Sam Szanto

A Writer has a Choice

After a long wait
in a stuffy red room
the woman sees a doctor.
He tells her he has to do a scan
and she might not want to look.
He puts cold gel on her stomach
and she does not look.
He tells her the foetus is not
eight weeks old, as she had thought, but ten.
He sends her back to the red room
to wait for the termination.
 
In every poem she has written
since that time
the woman chose differently.
She looked at the screen, saw her baby
and told the doctor
I don’t want this.

Sam Szanto lives in Durham, UK. She is a writer and an editor at the ‘The Afterpast Review’. Her collaborative pamphlet, ‘Splashing Pink’ was published by Hedgehog Press and is a Poetry Book Society Winter 2023 Choice. She won the Charroux Poetry Prize and the First Writer International Poetry Prize.