Before the Morning-After Pill

Mother takes me back from the house of a boy
I gave my body to. Her lips are opening

and closing about Tuesday’s dreadful forecast,
and Margaret, whose surgery had gone well.

Half-listening, I give Mother affirmations, shy
and shift in jeans the boy pulled down my thighs.

White noise scenarios invite themselves to stay
like distant cousins–peeing on sticks, abortion

clinic waiting rooms, signs that scream “life
begins at conception.” It is dawn

when I slip out of the jeans whose stains did not go away
while I was sleeping. Neighbors search for shoes

and kick each other out of bathrooms,
Mother’s alarm clock rings upstairs.

She will call me thoughtless
when I am not on time for breakfast.

By Rachel Evelyn Sucher

Biography:

Rachel Evelyn Sucher is a queer-identified Vermont writer, activist, performer, horsewoman, and intersectional feminist. Rachel is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of COUNTERCLOCK literary & art journal. Her poems have been shortlisted for the International Literary Award (Rita Dove Award in Poetry) and the Dan Veach Prize for Younger Poets, and longlisted for the Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize. A mentee in the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program and the Glass Kite Anthology Summer Writing Studio, she has also attended the New England Young Writers’ Conference at Bread Loaf and the Champlain College Young Writers’ Conference. Her work is forthcoming in Tinderbox. When she isn’t wrestling writer’s block or the patriarchy, Rachel can be found snuggling puppies, making music, and overthinking in her nerdy poet’s notebook.