Ittmust via a Creative Commons license.

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A Supreme Proposal

By Katie Avagliano

I’m not saying cannibalism is the only option. If we’re talking animalistic magnetism—the old horizontal tango-—there are other ways to dispose of the sperm vehicles. Sure, arachnids control their own widowhood, and half of all Chinese mantises have copulations that end in the death of the male. In response, though, the male has adapted by becoming even more opportunistic in its coupling, i.e. sneaky and surprising. Perhaps hanging the threat of execution over the proceedings isn’t enough to combat bad behavior.

Powerful men seem only to look to the animal kingdom when it is convenient for explaining things like “boys will be boys.” They claim the alpha male cannot be expected to keep it in his pants when presented with the young, the fertile.

But if a man yearns to be a snarling pack animal, I will be a kangaroo. I’ll take you out in one kick. Plus, the kangaroo has two vaginas and the ability to suspend its own pregnancy. I could stop a growing fetus at its blastocyst stage. Kangaroos do this when they’re waiting for warmer weather, waiting for the rain to come, waiting to feel safe once again.

I’m not saying that, post-coitus, our only options involve my eating your innards or embryonic stasis. I’m saying it’s important for you to know that, if this door closes, I will one hundred percent open the fire exit, the one with the blaring alarm that no one remembers the code to turn off. I’m saying that, if you close this door that’s been open since my mother’s mother was getting it on, then you better be prepared for pretty grisly consequences.

Because in the end I’m no kangaroo, all downy hairs and fawny eyelashes; I’m not even a praying mantis, eating the male who dared try to get it on with me. If we do the boom-chick-a-boom-boom and, god forbid, one of your little swimmers catches on—and we live in this dystopian reality where the powers that be say the choices afforded to animals in the Outback don’t exist under our Star Bangled Banner—in that scenario, we aren’t humans or mammals or even terrestrial creatures.

We are anglerfish (like the one in Finding Nemo with the light on its head) and you are the scrappy, sperm-wielding parasite I have to support with my own food, my own beating heart. In exchange for this supposed legacy, you are nothing more than a growth on my side. It took decades for scientists to even find the male anglerfish, overlooking the unremarkable blip on the female’s body as just some other ornament picked up on her trans-oceanic travels.

And perhaps you’re okay with leeching, unwanted, shedding entire parts of yourself. Male anglerfish, once they burrow into the soft flesh of a female host, lose fins, eyes, organs. In the pursuit of fatherhood they give up everything they are, become a worm on the side of a glowing queen of the deep.

What I’m saying is, if you want to rewind us down to our base parts, then we should introduce some risk. If you try to make me nothing more than the ovaries I carry, then I will become sharp teeth, strong maw. In the end, there are still too many of us naked primates on this soft green earth. It is only good and just to root out the source of the problem.

Spiders cannibalize on the flip of a coin, so how about heads I win, tails you lose? Would you walk into my parlor?

Katie Avagliano (she/her) teaches college writing in the Pine Barrens of South Jersey. She earned her MFA at American University and her writing has appeared in Lunchbox, Bethesda Magazine, and elsewhere.

Photo credit: Angler fish image by Helder da Rocha via a Creative Commons license.

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Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

LipStick It Couture Du Jour

Because Extraordinary Times Require Extraordinary Adornment

By Tracy Rose Stamper

Welcome to RevlOff’s Lip Couture Counter, where science blends with art, topped off with attitude, to bring you colors to carry you through dizzying days.

Our makeup counter’s mission is to challenge the slippery slope into post-truth society. By offering an honest line of honest products, we aim to create an oasis in this world gone off its axis. Like you, we wouldn’t have made it this far without attitude, an ingredient as important as science and art. Sometimes, attitude shows up as color play therapy. Other times, admittedly, we’re throwing shade. Because today’s many shades of fustercluck require many shades of lip armor.

With science under attack, we begin with highlighting our Scintillating Lip Science Line. Our distinct shades—Moderna Woman, Pfizer Fly, J&J Vim&Vigor Violet, and Fully Vixenated—are recognizable, helping take the guesswork out of navigating this partially vaccinated world. Thirty-nine percent of proceeds from this line go towards public health education.

Our Levity Line is curated for comic relief: Frosted Snowflake, Commie Bastard Berry, Cashmere Coastal Elite Crème, Scintillating Socialist, Luscious Lefty Lavendar Lustre, Flaming Liberal Lilac, Bleeding Heart Burgundy, and Radical Rosé. You will be called all the above. May as well dress it up!

Our LipStick It line’s Pop Off Pink, Ragin’ Red, and Apoplectic Purple coordinate well with feeling feisty. Piehole Plum works wonders when venturing places where you’ll wish to tell folks to shut it. Warm, inviting Pumpkin Smasher Spice is popular on Wednesdays when we smash the patriarchy. Another smashing shade is Vagalante Lavender. (We’ve been asked if that’s a typo. No, it’s not.) Our newest addition, Pro-Roe, is a bold blood red. Enough said.

Lip Armor Liquid Courage Collection comes to the rescue with extra oomph! Impressive science merges a lip stain offering 8-hour staying power with a satiny liquid look. These blends have you covered across the board, from situations where it’s best to just walk away, to those times when you’ll have to say something to maintain any semblance of self-respect. Talk for 8 hours straight ‘til you’re blue in the face, with lips remaining radiant, although we don’t recommend wasting breath trying to change minds committed to closure. Red&White&True, Pink Patriot, and Coral Compass encourage standing for what is real and right. Think insurrectionist thugs eager to decapitate politicians, thus threatening our democracy’s very survival. Consider this collection your armor against gaslighting claims that what you saw didn’t happen.

