i don’t think i have ever felt safe here,

except when i was a kid running aimless

through the flowers and the trees finding

magic and miracles in everything;

i am so sick of all the disasters

since the overturning of roe v. wade i have

felt so unsafe and so angry and so betrayed by

my own country—

how can we be expected to go on in times

like these? things just seem to go from

terrible to even more terrible and then something

else awful happens and we’re all expected

to keep going on with our lives as if nothing

has changed and everything is okay, but this isn’t

okay and there’s nothing normal about any of this.

as if that’s not bad enough they’re coming for

other rights, and it makes my heart sad to know

that i may not be able to marry the person i fall

in love with one day because they might be a woman;

never signed up for this oligarchy or theocracy—

i was promised a better future as a kid,

and i want them to deliver on this promise;

because what the hell kind of world is this? this

is nothing to be proud of, this is not a world

that anyone will want to inherit after us;

i am so sick of politicians and people in power

corrupted with greed and delusions deciding they can

do whatever they want whilst they make the rest of us suffer.

BIO: Linda M. Crate (she/her) is a Pennsylvanian writer whose poetry, short stories, articles, and reviews have been published in a myriad of magazines both online and in print. She has eleven published chapbooks the latest being: fat & pretty (Dancing Girl Press, June 2022), and three micro-chapbooks. She is also the author of the novella Mates (Alien Buddha Publishing, March 2022).