Five Women, Five Stories

(A poem about abortion)


1

The woman across from me is as appropriate
as a cut throat in a Sunday-School class.
Who in their god-fucking right mind talks
about this business of bleeding,
over dinner?

She gurgles,
"I don't see why you should even get an opinion,
it's not like it will ever be your body," and she's bloody,
but she's right. It's not a choice I can ever make.

Yet, the meat on the table between us glistens wet
in the light and I bleed her a story:


2

The smell of bleach still makes a fist in my ribcage.
There are no rituals for this. You just sing the details:
bone-white bathtub tiles toilet bone=white sink,
blood and the thick way it seeps from her.
The finger bone skitter of a coat hanger
dragging through wet mess,
the smell I can taste, like a mouthful of nickels,
semen smell of bleach, the way she laughed with her hands
smashed together at the wrist, twisting and never touching
telephones, her trip to the hospital, my fingernails blood black,
bleach blood running pink, the possibility my hands left behind
in my hair, the smell of bleach,

3

I say, all whiskey bubble giggles,
"I think it's sad that in Zombie movies,
no one has ever addressed the issue
of what happens at an abortion clinic."


She has already seen their teeth set
jewel hard and shining in the stainless steel
morning, protesters a crowd of mouths moaning,"Life,"
surrounding and devouring supporting actresses.

Her hand is flat against her belly,
palm pressed bridge from ribs to pelvis.

"No," she says, "it's not sad," and her voice,
her voice is terrible and soft.


4

We are all crying, today.

The front door will always be thirty feet tall,
when I remember it. There is a single protester
who looks so understanding that I hate her
with the immediate frenzy of a guard dog
I'm not sure what I am trying to protect us from.

"Just open the door," the woman behind me says.
After, when we walk thirty laps in the clinic hallway,
I will hear the woman out front every time the door opens,
repeating the same, simple truth:

5

"You don't have to do this," I tell her.
She looks at me, but she's seeing empty bottles,
cigarette butts, the littered coffee table
that is my life. I want to say more, but the certainty that
I will always be dirty dishes in a tiny apartment
has jammed itself in my throat.
Her eyes catwalk from the cigarette
burning in my mouth to the question mark I'm wearing
just above my eyes.

"No," she says, "I don't."