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WHAT IF YOUR MOTHER, Judith

Arcana. Chicory Blue Press, Inc., Goshen,

CT 06756, 2005, 91 pages, $15 paper.

Crimson, ink—Abigail Marble’s striking

watercolor cover wraps Judith Arcana’s

words in fluid shapes that suggest a womb,

that ripple like muscle, seep like blood.

It vividly anticipates Arcana’s bold poetry

that gives voice, voices, to all sides

of the double issue that is its subject:

abortion and motherhood.

     Arcana is a daughter and a mother. She

was also a “Jane”—one of the Chicago

women who learned how to provide abortion

in the days before Roe v. Wade, a

calling fraught with danger, commitment,

and questions. In her preface, she tells us

I...had been thinking about how to use what

I’d learned since 1970 to be more useful in

the increasingly frightening national struggle

over abortion and motherhood. This sentence

 anchors the book. Arcana aims to

be useful and, in doing so, does not limit

her scope to abortion but entwines it with

motherhood, poverty, fertility or barrenness,

love, fear, desire, and obedience. She

gives voice to those who came for help.

She offers image and argument—in dramatic

monologues by both sexes, in ironic

asides, in reports, in poems that rise to

lyric.

    Most distinctively, from the first, she

issues no absolutes:

Most of us think it’s not really a baby,

not a baby at all when it’s that small.

We see pictures on a screen, strange

dim images shot back from space.

But we know science isn’t what you feel.

What you feel comes from inside,

movement grandma calls quickening.

Until then we count on the calendar

to where we’d have to be to have it

be a baby….

(“Not really a baby”)

    She reminds us of ambiguity: she says,

Sometimes when you talk to them (“What

if your mother”); she addresses the life

that grows within, for me it was one thing

/ for you it was another (“For you it was

another”). Above all she voices questions:

you’ve got to decide right now / if you want

it: can you have it? (“Think Fast”); You say

it’s mine but how do I know? (“She couldn’t

be sure what he’d say”); and, in considering a

priest who rams his car into an

abortion clinic in Illinois, How is damage confined?

How does that work?” (“Applied History”).

     So much depends here on language, on

the words used to describe, persuade,

condemn—words such as quickening,

embryo, fetus, maternal instinct, miscarriage,

birth mother, give and take. Strong words,

strong feelings—red blood, black tears—

are leavened by Arcana’s keen ear for the

ironic. When arrested for her work as a

Jane, her breasts leaking milk behind bars,

she notes we were…charged with several

counts (Monte Cristo, / Dracula): all felonies,

nothing small.) (“Felony Booking,

Women’s Lockup, 11th and State: A Short

Literary Epic”). Irony does not cancel

pain, however. Such personal pain is often

misunderstood by those who focus on

politics, or religion, or what someone said

on the street:

Don’t you just hate it when you start to cry

and other people think you’re crying

because of something they know

but you’re not

you’re not

you’re crying because

what’s happening

has knocked the heart of your memory

sideways,

and the pain, the pain

of that sideways heart…

(“Hard times, fast river”)

We enter the physical pain of bruise,

abuse, and attempted self-induced abortion where…

yellow pus poured out of her,

/ creamy pus, running thickly / down the

plastic sheet is coupled with the pain of

desperation: But she grabbed my arm. / No!

You have to do it! I brought the money!

/ I can’t have this baby. (“Glenda

Charleston, 1971”). In the eloquent poem

“Snow, Fall,” an anguished young mother,

pushed beyond endurance, finds herself

slapping her young, loved daughter.

Arcana gives equal weight to the anger

of a birth mother who does not want the

court records unsealed and to the joyful

voice of a birth mother who hears the

long-lost voice sounding on the phone.

     Arcana skillfully differentiates these

voices in diction and form. We hear the

low thank you murmur of the fifteen-yearold

who is walked, post-abortion, back

close to her home; and the desperation

of the woman who flees as far as grocery

money will take her. Behind every voice

rise the voices of the Janes, passing in a

circle the cards that list the wrenching

stories of the pregnant women who need

everything—the Janes daunted but committed

to helping each one.

     This collection leads the reader to no

one conclusion, except the importance

of choice. Who defined right and life? And

 what does it mean? (“Back and Forth”)

Arcana asks in a stunning examination

of the history of the words row (roe) and

wade. The voices in this book—striking,

direct, real—offer rich possibilities for the

solitary reader as well as for an audience.

A dramatic reading for many voices (as

in Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues)

could present aloud these women and

men, speaking in deliberation, in relief,

in joy, in indifference and determination,

and, being human, out of our common

pain, the sideways heart.

Judith H. Montgomery

Copyright  2006 by CALYX, Inc., a non-profit corporation. No part of this publication may be copied or reproduced without written permission from CALYX.