CNF: Tuesday, the Regulars
by Liz Abrams-Morley
The second rat to scuttle across his foot and back into the dumpster, my friend Damien still doesn’t look down, just goes on directing cars into spaces along the clinic’s low wall. Not yet dawn. Damien in his long purple skirt, his you- couldn’t- possibly- feel- a- rat -through these shit kicker boots of his, smart guy, the usual protesters across the one lane street, Tuesday regulars, all broken and ancient looking men probably ten years my junior, are setting up their posters on the side where they’re supposed to stay but don’t: Don’t Kill Your Baby, It’s a Life, not a Choice— today, a colorful addition: Women’s Rights Begin in the Womb—how do they not see the irony, my friend, Sheri’s saying as she moves my brightly striped Clinic Escort vest over my puffy parka, pulls my orange wool hat down over my ears. It’s cold. The sun won’t rise for more than an hour this time of year, but the cars begin to show. The women—smiling or defiant—I don’t pretend to know what any she feels—will arrive, wrapped in woolen jackets or swaddled in blankets over pj’s, Uggs on their feet and slippers in hand.
Young, very young, not all that young, I’m walking beside each one of them, putting my body between her and the curb, between her and the arm reaching toward us offering her a brochure, a so called ultrasound photo I know to be a newborn of at least 3 weeks. Just ignore him, I croon. Just ignore this guy and soon, each patient delivered to behind the heavy, self-locked doors, I’m back on the stoop of the clinic and one of the four usuals—Jerry usually—crosses the street to remind me that I’ll soon be burning in hell. It’s 18 degrees. Icy rage roils my gut the way snow floes calved and thundered off waning glaciers I watched from a safe distance once in Alaska. What I can’t say—never engage with them, the training manual directs—what I won’t say is how good hell fire sounds about now, my coffee no longer even lukewarm in the go cup. My mother’s abortion was so long ago, it was in the bad old days before the good old days we’re looking back on now, far from home, maybe in Puerto Rico, and how she got there, I never learned. Did she shiver despite the humid sweetness of the island air? Feel relief? Terror? Butter-gold and pink sunrise striating the sky to the east now. My mother’s silences before she ever boarded that prop mirrored nonstop her silences after.
Liz Abrams-Morley’s collection, Because Time, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2024. Other collections include Beholder, 2018, Inventory, 2014 and Necessary Turns, published by Word Poetry in 2010 and which won an Eric Hoffer Award for Excellence in Small Press Publishing that year. In 2020 she was named the Passager Poet of the year in Passager Journal’s annual contest. Liz’s poems and short stories have been published in a variety of nationally distributed anthologies, journals and ezines, and have been read on NPR. A retired faculty member in the Rosemont College MFA program, Liz is co-founder of Around the Block Writers’ Collaborative. Poet, professor, gramma and activist, Liz wades knee-deep in the flow of everyday life from which she draws inspiration and, occasionally, exasperation.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Tuesday, the Regulars”? For the past few years, I’ve been creating work that blurs the lines between poetry and prose and I’ve ended up with a number of pieces that fall into the category I’d call prose poems. But what surprised me in drafting this poem was that I had no earthly idea what it wanted to be or become. I wrote a very initial version in a master class on zoom. It was a scene I wanted to paint of the clinic where I spend weekly early mornings, of the regular anti-choice protesters and their crazy assertions. This started as a longer and more discursive piece into which my workshop colleagues noticed I’d dropped the barest hint of my mother and her experience. A few months after I wrote it, I began to shape it, compress it, and build in a sense of music that I think separates prose poetry from prose, but I still didn’t see the breadcrumb I’d dropped myself, a slight reference to my mother, her illegal abortion decades ago. Only when I lifted my mom out did I find my ending. Look for those breadcrumbs you leave yourself, I always tell my students; this time I actually followed my own advice.
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