Roe v Wade is overturned in Tennessee
Wherever you are, wet soil always smells the same.
You could be stood outside the Supreme Court of Tennessee
in August, it’s thirty-five degrees, and the earth will give the same serotonin hug it does through snow in a cemetery.
There’s a sign outside the court that says One Way Only, next to the sign that says Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, around the corner from the sign that quotes Frankie Pierce, Nashville’s most famous suffragist:
we are asking only one thing – a square deal.
There is no one else around to scream and anyway
the soil can’t speak. So I sweat and the best I can give is a poem turned over all night in my head
as I stare at the ceiling, asking how this storm will taste tomorrow, about the neurological fact
that soil increases serotonin. About some days.
Some days when you’re lying in a park like that, after rain.
Let’s call it Square Deal Park. And it smells so good in the sun and you look up and the sky is too fucking perfect
and vacuous and blue. And if you make a tunnel with your hands to your temples and stare long enough at that sky,
you could have your face to a fresh-painted
blue wall or heaven or the future
as though none of it ever happened.
Press harder. Press until you can’t feel your face anymore.
Ruth Beddow is a London-based poet originally from the West Midlands. Her first pamphlet ‘The Thought Sits With Me’ was published by Nine Pens in 2022. She currently runs a poetry workshop at Morocco Bound Bookshop and is the 2024 judge of the E.H.P. Barnard Poetry Prize.