about the author
Dawn Tefft’s poems appear in Fence, Denver Quarterly, and Bennington Review; her nonfiction in Pleiades, PopMatters, Truthout, and Jacobin; and her fiction in The Account, which recently nominated the piece for a Pushcart Prize. Her chapbooks include Fist (Dancing Girl Press), The Walking Dead: A Lyric (Finishing Line Press), and Field Trip to My Mother and Other Exotic Locations (Mudlark). She holds a PhD in Creative Writing and works as the Executive Director of a higher ed union.
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One Poem
Dawn Tefft
L&D
They came at me with a tube
a way to get inside of me and watch
They were always wanting to see
Each baby an experiment
Each mother a thump and whir
and whack
Sure, there was something to try
and save inside of something else
to try and save, but there was also
a technology of bodies
a mechanic can only be a mechanic
if there are mechanics to work out
prelude to each consent
(to be imagined as a refrain):
repeated attempts to convince
repeated stern faces
a trail of bloody water starting at the bed
a message without content
read differently by each party
converging and diverging points
of interest while an ocean
continued to ocean itself
we were here to figure something