Mea Andrews

They have said all life we give
must be on their terms,
our biology extorted
for their workers,
their GMO livestock
to keep their factories,
healthcare pyramid schemes,
and prisons running.

If it is our bodies they want,
let us run like stallions,
untamable,
to a desert begging for life,
organisms dead and forgotten
under sand that remembers
existence like a wraith,
an ephemeral illusion.

From our own hands
we will grow what is needed
to protect us,
greenery so tall,
fertilizer the detritus
of what tried to hold us down.

They don’t care
if a woman like Adriana Smith
is brain dead,
as long as her womb
hasn’t yet fallen to maggots.

In our desert,
we’ll grow only Audreys,
fed on the bodies
of those who come
to drag us from
our self-made oasis.

Leave your fingernails
in the walls and
climb.

There is a place
where women walk
with the confidence
of constellations
gleaning across
the night sky.

It is not paradise,
but it is better
than the life
of a girl raised

with her books
chosen for her,
a shareholder
of a uterus,
the government’s claws
waiting to dig
into a womb
to catch
whatever
may tear its way out.

One day we will look down
into the cesspool,
the flesh of those
who didn’t make it,
smiling up at us
and know the footholds
we stretched to reach
were made for us:

a coalescing
of women raising
each other up.