Lip Armor Liquid Courage Collection mainstays are Crimson Courage and Seeing Red. These trying days require courage. Liberty Lover Lapis invites speaking the truth, because asserting individual liberties can sometimes adversely affect the collective, and empathy always matters. True Blue is for those of us who have earnestly spent six plus years trying to understand hearts of loved ones living in an entirely different world, despite residing mere miles away. Googling “cognitive dissonance” is your clue that this one’s for you. Striking shades draw foci to lips, away from puffy eyes. We’ve all had moments of dissolving into tears, leaving us looking as weary as we feel.

On Second Thought All-Out Orange is our collaboration with the common sense gun safety movement. With a nod to the Second Amendment and law-abiding citizens’ rights to own guns, this also represents the rights of our children to simply survive an America riddled with epidemic gun violence. Deep orange emboldens the user to take on stale assertions that “the government’s coming to take away your guns.”

Our Glow-Getter Glam Line celebrates bright spots with shimmering finishes. We have Yes We Candied Plum, Georgia Peach, Blunami, and V(I)P Pearlescent, in honor of our first POC and woman VP. We wish to expand this line in years to come.

Our True Colors Collection reflects the revealing of folks’ true colors. Spiraling up each tube are the words: “We’re only going to get browner and queerer and witchier and louder and stronger and prouder (author unknown).” Top-selling Browner is a rich maroon that beautifully celebrates the browning skin tone of our country’s trajectory. Black Sheep comes with a gift enclosure that reads: “For the black sheep of families dangerously close to falling off the edge of their flat earth if they lean the tiniest bit further right.” Pussy Hat Pink is quite popular. Pride gloss features rainbow sparkles. #RubySlipperRed represents the dreams of a compassionate homeland that lives up to its ideals of democracy, equity, and unity for all.

Finally, for the end of those days that last for months, we have our Lip Therapy Line. Designed as therapeutic balms to soothe and restore lips overnight, many customers reach for these around the clock. One of our regulars dubs our therapeutics as the “Homebody Cluster,” since it feels less lonely given today’s isolating climate.

Whether staying home or venturing out into these most curious times, RevlOff has you covered. Though this concludes our makeup bar tour, it is just the beginning of the important work we will do, alongside customers like you, doing right by the world.

To thank you for being part of a bright future, our complimentary gift is a tube of bRight Side of History. Apply liberally.”

Tracy Rose Stamper dances with words. Her recently acquired middle name is the most significant word she has written lately during these days asking us to rise. She lives in a home on a hill in St. Louis with two beloved humans, two rescue beagle boys, and two whimsical wind sculptures. She is a contributing author of Anna Linder’s ‘The Book of Emotions,’ and has had work appear in New Feathers Anthology, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality & the Arts, Dime Show Review, Drunk Monkeys, and borrowed solace, among others. You can find her dancing with words at Facebook.

Photo credit: he who would be lost via a Creative Commons license.

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Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Secrets in the Gazebo

By Penny Perry

For my Aunt Leona Heyert Tarleton
who died at age 33

We are looking at the mockingbird
in the lemon tree. This is the first day
of my cousin’s summer visit.
I wriggle closer to her.
“I know how my mother died,”
my cousin whispers.
The gazebo is the place for secrets.

My Aunt Leona was almost famous.
She wrote plays that were on Broadway,
did crossword puzzles in ink. On a cold
spring day when silly girls wore sundresses
and shivered, Aunt Leona wore a smart
wool suit and pinned a spring violet
on her lapel.

Wendy’s mother died when Wendy
was only seven months old.

My cousin squints at the sun shooting
off the adobe tile roof. This is the first day
of her summer visit.
The jasmine smells sweet. She is thirteen.
I am eleven.

“She had an abortion,” Wendy says.
Her eyes are bright. She loves telling me
things I’m not supposed to know.

“A-bor-tion,” I repeat. Grandpa taught us
to sound out long words.

Grandma calls my cousin an orphan
even though she has a father.
“My mother didn’t want to have a second
baby so soon.”
“A baby?”
“It wasn’t a baby.
Your mother drove her to the bad doctor.”

“She wouldn’t do that.”
“But she did.”
I blot my wet face with my sleeve.
The excitement has left my cousin’s eyes.

Now I know why sometimes Mother
locks the bathroom door, turns the water
on full blast. She thinks I don’t hear her cries.

Wendy has long legs and her feet
touch the ground. My legs dangle
and the tie on the right sneaker has come
undone.

A seven time Pushcart nominee, Penny Perry has published a poetry collection, Santa Monica Disposal and Salvage (Garden Oak Press). Her novel Selling Pencils and Charlie, also from Garden Oak Press, was a finalist in the San Diego Book Awards in 2021. Her new poetry collection, Woman with Newspaper Shoes, was published June 2022 by Garden Oak Press.

Photo credit: “Polite Notice on Studded Door” is by Morning-meadow Jones, an American junior high school dropout, who later went on to realize her full potential and drop out of college too. She is a mother, migrant, and multi-media creative, practicing all manner of arts from her home in Wales, UK. She recently launched her writing career at the age of 51. Foolow her on Twitter at @Morning_meadowJ.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

A Simple Act

By Erin Edwards

It is a simple act to stand in the middle of the road. Simple, but effective. A car either has to stop and wait or run you down—and it just wouldn’t do for a hearse carrying the body of a former government official to accelerate towards a woman in the middle of the street.

Making a scene wasn’t something I’d planned. I hadn’t even been paying attention when they’d announced the route for Eric Marshall’s funeral procession on the news. Events simply collided, leaving me the perfect moment. The universe implored me to do something.

