> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.richardjnewman.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Three Poems Of Mine That Should Never Again Have Become As Relevant As They Are Now - URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/three-poems-of-mine-that-should-never/ - Published: 2024-08-09T12:00:51.000Z - Updated: 2025-01-07T16:20:41.000Z - Author: Richard Jeffrey Newman - Tags: Blog, #Migrated-1736118321857, #Import 2025-01-05 18:05 **When I first shared these poems with you** in June 2022—two from [*The Silence of Men*](https://cavankerrypress.org/product/the-silence-of-men/?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=three-poems-of-mine-that-should-never-have-become) and one from [*Words For What Those Men Have Done*](https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771832090?utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=three-poems-of-mine-that-should-never-have-become)*—*this is how I introduced them: > Sometimes you publish a poem in response to the current moment, whatever that may be, and then the moment passes, and the poem no longer feels as urgent as it once did. In our current moment, as the right begins its prosecution of what are essentially two wars, one on the reproductive autonomy of anyone who can get pregnant and one on LGBTQ folks, three poems of mine have suddenly become more relevant than they ever should have been in the first place. Well, in light of both the overturning of *Roe v. Wade* in the *Dobbs* decision and the ways that J. D. Vance’s vice-presidential candidacy crystallizes the right’s agenda, the poems feel even more (and enragingly) relevant than they did two years ago. Each is a response to the right’s drive to police as out of bounds the bodies of all those who do not conform to its holy writ, the heteronormative social script, but I think the poems also address, at least subtextually, the ways in which that policing is imposed on those of us who are cisgendered and heterosexual, an aspect of state-sanctioned sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia that often goes unremarked. I hope, if the poems move you, that you will consider sharing them. Poetry is not the only way, but it is one important way that we can speak truth to power, whether the power we are speaking to is the one we are resisting or the power within ourselves from which we draw the strength for that resistance. --- Thank you for reading It All Connects.... This post is public so feel free to share it. --- **These two poems from *The Silence of Men*** emerged from my reading of [*Back Rooms: Voices from the Illegal Abortion Era*](https://books.google.com/books/about/Back%5FRooms.html?id=-JQEAQAAIAAJ&utm%5Fsource=RJN&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=three-poems-of-mine-that-should-never-have-become), edited by Ellen Messer and Kathryn E. May. The first one, “Melissa’s Story,” is spoken by a woman who pays a doctor for an illegal abortion. I think it speaks for itself: > **Melissa’s Story** > > The doctor gave instructions like a spy: > *Be there, seven pm, on the dot.* > *If you’re not, I’m gone. Don’t even think about* > *another appointment. Got it?* That day, > of course, there was traffic, and the money > had to be in small, old bills. *You will get* > *in my car as if we were lovers. At the spot,* > *you’ll step out first. Walk when and where I say.* > *Make a mistake and I leave. Understood?* > I did. Somehow it went without a snag, > and there I was, legs open on a bed, > with a man crouched between them like a dog. > > He reached into me and scraped away the life > I’d almost made, not yet mine to give. --- Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. --- **The second poem from *The Silence of Men*,** “Bill’s Story,” is spoken by a man some non-specified but significant number of years after his pregnant girlfriend was sent against her will, and against what the couple wanted for themselves, to what used to be called a home for unwed mothers, where she was forced to put the child they conceived up for adoption. While I think this poem also speaks for itself, and while in practical terms at least, we are no doubt farther away from men having to live Bill’s experience than we are from people who can get pregnant having to live Melissa’s, I do want to say that I wrote “Bill’s Story” because I think it’s important to give voice to experiences like his, which embody a rarely acknowledged stake that those of us who can’t get pregnant have in reproductive autonomy. **Bill’s Story** He talked about her like she was a boat. *You just loaded the ship, son. Where the wind* *takes it is out of your hands, hear? She’ll find* *a port to dock in. Just be glad you got* *what you wanted without getting shot.