by Sharmila Voorakkara & Ron Riekki
Planned Parenthood officials on Monday announced plans for a mobile abortion clinic—a 37ft recreational vehicle that will stay in Illinois but travel close to the borders of adjoining states that have banned the procedure since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade earlier this year. —The Guardian, October 4, 2022
*
for Alexis McGill Johnson
*
There has always been a running, either away from or to. And sometimes, just the promise of anything other than where you are is all you need to leave. To live. This fills me with worried peace… My friend told me that I need to practice gratitude, to be thankful for mobile clinics and mobile apps and even my mobile home— these places of temporary comfort, where people might treat you like a person, can understand you are a being, human, like them, to help with the need to avoid suffering, needlessly, and perhaps be understood, be under caring hands, especially after the hands that strangled you, tried to own you, drown you, breakdown you, in your nightgown, you in front of your children and the law-and-order and the Bible that want to shame you, and then, at the border, this safety, waiting, at the border, thank God, at the border.
*
*
Sharmila Voorakkara received her MFA from the University of Virginia. Her first collection of poems, Fire Wheel, was published by the University of Akron Press.
Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).
This is powerful.