The route intersected my walk to work. Barriers prohibiting pedestrian access to the road lined the pavement, except at the crossing. There, two police officers simply held up a rope, keeping us all back. We were expected to stand in silence. Once the cars passed, they’d let us through, they assured us. But Eric Marshall had never let us rest for one moment once he stepped into office. What right did he have to a peaceful forever?

I didn’t want to wait until the cars had passed.

I looked around at the people bowing their heads, waiting respectfully for the procession to drive by. But Eric Marshall had done nothing to earn my respect.

The police officer guarding the crossing looked the other way, and there was my chance. I ducked under the rope and bolted for the middle of the road.

The procession was forced to stop. The car of a prominent government official, even a dead one, hitting a woman in front of dozens of cameras was unthinkable. The funeral was being streamed to the nation, but it wasn’t Eric Marshall’s show anymore. I looked around and saw the policemen frantically discussing my presence. Tackling a woman to the ground on live television wasn’t an option either, but I knew it would only be a few moments before they had the cameras turned off so they could haul me away. I needed to make it more difficult for them, so I sat down and laid back, tucking my arms underneath me to make myself harder to grab.

The tarmac was warm, cooking in the sun. I rested my head, feeling the uneven surface through my hair, and ignored the commotion around me. No one raised their voice—this was a funeral, after all—but there was plenty of debate. It would probably only be minutes before I was dragged away.

If I’d planned it better, I would have worn a long red cloak and a white bonnet, just so my stance on Eric Marshall’s politics was clear. He had stood in the way of so many women and their health, their right to choose. He’d convinced everyone that criminalising abortion had saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of children, but no one thought to mention the women who died as a result of the bill. Some were lost to backstreet abortions. Some took concoctions the internet promised them would end a pregnancy but wound up ending their lives. And some women just couldn’t take it.

I had heard stories of women placed under house arrest, under twenty-four-hour suicide watch, because they were deemed a risk to the foetuses they carried. Eric Marshall would turn us all into handmaids, if he had the chance. It was only right that someone stand between him and eternal rest.

The sky was cloudless and far-reaching above my head. I wondered how long it would be before I got to see it again—I knew I’d be heading to a police station rather than work when they moved me. I was contemplating whether they’d give me a chance to contact my flatmate and explain my absence at home, when I heard a yell.

“Another one!”

Before I had time to register where the shout had come from, someone skidded across the ground and stopped beside me.

“Sorry,” they said with a giggle. “I didn’t think that through.”

I turned to see another woman. She was far closer than I’d normally be comfortable with, but I appreciated the show of solidarity. From my limited vantage point, she was dressed for work, in a pencil skirt and floaty shirt with billowing sleeves. I wondered if she’d shredded them during her shaky landing. Despite any damage she might have done to her clothes or herself, she was grinning.

“Hi.” I laughed, a little manic. “You know they’ll arrest us for this?”

“Yeah, I figured. But if there’s two of us, it’s harder for them,” the woman said, shrugging. “I’m Daphne.”

“Allyson,” I introduced myself. “Thank you.”

We were at rather an awkward angle to shake hands, but instead Daphne threaded her arm through mine and linked us together. If they tried to drag one of us away, they’d have to take us both.

I didn’t ask Daphne why she hated Eric Marshall. She could have just hated the way he had knocked over the first domino—there was already talk of having women of childbearing age assigned to a guardian, whether that be a family member or partner, to ensure she “acted responsibly.” It was only getting worse. There was always the chance her hatred was personal. She could have lost a friend, a family member or a loved one. It wasn’t the kind of thing you asked someone when you’d just met and you were lying on the burning tarmac in the middle of the road in front of a funeral procession.

They must have shut off the cameras, because a police officer came to stand over us. The sun shone behind his head, backlighting him so all of his features were sunk in shadow.

“All right, ladies, you’ve had your fun. Show some respect, get moving,” he ordered, waving his hands like he could waft us away like a bad smell.

“This is a protest,” Daphne said, her voice stronger than mine would have been.

“This is a funeral,” the officer replied.

“You see a funeral; we see a celebration of the loss of our human rights,” Daphne shot back.

She tightened her grip around my arm. Despite the sun, I stared right up at the officer’s face, jaw clenched. Leaving quietly wasn’t an option.

The officer huffed and walked away. The debate on how best to pitch us out of the road was growing loud. I could hear shouting and radios, as they called for backup and argued over strategy. They didn’t want to make martyrs of us, but every second we were left there was another moment that Eric Marshall was rotting in his coffin.

I turned to look at the hearse, only feet from me. The black paint was glossy enough that I could see my face in it. There was me, there was Daphne, and there was what seemed like miles of empty road. If I had planned any of this, I would have brought handcuffs to lock myself to the grill. We likely had mere moments before we were picked up and tossed into the back of a police car.

“It was nice to meet you, Daphne, I said. “Thanks for doing something stupid with me.”

“Oh, I don’t think it’s over,” she said.

I could hear a grin in her voice and when I turned to see what she could possibly be smiling about, I found her looking the other way. At the crossing where I’d originally snuck through, there was a whole group of women. There had to be twenty or thirty of them, all pushing forward against a row of police. The officers had abandoned the rope they’d been holding up and were trying to create a wall of riot shields.

Our anger had been building for so long. Layer upon layer of it, another spark added to the fire each time we felt the restraints of Eric Marshall’s policies: the men-only bars and restaurants we were banned from for our own safety, the TV adverts begging us to take care of our health to ensure thriving offspring, the poster campaign that screamed “A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE HOME!” It was enough to drive anyone to rage. They say that a woman can display superhuman strength to save a child, but no one ever realised that she could do it to save herself, too. She just had to be pushed far enough.