* Her parents were no better, as if I’d planned to make her pregnant. We begged them not to send her away. Once she was gone, they moved out. Not long after the birth-month, her single letter came: *I named him Bill. Then they took him.* Years later, I drove to where the postmark pointed. No one would speak to me. I still hope, though. My son is old enough to look, and I deserve to tell him who I am. --- Thank you for reading It All Connects.... This post is public so feel free to share it. --- **The poem I want to share with you** from *Words For What Those Men Have Done* is called “It Must Include The Body.” It is rooted in an actual conversation I had with my son before marriage equality became the law of the lands. The poem takes a while to get where it’s going, so just go with the flow of it. **It Must Include the Body** Belly like a watermelon stuffed up the front of her white cotton summer dress, the pregnant woman at the corner turns her back to me to face the direction she’ll cross the street in, and what she’s wearing flares from the waist down in a twirl that settles along the line of her hips till only the hem that falls to just above her ankles is still rippling, a flag waving surrender to this late September day. My eyes lift to her shoulders, follow the contour the fabric traces down from the loops through which her tanned arms emerge to the curve of her butt cheeks that bounce lightly as she steps back, just avoiding the taxi pulling up fast to the curb where she’s standing. She’s as tall as me or taller, black hair tied tight in a braid pointing like a compass to the small of her back, and her dress is not unlike the one you wore the night we wandered the beach, till the boardwalk lights were stars blinking at our backs and the campfires scattered across the sand were the signal flames of a distant town. The moon over the ocean cast our shadows behind us. You leaned against me, the blue cloth of what you were wearing bunched in my left hand. With my right, I found you wet, though *wet* doesn’t really do it justice. You half-purred a laugh as I stroked and pulled and gently parted the hair you let grow in once the lover who kept you shaved was gone. Lifting your face to mine, you whispered that the breeze was like the water’s breath just before it touched its tongue to you, and when I kissed the lips you shaped those words with, you came, calling your pleasure out to the open sea for the wind and tide to carry who-knows-where. Walking back to our hotel, I thought how you have only ever called it your vagina. Then, later, while you slept, I tried to list the rhyming words I’d need to write a sonnet, but China, Carolina, trichina, and angina were the best I could do. The off-rhymes— Montana, banana, cabana—were no better, but then I heard that New Yawk accent you love to mimic: designah, finah, minah, reclinah—that last one bringing back to me the woman from the conference, who worried over two more whiskeys than either of us should have had that three kids had made her “roomier down there” than any man other than the husband she’d been needing to leave for years would want, and so she hadn’t left him. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this,” she said, blushing that the man she planned to make the next night the only other man ever to touch her might think he should be moving “furniture in down there, not his dick.” “If a man cares that much about size,” I told her, “he doesn’t deserve an adulterous woman.” The light turns green, and the mother-to-be who started these lines crosses First Avenue into the rest of her life, the crowd she moves with large enough that the left turn I have to wait for will get me to our son’s school five minutes later than the fifteen he’s already missed. “But *why* does George Bush care if two men get married?” he asks from the back seat, giving voice yet again to last night’s bedtime conversation. “I know a man’s penis fits a woman’s vagina, but that’s not love; and people love babies, but babies aren’t love; and two women, if they get married, each one can have a baby, but even that’s not love. Two men can’t, but if they love each other, so what? You don’t marry a body; you marry a person. Bush doesn’t get this? He’s an idiot!” Our boy takes my hand for the few steps leading up to the building’s entrance, letting go, as has become his habit, just shy of the security guard’s line of sight. “Seriously,” he says, “when I get home you need to explain this to me.” Then he’s running fast as he can past the front desk, arms and legs pumping, backpack swinging, the long hair that some still take for a girl’s bouncing with each stride up around his head. I get back into the driver’s seat, turn the key, put the car in reverse. With my foot on the brake, my eyes in the rearview mirror stare back at me what I know is true: if you will not love the body, you cannot love the person. I’m glad our son can’t yet imagine that. --- Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.