Choice words: writers on abortion

Foreword / Katha Pollitt

Introduction / Annie Finch

Mind. You are here / Cin Salach ; First response / Desiree Cooper ; From The Women of Brewster Place / Gloria Naylor ; Motherhood / Georgia Douglas Johnson ; (Amber) / Debra Bruce ; From The Kitchen God's Wife / Amy Tan ; The End / Sharon Olds ; A Million Women Are Your Mother / Saniyya Saleh ; "Oh Yeah, Because You Could Choose Not To," from Now for the North / Emily DeDakis ; From The Millstone / Margaret Drabble ; The Abortion I Didn't Want / Caitlin McDonnell ; Free and Safe Abortion / Ana Gabriela Rivera ; Merely by Wilderness / Molly Peacock ; From Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman / Mary Wollstonecraft ; Cora, Unashamed / Langston Hughes ; You Have No Name, No Grave, No Identity / Manisha Sharma ; Five Months Vulnerable / Burleigh Muten ; From Past Due / Anne Finger ; Abortion / Ai ; From Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman / Lindy West ; The Pill Versus the Springfield Mine Disaster / Joanna C. Valente ; You Don't Know / Judith Arcana ; Ghazal / Jenna Le ; From What Have You Done for Me Lately? / Myrna Lamb ; Post-Abortion Questionnaire-Powered by Survey Monkey / Susan Rich

Body. From "Tam Lin" / Anonymous Balladeers ; The Business of Machines / Shirley Geok-lin Lim ; From Heat and Dust / Ruth Prawer Jhabvala ; Psalm / Alina Stefanescu ; On the Death and Hacking into a Hundred Pieces of Nineteen-Year-Old Barbara Lofrumento by an Illegal Abortionist, 1962 / Pat Falk ; From Self-Ritual for Invoking Release of Spirit Life in the Womb / Deborah Maia ; And There Is This Edge / Lauren R. Korn ; Tugging / SeSe Geddes ; From Happening / Annie Ernaux ; Saraswati Praises Your Name Even When You Have No Choice / Purvi Shah ; "Recruiting New Counselors" from Jane: Abortion and the Underground / Paula Kamen ; From "Box Set" / Sue D. Burton ; Birth / Wendy Chin-Tanner ; The Scarlet A / Soniah Kamal ; Sorry I'm Late / Kristen R. Ghodsee ; Pelican / Mahogany L. Browne ; Names of Exotic Gods and Children / Valley Haggard ; Dates of Last Period / Amy Alvarez ; Remembering How My Native American Grandfather Told Me a Pregnant Woman Had Swallowed Watermelon Seeds / Jennifer Reeser ; From "Make Your Own Way Home" / Leila Aboulela ; An Avocado Is Going to Have an Abortion / Vi Khi Nao ; yolk (v.) / Emily Carr ; This Doctor Speaks: Abortion Is Health Care / Sylvia Ramos Cruz ; In Which I am a Volcano, from Terminations: One / Lynne DeSilva-Johnson ; Cold Cuts and Conceptions / Julia Conrad ; My Excuse: I Had and Abortion. What's Yours? / Laura Wetherington ; The Jewel of Tehran / Sholeh Wolpé