I watched, sideways and half-blocked by Daphne, as the group of women burst through the line of police. Once one had breached the blockade, they all piled through the gap before it could be closed again. Shouts of victory and glee rang out as they ran towards us. Suddenly the empty road was a sea of bodies, clustering together and grabbing on to each other so no one was left vulnerable.

Information was shared through the crowd as quickly as people could speak the words. The official broadcast had been shut down, but social media livestreams had almost immediately started up in its place, shared by onlookers from nearby buildings. The world was watching.

Any lack of a plan on my behalf was immediately rectified by the women around me. They shared the number of a protest support line, reminders to go limp if someone tried to lift you, orders not to give personal information even if arrested. No one had any doubt that we would all be taken into custody, that Eric Marshall’s funeral procession would eventually continue, and he would be laid to rest. But first, we would make our stand.

Erin Edwards is a dedicated Londoner and compulsive writer, most often found in an archive or at the theatre. She is committed to providing the world with more queer content and is currently working on far too many different projects to do just that. You can find her Twitter at @EEdwardsWrites.

Photograph by Victoria Pickering via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist:

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Choice

By Erica Goss

I’m sixteen. School
thinks I have the flu. I tell
the doctor to
knock me out. In
the alley behind the clinic, men
wait in cars.
They leave their
engines rumbling. Backseat
speakers vibrate.
My mother drives
me home.
I’m thirty-seven. Work
thinks I
had a miscarriage. I tell
the doctor to knock
me out. At the
hospital gift shop I buy
myself a bouquet of roses.
Classic rock plays
from the radio. My
husband drives me
home. I am not
sorry. I am not
ashamed. I saved one
from a teen-aged
mother. I saved the other
from her damaged body. There’s no
music for that. No
songs.

A brief bio: Erica Goss is the winner of the 2019 Zocalo Poetry Prize. Her collection, Night Court, won the 2017 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press. Recent and upcoming publications include Creative Nonfiction, North Dakota Quarterly, Spillway, A-Minor, Redactions, Consequence, The Sunlight Press, The Pedestal, San Pedro River Review, and Critical Read. Erica served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California, from 2013-2016. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she teaches, writes and edits the newsletter Sticks & Stones.

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels.

A note from Writers Resist:

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Two Poems by Alice Rothchild

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Thoughts on walking by rippling grey water under a darkened sky

In the days before stretch marks,
second husbands,
morning stiffness,
encore careers.
In the days when we couldn’t imagine
finding weed and condoms
secreted under our teenagers’ beds.
Or knowing the location of
every hidden bathroom in innumerable coffee shops,
Whole Foods,
Farmers’ Markets.

In the days when we wore clunky platform heels and
mini-skirts,
tossed a lion’s mane of crazy hair,
never worried about bunions,
hammer toes,
aching knees.

In those days,
poetry spilled from our guts,
orgasms came easy.
The spirit songs rooted
in our less encumbered selves,
wended their ways to our melodious, defiant tongues,
buoyed by a million women marching,
bearded men burning draft cards,
the fervent possibilities of youth.

Now, even in our graying successes,
we are weighted by the stones
of our disappointed mothers,
of bruises and torn ligaments accumulated
by stumbling through life.

Now, the future has creeping limits.
We’re stalked by the next mammogram,
unrelenting cough,
crushing brick on the chest.
Now, we have silver haired urgency
nipping at our toes.

This is an old fashioned
Call to action!
Take heart.
Wear purple.
Poke amongst old embers.
Your sisterhood will hold you.

When you are drowning,
we will throw you a life raft.
When you are gardening,
hand you a hoe.
If you fall into a hole,
we will haul down a ladder,
bad backs and all.

But when you are singing,
we will dance

Within reason.

The Right to Choose

December 30, 1994
Brookline, Massachusetts

On December 29,
twenty-two-year-old John Salvi,
thick black hair,
a wisp of a mustache,
eyebrows that knitted together
over the bridge of his nose,
drove to a hunting range
to practice his aim.

The following day,
less than two miles
from my home,
on a crisp, subzero morning,
forty pregnant girls and women,
partners, friends, mothers,
anxious, sad, frightened, resolved,
waited in a Planned Parenthood Clinic
for their turn.

Salvi strode into the clinic
carrying a black duffle bag.
If anyone had been watching,
they would have heard the quiet buzz
as he opened the zipper,
removed a modified .22 caliber Ruger 10/22 semi-automatic rifle.

He hit the medical assistant, Arjana Agrawal,
in the abdomen,
killed the receptionist, Shannon Lowney,
with a shot to her neck.

Screaming, blood,
a scramble for safety.
a shower of bullets,
five wounded.

He took his gun,
sprinted to his Audi,
drove west on Beacon Street
to Preterm Health Services,
two miles away.

Salvi strode into the clinic,
asked the receptionist, Lee Ann Nichols,
“Is this Preterm?”
Shot her point blank with a hunting rifle.
A security guard, Richard Seron,
returned fire.

Salvi dropped the duffle bag
containing receipts from a gun dealer
in Hampton, New Hampshire,
plus seven hundred rounds of ammunition and a gun.
He fled south to Norfolk, Virginia,
was captured after firing over a dozen bullets
into the Hillcrest Clinic.

The police arrived at Preterm
five minutes too late.

I trained before abortion was legal,
cared for women,
traumatized, mangled, infected,
by back-alley procedures.

I was an abortion provider
at the Women’s Community Health Center
and Beth Israel Hospital,
ten minutes from Planned Parenthood.

The next morning,
my eleven-year-old daughter
asked me, as I left for work,

“Mommy, are you going to die today?”

