Marion Deutsche Cohen

THE HEART

I haven’t the heart to tell you about the newly uncovered modern-day backwoods abortion clinic.
You’ll lie awake nights wishing there was nothing instead of something.
I’ll just say the women were poor, sometimes immigrants
who probably didn’t know what else was available.
And it went on for decades.
And more were killed than the doctor is being prosecuted for.

I won’t say what the instruments were.
You’d superimpose them upon any physical pain you happen to have.
You’d have to add it to the collection of horrors you already know about.
I haven’t the heart.

The newspaper with that article was lying on the kitchen table
and I wish somebody who loves me had been around at the time
somebody who hadn’t the heart to let me read it.
I would still know about it but not as much.

©  Marion Deutsche Cohen 2014

Marion Deutsche Cohen’s latest book is Still the End: Memoirs of a Nursing Home Wife (Unlimited Publishing, IN), the sequel to Dirty Details: The Days and Nights of a Well Spouse (Temple University Press, PA). Her books total 23, including Crossing the Equal Sign (Plain View Press, TX), poetry about the experience of mathematics. She teaches math and writing at Arcadia University in Glenside PA, where she has developed the course Truth and Beauty: Mathematics in Literature.