2022, Revisited

by Rachel Loring

written in 2022 on the overturning of Roe, revisited in 2024

I cry today because I am a woman

it is not usually allowed

it is a weakness

something that makes us unfit

hysterical

but tonight I cry because 

my value is not

in my personhood

but in my potential 

for motherhood

because my body is not mine

but a site for men’s violence

tonight I cry because I know

how it feels to live in a world where

I am not equal

and my beating heart doesn’t count

in a heartbeat bill

How I wish

I could leave this body

That binds me to motherhood

Binds me to hysteria

But I am only a woman, an overgrown girl

So tonight I cry

I remember being told:

go cry to Daddy because he’ll feel bad

and now I cry and the daddies grin

and I think about my mother

her lifelong servitude to men

the one in the sky and the one in the house

and how I wish she were a poet

that she kept her girlhood

had stayed fluent in that language; her native tongue

I cry because it all hurts

It hurts all the time

the women who were lost before me

lost and hurt so I would be found and free

so we wouldn’t do this again

bled out for me

died for me

how many women died thinking they would be the last one?

in vain

So I cry tonight for that hurt

I cry like I am seven years old again, screaming 

it’s not fair

but really I cry because I am just too tired

just too tired to not cry anymore