Lady Liberty (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: Nose Rest Day
*Let’s workshop this poem about how just because the US is a thot (given how splayed she keeps her thighs even to the nastiest immigrants, “the wretched refuse”), that does not make her “No” a “Yes.”
*I woke up in the middle of the night with this on my mind. I wrote it in the back of the book I’m reading and then worked on it this morning. The core nugget was “if we image the US as a real woman, maybe then her ‘no’ would not mean ‘yes.’” I could have left it at that. But that is too ambiguous even if I added “to entry” after “‘no.’” And also I really wanted to drive the political point home: just because she is very open (a slut who takes in the teeming masses of straight trash, as the Lazarus poem says), that does not mean her boundaries are not to be respected. Rhetorically I want to position those who defend even the right of illegal immigrants to be here on the side of rape culture—they are taking lady liberty’s “no” to mean “yes.” Indeed, to support their case they often cite the Lazarus poem at the base of the Stature of Liberty’s pedestal. But that has no more relevance to the allowance of illegals as saying the girl was scantily clad has relevance to her having gotten raped.
Lady Liberty
Slum lust (“Give me your tired and poor, [your scum]”) might make her la cucaracha of sluts,
la clamidia, but imagine the US as a real woman—maybe then, despite her clingy robes
or even her “askin for it” squirt when flipped to her left, “no” would never mean “yes.”
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