Alice Rothchild is a retired ob-gyn, author, and filmmaker who is writing a memoir in verse for young adults exploring her childhood in the 1950s and 60s and her development as a feminist physician and activist. Her poetry appeared in a collection of poems and essays titled Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine. Her other published nonfiction books and contributions to anthologies, blogs, and webzines are listed on her website: alicerothchild.com. She is inspired by the unheard and the forgotten, the awakening of women’s voices and truth telling in the twenty-first century.

Photo credit: K-B Gressitt.

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After the Splat

By Kate LaDew

In 1867, the first instance of a hero saving their sweetheart from an oncoming train after a dastardly villain tied them to the tracks debuted in the last scene of a New York stage play.

The hero’s sweetheart calls for help, while the hero, locked inside the train station, watches from a barred window, searching for a way out. The villain disappears, off to be dastardly somewhere else, and the whistle of a locomotive sounds, the sweetheart’s cries grow frantic.

The door shudders from a blow on the other side. The hinges creak, the wood splinters and the door swings open, lock dangling, as the hero appears, out of breath, axe in hand.

The sweetheart calls again, beginning to sob, as the hero rushes forward, tearing at the ropes crisscrossed over the tracks, and pulls the sweetheart to safety a split second before the train barrels past.

The woman drops the axe, the man shrugs off the remnants of the rope and they embrace, each declaring undying love. The sweetheart marvels that his hero is capable of such bravery, yet not allowed the right to vote.

In 1867, the first instance of a hero saving their sweetheart from an oncoming train after a dastardly villain tied them to the tracks features the woman as hero, the man as sweetheart.

A scene from Augustin Daly’s 1867 play, Under the Gaslight

Every moment since that night, men have waited while women, with incredible patience, undo the cruel, illogical and sometimes just plain stupid acts of other men. The good, waiting men all the while wondering why the world is so unfair and “Oh! if only something could be done, by somebody, somewhere, about it all.” But it can’t be them, The Good Men, because someone has tied them to a train track, and don’t you hear the whistle? and won’t somebody think about them? down here all alone with all the other Good Men, waiting for somebody, somewhere to do something about it all? Never mind how they got here, and never mind that the ropes aren’t secure because the knots have been tied by The Bad Men, who only know how to tie women’s wrists.

Those Brave Strong Women who really deserve more, more pay and medical rights and safety and equal access and equality in general and all those things they blabber on about. Someday maybe, somebody, but right now, let’s deal with the train situation.

All The Good Men who have daughters and wives and sisters and mothers and really get it, truly, no really, feminism and such, and hey, where are you going? don’t you hear?—can’t you see?—I would do something, I swear, it’s just, these ropes, you know and I mean, I don’t agree with all the bad men, and I’m only laughing to fit in, and I don’t really believe—and if it were up to me—and I would never—and the light in that tunnel’s pretty bright, and the tracks are really rumbling, aren’t they? and is it just me or is it getting hotter, and that whistle’s pretty close, and I think that might be the tr—

After the splat, the woman sitting in the train station she built from scratch, feet on the desk she designed herself, pauses in the middle of a sentence in the paragraph of a chapter of a book she wrote. Looking up at the blue cloudless sky, past the glass skylight she can open whenever she wants, the woman asks all the other women in the room, feet up on their own desks, reading their own self-authored books, Hey, did you hear something?

Kate LaDew is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a BA in Studio Art. She resides in Graham, North Carolina, with her cats Charlie Chaplin and Janis Joplin.

Boris Badenov image: Fair use.

Train scene from Daly’s Under the Gaslight (1868).

Mother’s Letter to Her Best Friend

By Penny Perry

June 5, 1942

Dear Isabel,

I drove my sister to the doctor’s
in Los Angeles. It all happened
so quickly. I promised to bring her
a chocolate phosphate when
it was over.

She joked with the nurses.
Told them if she puked
from ether she would buy
each of them a pair of nylon
stockings.

She insisted on ether because
her friend Hannah had told her
an abortion would be too
painful without it.

In the waiting room, I picked
up a movie magazine.
During the next ten minutes
I heard a harsh breathing
as though she were gasping.
I told myself she would breathe
differently under ether.

A nurse rushed to the telephone
to call emergency.
My knees collapsed.
I remember the sounds of sirens
on the street, footsteps on the stairs,
the horrible hissing sounds
of the oxygen tent.

I remember words like
“her pulse rate is low.”
“She has a seven-month-old baby
at home.” “Isn’t it a pity?”

Finally, the doctor came out
and said “Your sister is dead.”
The bastard didn’t even have
the sense to shut the door.
I could see her head thrown back
on the table.
He told me to stop screaming.

Penny Perry has received six Pushcart nominations. Garden Oak Press published her first novel, Selling Pencils and Charlie, and a collection of her poetry, Santa Monica Disposal and Salvage. New poems are forthcoming in Earth’s Daughters, Lips, the Paterson Literary Review, and the San Diego Poetry Annual. She is the fiction/nonfiction editor of Knot Literary Journal online.

Abortion Stories from Writers Resist

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, the person who is pregnant.

To those who feel confident they know better than the people to whom the decision belongs, we invite you to learn otherwise, and then join us.

Writers Resist is passionate in our support of reproductive justice—and we are in the majority—but we must do more to assure that across the United States abortion is legal, accessible, and safe for all.

The chart is from Pew Research Center.

How to Disappear Completely

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 of responsibility. She’ll have to take some time to think about it before she makes up her mind. She doesn’t need to, for the decision is already made, yet she pretends to consider all options, because that’s what’s expected of her. Being a mother was never her dream. Nor was being an astronaut. Or a lawyer. So she’s not an astronaut, or a lawyer. Does she have the right not to be a mother, though? She’ll wonder for a while if motherhood is a choice or an inevitable fate, yet she’s certain and firm. Her partner is not negative about a pregnancy, as usually expected in stories like this one. She won’t blame it on an irresponsible boyfriend. We could start a family, he’ll say. It’s up to her and she knows it. She’ll shake her head. She can’t even picture herself as a mother. He’ll hold her hand and ask her if that’s what she wants. She’ll nod.

