Joanna Brown
The A Word
I’m finally watching this doctor my age
on the video with her white meat tone
sip her glass of wine and eat her salad
while she talks about how to extract
fetal tissue so it’s preserved for research
and the truth is I don’t know whether this
is a voice over, maybe she wasn’t
in a restaurant maybe she was sitting
in her office in a white coat pants and clogs
like me, maybe her audio was seamlessly sliced
and spliced post recording but I feel like
I’m going to throw up.
She can use this
tone, I know, because causing repeated violence
to the body brings desensitization not always
in a bad way because how else can you
do the work.
I was in diapers the year of Roe v. Wade
so I did not see the women piled in
the “septic wards” shivering ash-gray
from knitting needles turpentine
pus blood seeping from vaginas spiking
temps dying— but I am practical and know
that sex is either just too fun or too awful
to be perfectly controlled no matter how many
pills I slip teen girls in nondescript paper
bags how many rods we insert in arms or Ys
or Ts in uteruses or how many condoms
we hand out like candy.
I trained with a doctor
who went to 14 weeks and it’s true, the heads
get stuck; I watched him break some.
But you have to remember there is a woman
lying on the table with her legs spread
and when I wasn’t assisting or doing the earlier
ones I was holding her hand and she cried out
because she was alone or cramping or talked
through it or closed her eyes and breathed
against the soft breath of suction but she was
there of her own volition.
And can I just say I don’t give a fuck
exactly how much Cecile Richards makes it’s
about a half a million and that’s a heck of a lot–
but she has a big job to do and it’s a lot more
important to me than whatever that guy
who runs Oracle does who gets 67 million.
Abortion is always going to be hell, easier
if it’s early, say seven weeks, you’ll just see
a whiff of white-spun cotton floating
in the water dish lit from below but often
you’ll see a translucent outstretched hand
or ribs like toothpick piano keys or find beads
that were eyes and sometimes they might sing
to you or haunt your dreams.
One thing that makes
me so so sad is that Planned Parenthood
is right downtown near a bus line and my old office
by the schools and Agnes’s café and I know the loving
people who work there and it’s free and girls
and boys can go there without their parents
and it doesn’t matter whether their mother
works three minimum wage jobs or their dad
is on disability or their parents are corporate
execs they can just show up and get birth control
and testing; and these idiots want to take
the money away that allows these kids
to take care of themselves and plan, thank God,
for their futures.
Joanna Brown‘s poetry has appeared in Gertrude, Eclectica, Bird’s Thumb, Earth’s Daughters, the chapbook 2 Horatio (2015), edited and published by Elaine Sexton, and other journals. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her spouse and two sons, and works as a family physician in community non-profits.
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