Thinking in 2015 of How the Other Half Lives, 1890
In Jacob Riis’ photographs of New York tenements,
sleeping children clump together in rumples of
face and cloth whose softness against
roughed blocks, barred alleys, shocks
the eye,
and people, even back in the Gilded Age,
were outraged.
But now we live in a Gelded Age,
where no one wants to man up,
woman up,
to face poor children,
to acknowledge
that they too
are all of ours.
And instead of flashing a light on the
shame of their tenemented and un-
tenemented lives (for so many are homeless)
we try simply
to dole out punishment.
Cut cut, halve halve,
wholly making sure that the have-nots
have
naught.
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The above is a draft poem for my prompt on With Real Toads to write about the idea of half. This arose from my Jacob Riis’ landmark book called How The Other Half Lives, about poverty in New York around the turn of the century. Riis’ pictures are truly remarkable though heart-rending and led to actual reforms in New York City and other places. Sad to say, the U.S. has now one of the highest rates of child poverty in the developed world, and change seems only headed in a negative direction.
The below is another draft poem I wrote for this prompt. Sorry for the number of draft poems–the pressure of April puts me in ferment, and I’d rather just get some of the half-done work out rather than stew about it, especially given pace of oncoming prompts.
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Another Half of It (Unbearable)
The egg cannot
just say no.
It cannot, no more than the woman,
push away its attackers; has no recourse to ‘shut down’
the porous.
The woman might convulse, weep,
at last still,
still the egg cannot repulse
what burrows into
its not-throat,
nor immolate against
forced flagellation.
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Apparently, women who bear children from rape have in many U.S. states no right to cut off parental/visitation rights of a rapist father. Additionally, although most states allow abortion in the cases of rape, new restrictions on abortion make it increasingly difficult for women to get an abortion in these instances because of difficulties in proving the rape within the short time period allotted for abortion.
ManicDDaily 
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