By N.C. Krueger
1st Place, Poetry, Create | Encounter 2024
Death has lost his honor—
no one mourns terrorists, or tissue, or blobs
of caricature or cells. A fetus
stretches her brown hands and rolls
against the womb-slope, the sand-slope,
the desert where no one is human;
a scythe jerks back her neck, gleaming
like drones in sunshine or warheads
flashing skin from bone and bones to carbon,
while the chemical smell burns her nostrils, her eyelids, her veins.
In the medicinal blue buzz of operating theater
fluorescents and bunker blacklights,
our heroes work the graveyard shift
with forceps and RPAs
—and her fetus head tears loose, scraps
the inside of another’s body, no scream
stamped on the womb-walls to indicate
who grew here alone.
We are sucked clean and free
to kill—“To gain dark transcendence we cut
the umbilical cords that bind;
we will neither be born nor die,
for murder is activism.” Naked death
is dancing on barren dunes,
barren wombs, while Molech’s maw
stretches to accommodate our excess of violence.
Innocent blood
pools in rivers we tiptoe over,
saying, forget them, forget them.
Artist Statement:
Systemized evils like abortion and unjust war can only exist because of dehumanization, like when unborn children are called “clumps of cells.” I wrote this thinking about how, when justifying both abortion and drone strikes that affect civilians, people use euphemistic, medicalized language to avoid the humanity of their victims. But in the end, freedom bought at the expense of innocents only cuts us off from our own bodies and our own physicality. This is a demonic impulse — to divorce the spirit from the body so that the body can be subjected to any violence we choose — thus the reference to a Tophet, a valley in the Ancient Near East where Moloch worshippers sacrificed their children. By incorporating visceral, explicit violence in the poem, I want to force the reader to look straight-on at how innocent bodies are degraded and destroyed.
Comments