Katherine Hagopian Berry | Sestina for Choice | Poets Resist

Katherine Hagopian Berry received her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2012. She was a finalist in the Belfast Postmark Poetry Competition in 2017 and presented “Evolution of Ideas” with the Inventing Trees Troupe for the 2018 festival. She has three poems featured in Balancing Act II: An Anthology of Poetry by Fifty Maine Women, “Inheritance,” “Black Ice” and “The Dinner Party.” Her poem, “Cain” was presented and published at ARTWORD: Ekphrasis at the PMLA in 2019. She has two poems forthcoming in the May issue of Frost Meadow Review. Katherine lives and writes in Bridgton, Maine.

Poets Resist
Edited by Jemshed Khan
May 24, 2019

Katherine Hagopian Berry

Sestina for Choice

Regarding Alabama HB 314, A Bill yet to be titled (though we will use words like life, child) An Act, Relating to Abortion: Dear Mr. Collins, Representatives, I see I am the lucky woman not included in your list of crimes. Ectopic pregnancy, procedure necessity, not a crime some heartbeats, then, can be ignored. Ironic. But logic is not something women are supposed to know much about, we are children really, hardly representative bodies, our thoughts aborted by feelings, wandering wombs, this abortion debate over our pretty little heads. Crime is another story, mugshot sexy, represented on the TV, always happy to be apple eaters, savor sin like candy, a child born, as all women’s decisions, from the hormone’s fervid heat. So woman trouble, short walk to the abortion clinic, dead child on the waving sign, a crime we gleefully commit. Be careful, Representatives, of what you have chosen to believe. It represents a narrow vocabulary, what constitutes pain. Women talk, you know, but only to each other, about what it means to be empty. Mention abortion and no one I know has ever smiled. Crime is tricky. Do you steal bread to live? Save the unborn child only? Did you ever meet a child hungry, sleeves too short, represented by test scores, free and reduced lunch, agony? Where’s the crime? Mercy has its own dark gloss, what we allow women to say when they carve out their hearts, abort one hope in exchange for another, yet to be, but we are, determined. Representatives, reconsider criminalizing abortion. (Be witness, I have not talked about the dark star, child hole, scar, chasm, hell, choice I, woman, made, to carry myself away)