Annalee Roustio

Current River at Van Buren, Missouri

We’ve come to Missouri for a float trip, which sounds like a euphemism

for abortion (even Current River somehow seems reproductive),

but isn't. If you’re not of the Ozarkian ilk, a float trip starts with a rubber

donut raft. When your group is called (it’s all very coordinated, see),

you pile into a dust-caked school bus, rafts stacked high in its hitched trailer.

Up the mountain you ride, dozens of sunscreen-slick thighs sticking to the seats.

Once at the river’s mouth, you tie your rafts together with rope (BYO knife),

wade in, and coast downstream for miles. Back to where we started.

That I’m not here for an abortion is good, considering

Governor Parson’s signature banned them the day SCOTUS overturned

Roe, enacting the great Show-Me State’s trigger law. Plus, it’s our first date

since getting back together for the nth time (he wants kids, I don’t,

etc.), and despite the hundred-degree misery melting us, despite

swaths of shitfaced bachelorettes and Trump supporters waving

MAGA flags red as their terrible sunburns, I will admit, 

I am almost relaxed: our legs, waspish and indifferent, dangle

in the deliverance of cold water. The pitbulls are reliably cute,

paddling after submerged sticks or snakes, bumping YETI

coolers fastened like toddlers into rafts of their own.

An oily milk of sunscreen and spilled beer ribbons the currents.

Pistachio shells trail in the wake of passing fishing boats. An exhaust.

(In another place, the man I last loved rocks his sleeping infant.) Everywhere

else, dragonflies—eyes like coconut bras—their skinny, slip-bobber tails—

constantly fuck. Or mate. Whatever it is they do when stacked

in twos, double the periwinkle wings. I think I catch a glimmer of a fish

beneath me, but it’s only someone’s Croc sinking. I might love this

man before me now, nodding off under his seersucker bucket hat,

but the poem isn’t really about him. It's about you and me, reader.

If we wanted an abortion in this state, we could not get one.

If we needed an abortion in this state, we could not get one.

Everybody continues to bob downriver, swimming in each other’s pee.