ERASED

by Erin Murphy

​An erasure of “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” by Renée Nicole Good (Macklin).

The original poem follows "Erased."

 

Erin Murphy’s latest books are Human Resources and Fluent in Blue, winner of the 2025 American Book Fest Best Book Award in Poetry.

*****

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs

by Renée Nicole Macklin Good

i want back my rocking chairs,

solipsist sunsets,

& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.

 

i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores

(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—

the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):

 

remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils,

& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.

under clippings of the moon at two forty five AM I study&repeat

               ribosome

               endoplasmic—

               lactic acid

               stamen

 

at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills—

 

i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can’t point to anymore, maybe my gut—

maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.

 

it’s the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead.

can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom

 

               now i can’t believe—

               that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”—

all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:

life is merely

to ovum and sperm

and where those two meet

and how often and how well

and what dies there.

AND SO IT BEGINS

by Imogen Arate

Art by Ann Telnaes

I.
The video stunned
The spin followed

An award-winning poet
has been silenced
by the shrill bullets from a
21st-century fast-drawing
cowboy on the man-made
frontiers of the new wild West

Yet we’re subjected 
to the lies of a rapist

Another man trying 
to justify violence
against women

A bad remake
of another family 
forced into mourning

another community
thrown into chaos

II.
Yet we still think in terms
of elephants and donkeys

while neither will draw down
on the military budget

sunset high-tech toys
hardware for the police and

other testosterone-charged 

angst-driven angry boys

tear down boundaries
that gate-check
investments in decency
beyond the borders
of “me and my”

Repulsive successive local waves 
reinforce the national and the 
global of political expedience 
and small and large lies stack 
upon one another to enrage
as the bodies of the sacrificed
emit the noxious gas
of corruption to explode
in a tsunami of grief and fury

III.
He who became
a millionaire at eight
nursed on government subsidies
bailouts and tax breaks
feeds us the fast-food diet of rancor 
while he grabs a pussy a plane 
a tanker a president oil fields 
Greenland and lusts after resort money
built on a still-hemorrhaging mass grave

But he’s just another opportunist
a symptom mushrooming on the 
advantages of Eugenicist 
elitism ripened by everyday
brand ambassadors gladiating
for a piece of the imaginary pie

IV.
Our pens may ink mighty words
but their impressions are paper thin 
against the hurried tunneling
of semi-automatic street artillery
bump-stocked by the political will
of fuel-guzzling AI overtaking human 
value as they peel away with the 
breeze blasé over endless shootings
grown accustomed to washing away 
anguish with yet more agony while 
prayers whistling show tunes 
to soundtrack the cha-ching
of firearms outstripping humans

V.
But she was a white citizen
Why should that be the red line
when we don’t let spilt blood
rust before sacrificing more lives
to our inane judgement of worth 

This social engineering
was never meant to end well
when chaos has no red line
maelstrom cannot be reined in

The hunger of greed 
self-perpetuates
in unchecked growth
to unleash the pandemonium
of a self-fulfilling prophecy

Imogen Arate is an Asian-American poet in search of hope: that humanity will overcome our self-destructive tendencies to work together against the onslaught of the climate crisis. She's also the Executive Director of Poets and Muses, an award-winning multimedia artist platform that has featured diverse contemporary poetic voices from around the globe. She believes that we will only be able to value lives equally when we lend our ears and hearts to the life stories of those we don't readily recognize as our kin and stop requiring the presence of certain socioeconomic trappings to recognize people's right to a dignified existence.