Chapbook “Outside the Clinic”
This chapbook, released in 2010 by Unlikely Stories, deals with the murder of Dr. George Tiller. From my Author’s Note:
Dr. George Tiller was shot and killed by Scott Roeder on May 31, 2009, while attending church. Prior to his death, Dr. Tiller worked in women’s health care, specializing in abortion services. He was widely known as one of the few doctors in the United States willing to perform abortions after the 21st week.
As a male, I’ll never have an abortion. One of the privileges of my sex is that I will never enter an abortion clinic as a patient. However, according to Dr. Leroy Carhart, a friend and associate of Dr. Tiller’s, “men have had unlimited availability to ‘abortion’ since the beginning of time. Men can walk away from unwanted pregnancies with virtually no response from government.”
While our current political discourse typically rests on binaries (good and evil; them and us), poetry often resists such discourse. Its lines are less clean cut, less distinct. It encourages us to see people as complicated human beings, not simple rhetorical subjects.
I feel it is important to integrate poetry’s broad view with the political specifics to truly know where one stands. To paraphrase former New Zealand Prime Minister Jenny Shipley, we’ll never have neutrality outside of an abortion clinic.
I am adamantly pro-choice. This chapbook asks, where do YOU stand.
Outside the Clinic is available for purchase for $5.00 through Unlikely Stories. It is also available as a free PDF download. Click the image for ordering and/or downloading information.
“One of the best books of political poetry I’ve read in ages.”
—Nin Andrews, author of Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane
“The American debate about abortion and contraception is too often conducted with shouting, anger and violence. Outside the Clinic is a powerful and unflinching look at these issues and those who stand on either side. It reveals everyday truths that are often drowned out by the politicization of abortion. It looks beyond the commotion and into the heart.”
—Kellie Copeland, Executive Director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio
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Sample Poem:
The Life Counselor
shouts at women whose minds
are already made up.
In this parking lot, his barking
finds no empty spaces;
the time for decision making
has passed. He has no part
in that process, no scales
for the weight within these women.
The kind of guy you could see
ordering a mail-order bride
and imagine her asking for a divorce.
He is propaganda from head
to toe: thick military-style
boots, cargo pockets stuffed
with pamphlets, red vest
tied around his wide
stomach with the words
Please Talk To Me
and a picture of the cross.
His eyes see passed boyfriends’
confusion, passed the women’s
puffy eyes. Does he look for
scruffy, unkempt fantasies
of the Old Testament?
He says he is offering
an alternative, that he knows
organizations that will
help with the cost
of raising her child.
He thinks that if the price
is right, these women
will speak with him,
whisper his name gently, say
thank you or this means
so much, and look up at him,
not with tears of anger
or fear, but of gratitude,
thinks the voices of the little
ones he saves will one day grow loud
enough to drown out the silence
of children who never call anymore,
not even on his birthday.
.
Also, poems from this collection can also be found in New Verse News and Breadcrumb Scabs.
