reproductive rights poems Archives

Legislators v. Her | Alexandre Bartolo

Nightcrawlers fill your tonsils, beaconing
false beetles towards eerie lepers. Fit

weary scarfs around legislators, disheartened
from feminists’ marches.

“Those fetal coincidental miscalculations!
Where was our pharmaceutical latex?”

“We didn’t laboriously get paid to endure
unshaven armpits!”

Parasites, elephants whose genes changed
by Linkage near to reincarnation engorge

laundry rooms, wombs and Her call to
living will.

Look across lucky neighborhoods where
daughters can afford crossing borders, eager

to adjure a Mount Venus’ climber,
executing their fathers’ shame.

Before Roe v. Wade | Marsha Owens

I didn’t know the girl
raped by her uncle, the one
who told her dirty jokes,
the neighbor women whispered
poor girl, eleven, disappeared,
gone to ‘the home.’

I knew about The Home out on
the highway for girls who got
themselves pregnant,
as though they caught
a disease because they
didn’t wear a jacket.

I didn’t know the girl
on the sidewalk downtown,
her head lifted to catch
moving air in the wrinkles
of her shiny black neck, road tar melting
in hot July, baby
in her 14-year-old belly.

I didn’t know. I stuffed my white
gloves into my pocket, went back
to my whiter-than-white neighborhood.
hung my white blouse in the closet,
coat hangers jangling
their impatience like little girls who
just want to play outside.