Heart. the mother / Gwendolyn Brooks ; Places / Mariana Enriquez ; Women's Liberation / Judith Arcana ; Cardboard Pope / Galina Yudovich ; From Granica (Boundary) / Zofia Nałkowska ; Interred / Pratibha Kelapure ; She Did Not Tell Her Mother (A Found Poem) / Kenyan Teenagers and Annie Finch ; The Lady with the Lamp / Dorothy Parker ; From Rubyfruit Jungle / Rita May Brown ; From La Bâtarde / Violette Leduc ; I Am Used to Keeping Secrets about My Body / Josette Akresh-Gonzales ; Weather / Lisa Coffman ; Of the Missing Fifty Million / Shikha Malaviya ; My Sister Grows Big and Small / Linda Ashok ; Tweets in Exile from Northern Ireland / Jennifer Hanratty ; The Virginity Thief (A Letter to My Man) / Thylias Moss ; Abortion Hallucination / Larissa Shmailo ; Brass Furnance Going Out: Song, After an Aborthion / Diane di Prima ; What Was, Still Is / Alida Rol ; From "Abortion" / Anne Finger ; Song of the Emmenagogues / Lesley Wheeler ; From The Hundred Secret Senses / Amy Tan ; Nothing but the Wind / Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi ; Haint / Teri Cross Davis ; The Memory of Abortion Unexpectedly Returns / Leslie Monsour ; Gretel: Unmothering / Lauren K. Alleyne ; Moo and Thrall / Dana Levin ; From La Nove de los locos (The Ship of Fools) / Christina Peri Rossi ; Abortion / Bobbie Louise Hawkins ; From Come in Spinner / Dymphna Cusack and Florence James ; From "Standing Ground" / Ursula K. Le Guin ; Dear Elegy the Size of a Blueberry / Katy Day ; "Farewell, My Love," from The Sacrament of Abortion / Ginette Paris ; Afterlife / Joan Larkin

Will. Through the Blood / Busisiwe Mahlangu ; Right to Life / Marge Piercy ; From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name / Audre Lorde ; The Spring of Life / Ann Townsend ; From for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf / Ntozake Shange ; From "Introduction to 'The Idea' and 'The Idea'" / Hilde Weisert ; Not Yours / Angelique Imani Rodriguez ; Being a Woman / Jennifer Goldwasser ; An Abortion Day Spell for Two Voices / Annie Finch ; I Think She Was a She / Leyla Josephine ; Regarding Choice / Alexis Quinlan ; We Women / Edith Södergran ; "Don Quixote's Abortion," from Don Quixote / Kathy Acker ; American Abortion Sonnet #7 / Ellen Stone ; After the Abortion, an Older White Planned Parenthood Volunteer Asks If My Husband Is Here & Squeezes My Thigh and Says, "You Made The Right Decision," and Then "Look What Could Happen If Trump Were President, I Mean, You Might Not Even Be Here." / Camonghne Felix ; New World Order / Lisa Alvarado ; From Daughter of Earth / Agnes Smedley ; The Abortion / Anne Sexton ; Confession #1 / Yesenia Montilla ; From Frog / Mo Yan ; Getting into Trouble / Jacqueline Saphra ; The Children's Crusade / Ana Blandiana ; A Promise / Gloria Steinem

Spirit. Poem for Myself and Mei: Concerning Abortion / Leslie Marmon Silko ; A Good Woman Would Never / Sylvia Beato ; Abortion Isn't Beautiful / Nicole Walker ; Magdalen / Amy Levy ; The Year the Law Changed / Carol Muski-Dukes ; I Bloomed / Angie Masters ; From "Corona and Confession" / Ellen McGrath Smith ; The Promise / Tara Betts ; From "A Healing Abortion Ceremony" / Jane Hardwicke Collings and Melody Bee ; A Birth Plan for Dying / Hanna Neuschwander ; On That Day / Arisa White ; New Religion / Mary Morris ; Hail Mary / Deborah Hauser ; At Advent, the Waiting Room / Daisy Fried ; From A Book of American Martyrs / Joyce Carol Oates ; Tunnel of Light / Julie Kane ; Lizard / Ulrica Hume ; Beneath the World: Two Poems to The Child Never to Be Born / Sharon Doubiago ; Prayer to the Spirit / Starhawk ; the lost baby poem / Lucielle Clifton ; "Fire Section" from Abortion: A Healing Ritual / Minerva Earthschild and Vibra Willow ; An Abortion / Frank O'Hara ; From "Principles of Midwifery," from My Notorious Life / Kate Manning ; Christmas Carols / Margaret Atwood ; Nicolett / Colette Inez ; From "Lily's Abortion in the Room of Statues" in Among the Goddesses / Annie Finch ; Chapel of Forgiveness / Cathleen Calbert ; From Surfacing / Margaret Atwood ; Mourning Sickness / T. Thorn Coyle ; Lullaby / Claressinka Anderson.