She’ll make the arrangements next morning. She’ll remain detached, not out of second thoughts, as expected in stories like this one. She only regrets not being careful enough. She doesn’t enjoy unnecessary medical procedures. No one does. Nor does she enjoy her body being invaded by an alien creature, even if it’s her future offspring. She’ll sing inside that Radiohead tune about how to disappear completely. She’ll recognize it’s a sad song.

The doctor will see her partner standing beside her and won’t know what to tell him. In his mind, it’s the boyfriend’s fault. The girl would love to be a mother, he thinks, had she found the proper man. Wouldn’t every woman? She’ll keep her boyfriend away, go and fetch some sandwiches, she’ll tell him. Now that they’re alone, the doctor will feel more comfortable asking her. Are you sure? She’ll nod.

She’ll come home to sleep. Not out of regrets, as expected in stories like this one. She’ll be exhausted but glad the whole thing is over. I’m more than just a womb, she’ll say to herself. She’ll wonder if love is only about procreation. She’ll know, though, she did the right thing. She’ll be happier without a baby, so will be the unborn kid. What would life be like for a child growing up with an unwilling mother? Next day, she’ll go to work like nothing happened. Her colleagues will ask if she enjoyed her day off. She’ll nod.

She’ll still be child free at forty, privileged enough to live a life of choices. She’ll have been careful enough to not go through the same situation again. She won’t see the ghost of her unborn daughter, as usually expected in stories like this one. Strangely enough people only imagine unborn daughters, not unborn sons. People will wonder why she doesn’t have kids. Not all people are made out to be parents, she’ll say. They’ll assume there’s something wrong. Physically or mentally. They’ll ask questions and offer unsolicited advice. To avoid further explanations, she’ll nod.

In an alternate universe, the girl won’t have a choice. She’ll have to keep the baby no matter what. She’ll look at it and every single time she’ll be reminded of the life she hasn’t lived. She’ll hate it, only she won’t be able to admit it. People never do. She’ll raise it like a committed mother and little by little she’ll love her kid, like all parents do. Or most of them.

By forty, she’ll have completely disappeared, enslaved in a life unchosen. That’s when the ghost of the life she could have lived will come to haunt her. The doctor will hand her the appropriate pills, asking her to calm down. She’ll take them without hesitation and she’ll nod. Not out of determination this time, but that nod will be the white flag signaling acceptance of defeat.

Mileva Anastasiadou is a neurologist, from Athens, Greece. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in many journals, such as the Molotov Cocktail, Jellyfish Review, Sunlight Press (Best Small Fictions 2019 nominee), Ghost Parachute, Gone Lawn, Ellipsis Zine, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Bending Genres, MoonPark Review, Litro and others. Follow Mileva on Twitter @happymil_.

Photo credit: Carlos Ebert via a Creative Commons license.

Coat Hanger Song

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

and fostered and fostered and

jailed for no crime of his own

Baby who commits suicide at nine

with a needle spooned from the shelter

of homelessness

Baby hit by the hunger of

water just to be wet

Black baby White

baby

Baby nursed by wolves or cats

Baby who killed his mother and

died anyway in the NICU of broken

hearts or the

Baby kept in a shed of his own

milk and blood

Beaten like a drum, in the back

alley of our glorious forsaken nation.

Andrea England is the author of Other Geographies (2017, Creative Justice Press) and Inventory of a Field (2014, Finishing Line Press). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Potomac Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Fourteen Hills Review, and others.. Most recently she had the honor of being a Writer-in-Residence at Firefly Farms (SAFTA). She lives and works in Kalamazoo Michigan, where she teaches English and Creative Writing for various universities and organizations. To learn and read more about her and her work, visit andreajengland.com.

Photo credit: Photo by Palash Jain on Unsplash.

On Abortion

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 late to consider her options, or the woman about to give birth to her eleventh child. I often left work feeling jaded and tired.

Now, in my semi-retirement, I mostly do the opposite of what I did before. I help women prevent pregnancy and help them when those plans fail. Which they do.

On social media, in response to an article about abortion, a man wrote that women should, instead of killing the baby, use birth control or the morning after pill. I could not stop myself from responding. I wrote that I am an abortion provider despite the fact that abortions are a fraction of what I do. I wrote that birth control is not 100 percent effective, nor is emergency contraception. I wrote that an unplanned pregnancy never happens without a man. Whoever claims they don’t believe in abortion rights may make their own decision not to have one.

My post received applause and gratitude. It also received more than one veiled threat in which I was told I was going to Hell. I think I do not want to go to their Heaven.

Yes. I do abortions.

I also provide contraception and STD treatment and preventative care.

Many days, I pass protesters who block my car from the clinic parking lot, who engage the women who are coming to see me or the other clinicians I’m proud to work with. What I think about these people—holding pictures of dead babies, handing out business cards for fake clinics, pamphlets filled with inaccurate descriptions of what we do, and propaganda such as the claims that sperm protects against pre-eclampsia or that birth control pills cause cancer—is: How dare you? This is not your business.

I can dismiss them. But my patients? Maybe not.

The second time I saw the rape victim was a month or more after the assault. The first time she’d asked me to look at a small bump that turned out not to be the herpes she was worried about. But this time, after sitting at her side while she tried to catch her breath long enough to tell me why she’d returned, to describe the pain of sitting, the torture when urine hit her skin, the agony caused by the multiple eruptions on her genitals, I had to tell her that this time, she was not so lucky. I sat with her as she sobbed, distraught over the thought of being reminded of the rape every time she has an outbreak of an infection she will never be rid of. This woman was not pregnant. Still, before getting inside, she had to walk past people who called her a murderer.

