“roe”
Alyssa Hanna
Artist Statement: All of the work I have submitted is directly related to my experience as a mentally ill, mixed race adoptee and person who can get pregnant/give birth-- a group of people that are constantly used as props in other peoples' arguments about politics, identity, and morality, yet ignored when we ourselves speak. Adoptees, especially international ones, do not have the same human rights guaranteed under the US Constitution that non-adoptees have, and if my work can shed light on that at all, or make any other fellow adoptee feel a little less alone, my mission will be accomplished.
adoptees are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their non-adopted peers, and despite being only 2.5% of the population, adoptees are twice as likely to come in contact with a mental health professional or be diagnosed with ADHD, ODD, bipolar disorder, or other mental illnesses.
roe
in the abortion debate we’re always called “unwanted babies”, even as we’re growing shut eyes in someone’s uterus. in the abortion debate they say “adoption is an option” like the garbage can is always empty (it is always full). in the abortion debate we’re asked if we’d rather be dead.
aren’t you lucky, they say
the wound turns infection, infection turns fester,
fester turns sepsis, the tongue splits open when it asks
if it could have done anything better
then withers when the brush is dipped
in guilt pails and painted with thick layers
it’s possible that you wouldn’t be here at all
the kids want to watch the movie annie but god why
can’t i stop mopping up my own vomit or
picturing being placed on a doorstep of an orphanage
like annie was but again you remind yourself that you’re
lucky hearing everyone around you think
you gotta get over it just because
your [parents] are fake doesn’t mean they’re
not real, you gotta get over the statistics
you gotta let go of your [mom] when she drops you
off at school, you gotta get over it (you’ll
never get over it,
the likelihood you’ll end up worse off than where you
started is so, so probable and you know this
because no other child spends their recess
smashing their heads against walls trying
to either forget the present or remember
your [mother]’s face if you ever saw it but—)
shouldn’t everyone get a chance to live like you?
Alyssa Hanna's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, The Mid-American Review, The Laurel Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, Passages North, PRISM International, and others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net, was a finalist in the 2017 James Wright Poetry Competition, a semi-finalist for the Hellebore scholarship, and a semi-finalist for the 2020 Nightboat Poetry Prize. alyssa is a Contributing Editor at Barren Magazine and works as a copywriter by day. She lives in New York with her fiancé and two lizards. follow her @alyssawaking on twitter, instagram, ko-fi, and tumblr.