Amy Lawless
DOLPHIN LIVE BIRTH
- Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn
- —Gore Vidal
- Ghost of Gore Vidal, please watch over me as I watch this dolphin live
- birth online. We’re sort of a militarized republic, you said.
- Remain over me, and what you
- see in the present and the future.
- Art, the function
- of art, is to remain
- here. Success
- is made through
- failure, made the dolphins
- female, watching me, birthing me.
- But need was gone?
- Not sure.
- What rearming? What energy and patience?
- Gore Vidal,
- the family that previously Kickstartered for a dolphin midwife live birth
- disappeared from the internet without a trace.
- I searched for them. They were peace-loving crust punks.
- Their story is our story.
- Two crust punks expecting one more
- wanted to Give Birth in Hawaii with a Dolphin Midwife.
- To all the women who want a baby,
- over here please!
- And to all the children who weren’t born in a hospital,
- step over here please!
Reality star Scott Disick posted a photo to Instagram: a man with his dick in the mouth of a fish. Bestiality, rape, blow jobs, pornography—this photo had it all. His caption, however, was an inquiry of taxonomy: Does anyone know what kind of fish this is?
The unfed mind devours itself.
- The photo was taken down.
- I’ve given some blow jobs.
- Each was a difficult though rewarding gift.
- I empathize for that dead or dying fish.
- It is the woman without arms.
AMY LAWLESS is the author of two books of poems including My Dead (Octopus Books). Her third poetry collection Broadax is forthcoming from Octopus Books. A chapbook, A Woman Alone, is just out from Sixth Finch. With Chris Cheney, she is the coauthor of the hybrid book I Cry: The Desire to Be Rejected from Pioneer Works Press's Groundworks Series (2016). Her poems have recently or are forthcoming in jubilat, Reality Beach, The Volta, Washington Square Review, Best American Poetry 2013, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Every Occasion, and the Brooklyn Poets Anthology. She received a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2011. She lives in Brooklyn.