The day before, while deciding whether to renew the state’s last reproductive health clinic’s license to operate, Missouri’s health department passed a requirement that clinicians do a pelvic exam prior to the already mandated three-day waiting period before a woman has her constitutionally protected abortion. There are few situations that would make this exam medically necessary. This is punishment, pure and simple. Punishment for the women—some of whom, according to news reports, feel obliged to apologize to their clinicians for this prerequisite—punishment for the providers who, I imagine, feel as if they have guns to their heads.

In Oregon, where I work, we’re lucky to have a liberal governor and liberal laws. It is easy to convince myself that whatever the federal government does, we will be safe. And yet.

The federal Title X gag rule has been upheld in the courts. This rule tells health care providers they may only discuss prenatal care or adoption with their pregnant patients. It tells us, if we continue to provide education about or access to abortion, that we will lose Title X funding. What will this mean for the adolescent requesting chlamydia screening? For the married woman who learns her husband has been having sex with men? For the recovering addict who wants to be sure they don’t have HIV? Or the woman with the breast mass, the one asking for her first cervical cancer screening in ten years, the one with bleeding that could be controlled by a hormonal IUD even though she’s never been sexually active? The trans-man who feels rejected everywhere else or the cis-man who wants condoms, a vasectomy, or testing for STDs? Besides being a question of choice, this is a public health issue, pure and simple.

Sometimes the protesters outside my clinic are women. Head-bowed women holding prayer books line up along the sidewalk singing hymns. The woman in the headscarf, when she’s not pushing brochures, lies prostrate at the entrance to the property. I would like to tell them about the women who start out just as convinced of the morality of their views as they are, but who end up inside, making a choice they never imagined they’d make.

Sometimes, the protesters are men, to whom I want to say: You, too, bear responsibility. The only thing that guarantees no unplanned pregnancies is not having intercourse with a man. So why is the onus on women? It’s simple. Men can walk away. We cannot.

During his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Brett Kavanaugh was asked to come up with just one law that regulates what a man can do with his body. I couldn’t stop thinking about that question, couldn’t stop thinking about the decisions being made about my body and the bodies of every woman I know and those I don’t. I wrote the senator’s question on a cardboard sign and carried it to a Stop the Ban rally where a stranger informed me that in some states a man still needs his wife’s permission to have a vasectomy, but in fact, such a requirement would constitute not only an ethical lapse, but a violation of patient privacy law that prevents health care providers from discussing a patient with anyone without permission. The person who felt compelled to tell me I was mistaken, was mistaken.

I left the rally with my sister, both of us wondering what made these protests feel so less potent than those we attended when we were young. Demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Fighting for civil rights and the passage of Roe vs. Wade. I couldn’t stop seeing the sense of fatigue reflected back in the faces of those who now protest at our sides. Does it come from the barrage of stories about children in cages, starving polar bears, and mass shootings that flood social media and feed our sense of helplessness? Is it a manifestation of the slow, deliberate cutting away of our rights so that by the time we realize they’re gone we’ve been exhausted instead of energized?

It’s easy to convince ourselves that lives are not on the line, but they are. I am overwhelmed by a pervasive and palpable fear of returning to a time when women died and doctors were assassinated for trying to help.

So, every day, moving forward, I will remind myself of the health care providers in Missouri’s last clinic who, after three weeks of state-mandated pelvic exams—a decree that amounted to nothing short of state-mandated assault—stood up and said, No. We will no longer do this. We will not let you tell us how to do our jobs. I will remind myself of those clinicians who forced the state to stand down. I will remind myself of what is possible.

What if my patient with herpes had been pregnant, if her attacker had given her not just a chronic disease, but had also impregnated her? Who has the right to tell her whether or not to raise a child created by rape? Or to tell the woman who struggles to feed her children that she must have one more; to tell the teenager, who conceives the first time she has sex because her partner removed the condom, that her dreams have just died; to insist that the woman with a damaged fetus give birth even though the fetus won’t have a chance at the kind of life every one of us wants for our kids?

Who has that right? I don’t. And you don’t either. Our opinions don’t matter. We should keep them to ourselves, even, sometimes, when we’re asked to share.

Reproductive justice is about one thing and one thing only. It is about who controls my body and who controls yours, even if you are sure you’d never terminate a pregnancy. Please remember the women I’ve had in my office who, until they sat there, were absolutely certain, too.

Vicki Cohen is a nurse-midwife, a writer, and an activist from Portland, Oregon. She received her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars in January 2018.

The image is by Lauren Walker for Truthout.

Dark Spaces

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,
she had it even worse—at least Eve
knew what the apple looked like,
could touch it, fingertip trace its cheeks
and test for firmness. Fondling wouldn’t
have done Eve in, but all Pandora
had to do was crack her box
for the proverbial peak.
She couldn’t have known
what was in there, what could take root
in the world outside herself.
If she could have known,
of course she wouldn’t have
opened it and damned herself
to a notoriety which outstrips her gods.
Still we punish women who look
inside themselves to see
what seeds we bear, what traits,
what crooked stems and strains,
and we damn with new laws
those who slam the lid back down
and seal up in their cups and vessels
that which they will not tend and grow.

Heather Mydosh is a professor at Independence Community College in southeast Kansas and a recent graduate of the Stonecoast MFA at the University of Southern Maine. Her work has appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, After the Pause, 99 Pine Street, The Corvus Review, and Kansas Time + Place among others. Visit Heather’s website to learn more.

