After Roe Was Repealed
By Jennifer Karp
Breasts —as if syllables of flesh
rewrote the law, a pulse hammered
in DNA scrawled in an alphabet
that cannot be read. Our drums
go forth, persist. We spit teeth
into the ballot box, heels cracking
on broken regulations, carry on, fall,
marrow pounding, lineage cheering under skin.
As if policy bent around a body
too curved for their angles,
hips detonating committee chambers
with a sway and swing, air forced
into rooms starved for it. We stretch new ink,
no need for a branch to land on;
the line items didn’t remember our skin,
supple and warm. We answer with daughters,
through a checkbox too soft to hold
an ache that won’t stay in ( )
Jennifer Karp is a disabled writer, and was short-listed in the 2025 Bridport Poetry contest, won first prize, runner up, and honorable mention in the 2025 International Memoir Association’s inaugural poetry contest, won honorable mention in the 2023 and 2025 Kowit poetry contest, and was a winner of the 2022 San Diego Reader poetry contest. Her work had been published abroad and domestically. She lives in San Diego.
Photo credit: Handmaid by Julie Blair via a Creative Commons license.
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