By: Leon Fedolfi
I can’t remember the particulars of my fetal thoughts - it’s a
Gunshot Difference of
My first love -
Honest breath.
Then I remembered the fetus cannot think, it is not me while
Strange against my skin and head.
There is a bouncer at the door where I am the only customer:
Little black cocktail dresses hold hands with what I want.
A tobacco pipe sits in a Virginian virgin’s garden. Those guns go off:
I was not turned on
to who I am,
until programmed with language.
Flesh and Ink -
A pretty dissent across my chest.
Brooklyn Resident and Liberal Patriot. Likes long walks along the beach and romantic comedies.
"This poem 'broke apart' from a reflection on arguments around abortion. Not something I think about too often, and I don’t know why I was reflecting on it that night. Also, I don’t know why, in particular, it took this form. I am pro-choice, so, there may have been something I was reading on my phone that was anti-choice. To ‘abort’, there are a lot of walls in that term. Abort what? This is not a political poem, but politics scaffolds: the undercurrent is in the title, my association to the use of guns, my association to the reference to a specific southern State (of alliteration), and in the original literal inspiration. But this is not a poem about the politics of abortion. This poem was written in a bar, where there was a bouncer and I was the only customer, for a while, and I used my thumbs to hit spots on my phone that were defined as 'keys.'
That is how I wrote the poem. The idea of 'virgin' and the idea of 'abort.' I am not suggesting the poem is philosophical, but when I re-read the poem, this is what I get hung up on. The terms are film negatives (I think..maybe) of each other. Got here how? What is no longer here? I can’t remember when I came into existence, and when I sleep at night, most every night, I cease to exist. A reference to tattoos sprinkle across the modest body of work that is my writing. I love the idea that people have symbols written across their skin, like it was a fresh piece of paper. I love the idea that we can author ourselves. At one point in the night a wave of people rushed through the door. Two women in cocktail dresses were holding hands. They seemed to really care for each other."
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