Painting credit: From the 1951 film Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.

Floating

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,
a murder in the Braille room of the public library.
Then, she sat silent, her long fingers tangled like kelp.

The doctor glanced at his medical license
framed on the wall behind him,
said he was afraid to use ether.
Leona jutted her famous Heyert jaw:
“My friend Ruth told me to insist.
With ether I’ll float above the pain.”

It was hot that June morning, 1942.
No air conditioning. My mother
in the waiting room thumbed through magazines.
Big-eyed Loretta Young on the cover of Life.

It happened fast. Ether, a busy housewife,
pulled down the shades.

The doctor waved my mother in.
White face, head back, Leona was no longer breathing.
The ribbon in her dark hair floated in the breeze of a fan.

Penny Perry currently has poems in Earth’s Daughters, Lips, California Quarterly, Patterson Literary Review and the San Diego Poetry Annual. Garden Oak Press will publish my novel, Selling Pencils and Charlie in Spring 2020. “Floating” was previously published in Penny Perry’s poetry collection, Santa Monica Disposal & Salvage (Garden Oak Press, 2012).

Photo credit: Photo by Ava Sol on Unsplash.

Permission to Procure Birth Control: U.S. Government Form BC-451

By Tara Campbell

U.S. Government Form BC-451: Permission to Procure Birth Control

In accordance with the Maternal Priority Act of 2020, any and all requests for contraception must be approved by the U.S. Department of Health and Fetal Services. To that end, please complete the following questionnaire:

Name of Infernal Harlot (Last, First): _________________________________________

Citizenship status

U.S. Citizen
Naturalized U.S. Citizen*
Dual Citizen*
Permanent Resident*
Spanish-speaker*
Olive-skinned*
Otherwise suspicious*

* This is the incorrect form for your use. Please submit Form 4827: Voluntary Forfeiture of Citizenship Status and Form 3453: Requisition for Repatriation to Country of Ancestral Origin.

Race/Ethnicity

Caucasian or White
African American or Black*
Asian*
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander*
American Indian or Alaska Native*
More than one*

* This is the incorrect form for your use. Please submit Form 3453 Requisition for Repatriation to Country of Ancestral Origin. Alternatively, submit Form 3423, Requisition for Federally-Funded Sterilization.

I, Infernal Harlot (First name, Last name) ___________________________________________, am requesting permission to procure birth control for the following reason(s); check all that apply:

__ I choose not to have children at this time.
Please report for six-month Re-Acculturation Training for self and husband. Be advised, failure to do so will result in a filing with your state’s attorney general.
__ My family cannot afford to have additional children at this time.
Please be advised that per the Find A Way Act of 2020, the right of the child to be conceived supersedes any and all other potential concerns, such as present ability to feed, clothe, house, or protect current or future children. Potential parents are legally bound to procure such means should conception occur, and as such, all petitions for birth control lodged upon this basis will be rejected.
__ Bearing a child will disrupt completion of school/my ability to work.
Per the 2021 Patriot Mother Act, an approved and notarized Form 1426b: Justification for Continuance of Educational/Professional activities must be attached. Please note that applications filed under this justification will be investigated and may result in termination/expulsion from your educational program.
__ Health risks associated with pregnancy.
Per the 2022 Valiant Vessel Act, you must attach a statement from your pastor attesting that the benefit to the world of any potential child that might have been conceived was considered coequally with the value of its mother’s survival. Please note, physicians’ statements are no longer considered valid.
__ I’m too young to have children.
Please consult the 2023 Budding Young Future Act, which revised age of consent with parental or assaulter’s permission, and harmonized it with appropriate childbearing age on a national level.
__ To regulate my periods.
Attach a statement from your husband along with form HOLI-1: Certification of Training: Understanding God’s Plan for You. Please note, physicians’ statements are no longer considered valid.
__ Treatment for ovarian cysts, endometriosis, or other health conditions unrelated to pregnancy prevention.
Attach statements from your husband and your pastor, along with form HOLI-1: Certification of Training: Understanding God’s Plan for You. Please note, physicians’ statements are no longer considered valid.
__ Risk of sexual assault.
Attach proof of address; most recent crime report from your precinct, certified by a reliable male law enforcement official; notarized letters from any potential assailants granting you their permission to not bear their children; and form HOLI-1: Certification of Training: Understanding God’s Plan for You.
__ I am dating a married CEO or Member of Congress.
Attach copy of text messages and current mailing address for immediate shipment of contraceptives.

IMPORTANT NOTE: All petitions based on reasons 1 through 8 will be rejected per the Fetal Host Act of 2024.

________________________________________________________________________
Name and Social Security Number of Infernal Harlot (print)

________________________________________________ ______________________
Signature of responsible party Date

________________________________________________
Relationship to Infernal Harlot (Husband/Father/GOP Elected Representative)

By signing this form, you acknowledge that you have given your wife/daughter/mistress permission to procure birth control, which may render your household subject to additional surveillance. Please be advised that per the Purity of Penetration Act of 2020, all carnal activity, including that between husband and wife, but with the exception noted in point 9 above, is purely for purposes of procreation. Anyone who knowingly commits fornication (sexual contact for purposes other than procreation, with the exception of point 9 above) may be subject to prosecution under federal law, potentially resulting in fines and/or jail time, and forfeiture of present and/or future rights to erectile dysfunction therapy.

Tara Campbell (www.taracampbell.com) is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, and fiction editor at Barrelhouse. Prior publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Jellyfish Review, Booth, and Strange Horizons. She’s the author of a novel, TreeVolution, a hybrid fiction/poetry collection; Circe’s Bicycle, and a short story collection, Midnight at the Organporium. She received her MFA from American University in 2019.

Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash.