[THIS POEM WILL PROBABLY GET US KILLED]

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).