7/7/23

Roe vs Wade Series | Poetry | Carol Alena Aronoff

Searching the Womb by Inder Salim 

 

Estranged Fruit

 

Forced birth to increase

domestic supply of infants

for adoption. Not oil, not

chickens– children. Ty

 

Is birth control next

to be sacrificed on the altar

of false piety– our bodies

offered up to the state?

 

Anger–too small a word to

contain my feelings of  betrayal,

despair at the sufferings, deaths

to come, at memories triggered:

 

Of being told to steal a diaphragm off

the doctor’s desk because he couldn’t

prescribe contraceptives in sixties’

Boston even to a married woman.

 

Of being molested by a Harley Street

physician as I lay on the table awaiting

an abortion, of being told he was doing

sex research as I must be a loose woman.

 

After years of struggle, lost and damaged

lives, are we once again commodities

to be exploited, trees forced to bear fruit,

to be plucked and plundered, driven

underground to early and unmarked graves?


 

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