mark leidner Scantily Clad Press, 2009
I think there should be lots of statues of women everywhere, on birthday cakes, on tops of stadiums, next to exits in parking garages, gesturing outward into the world, in urban areas on basketball goals, at the bottom of the ocean, on the moon, everywhere
I think every home should have an aquarium, and in the bottom should be a mandatory miniature statue of a woman, tucked in the blue pebbles, beside the fake castle. She seems unaware of the fish around her
I propose: 1) Icicles that drip and freeze into the shape of breasts 2) Glass maidens attached to the fronts of coffee pots like ships 3) Mandatory in all new cars: curved, ‘breast-avoiding’ seatbelts 4) Genetically engineered cacti growing out of the desert in the shape of women
I think they should stencil vaginas into the tops of light bulbs so that when we screwed them in and turned them on, shadow vaginas would be projected on our walls and ceilings like Bat signals
I think if we could invent ‘light gloves,’ we could reach into a vagina and actually pull out its shadow. This invention could be huge. Pinched by the tail, it might resemble a backward helicopter, or a silhouette pulled by the ponytail, i.e., ‘the face of god’
All light fixtures and light-related accessories (lampshades, windshields, x-rays, prisms) ought to bare some kind of depiction of a vagina. These depictions can be huge or tiny. For example, if you were looking at a mirror, the vagina could be like the gnarled gilt frame around it, or like a tiny artist’s signature, etched in the bottom-right corner of the glass
In Southern states, where resistance to these initiatives will likely be the strongest, the vagina can be microscopic. We will have to be clever, like Galileo was with the Church, in sneaking things past the censors
We can paint magic-eye murals on Southern courthouses, so that if you look at them casually, they just look like courthouses, but if you stare at them long enough with your eyes relaxed, the courthouses become marble-columned vaginas
I think it’s important not to have dicks in the pictures. That sends the wrong message—that it’s about sex—when it isn’t. A good Latin motto would be VAGINA IPSA LOQUITUR
I picture a giant vagina empire, where everything inside the empire is protected by a giant vagina, yet everything within the vagina is also a vagina, surrounding smaller and smaller vaginas, all the way down to the original vagina
Enough about vaginas, though I may return to them later
Really quickly: 1) I think if someone ever steps out of a vagina fully formed, they should be exiled, but also feared 2) I think of the vagina like a physical imagination 3) Periodic naming and studying of all the vagina’s parts should be as common as going to the dentist or mowing the lawn. Children as young as twelve ought to be able to assemble a large plastic model of a vagina in thirty seconds 4) We should invent a synthetic vagina that can be fired from our tanks like a wet, silky rocket. When it reaches the enemy, it latches onto their face and dissolves them in a soft, pleasurable luxuriance 5) We should tell our children tales of the magmatic vagina hidden in the core of Earth. It looks like a cat eye and spins at a rate of three revolutions per second and is the source of the magnetic field, plate tectonics, and possibly all poetry and war
6) We should constantly problematize the vagina in our universities, building up a diverse and even contradictory body of thought regarding the meaning of ‘vagina,’ that way our enemies can’t claim we are only blind, dogmatic, and evil 7) We are actually questioning vaginas the whole time. That’s what makes us different from our enemies 8) It could be useful to think of the academy as a giant vagina from which the river of theory flows… drowning the land? Cleaning it? Spoiling it? Fertilizing it? This is what it means to problematize, and this is how the empire grows stronger 9) Vagina kites would be a good arts and crafts activity for children. It would then be easier later, to posit in undergraduate seminars, VAGINA VICI GRAVITAS 10) The tightest vagina in the world would probably be the vagina of a child of two ninjas 11) The loosest vagina would be, of course, the world itself 12) It would not be hard to paint hang-gliders to look like vaginas. We should probably get started there
The Twin Towers could be rebuilt in the shape of a woman’s legs. There can be some debate about the design, but I think it should be a realistic portrayal of female body size, not some Barbie runway model bullshit. Less realistically, I don’t think the two legs should meet at the top
We should be the kind of empire whose purpose is not to suppress and conquer, but to liberate and civilize
All women should be released from prison, except those who wished to stay, perhaps because they have nothing left on the outside. In such cases, those women would be tasked with transforming each prison into a giant, haunted botanical garden
Lesbians would form an elite class of priestesses They would claim magical powers, but not really have any, like the priesthood does now. Yet many people would also still follow them, and it would be ambiguous as to whether this was a good thing, or a bad thing, because the lesbians would give people hope that there was more than just ‘the surface vagina’ to contemplate
Some of the more fiery, feminist women could be used to give seminars to the quiet, boring women
We should make vagina into a verb that means to be awesome Like say two tourists are standing at the bottom of Victoria Falls taking pictures, and one of them goes, “This view really vaginas” and the other tourist goes, “True. But when we get home, these pictures are going to really vagina too”
I think there should be some debate about the word ‘pussy.’ Maybe it would be like our version of slavery. Maybe we can rig it so that ‘pussy’ used to be in the Constitution, but as civilization progressed, and notions of civil rights broadened, in the intervening years the language was changed to reflect the new realities, yet the old wounds never really healed
We could use lasers to surgically enhance the quality of disadvantaged vaginas. Or just as well, lower the quality of the unfairly advantaged, to level the vaginal playing field, so to speak. As long as we do something with our technology. Otherwise, why did we go to the expense of developing it?
It should be noted, somewhere, perhaps in our founding documents, that even men have vaginas. One is very tiny, on the tip of their penises, so in this way they are inferior to women. But the other is larger than the female vagina, and is turned sideways on their face, called a mouth. In this way men are superior. Yet women have these mouth vaginas too, so once again their stock rises. In the end, we are left with men on the one hand, having the smallest vaginas, yet also having a vagina equal in size to the women; and women having the most total vagina, but having neither extreme, smallest nor largest. The complexity of this balance allows for enough back and forth among the sexes to generate a great deal of sexual energy‌ to keep the wheel of culture continually spinning‌ in the same way scientists describe the atom: larger protons balancing out impossibly small, yet seemingly more magical electrons, with neutrons caught somewhere in the middle. A complex bond of simple particles, stable in flux, in stable instability
Famous opening lines like Yeats’ Turning and turning in the widening gyre could be revised to better reflect the imperial aesthetic. Like Turning and turning in the widening vagina would be nice Note that no original meaning is lost
The only unutterable word will be the name of the most unimaginable crime. I won’t even say it here so as to set a good example, but it begins with ‘r’ and ends with ‘ape.’ People who commit this crime would not be prosecuted, technically, but they would be socially ostracized and have their careers ruined. Their own family would turn against them, while the government remained eerily silent In spite of this policy, or perhaps because of it, victims of this crime, as well as any accidental descendants, would over the years come to speak the crime’s name openly and freely. Among them the word would be bandied about so casually, so playfully—so ruthlessly—as to almost suggest the word had no meaning at all. Or worse, it meant everything In this way, the word would become one of the most disturbingly popular words in the empire
In advertisements for cigarettes, perhaps some clean, elegant vaginas can be leaning up against balconies, smoking coolly, exhaling clouds of thick, silvery smoke into the clear night sky, the lights of the big city bright in the background behind them. Or, if you like anti-smoking, a flock of vaginas flapping wildly through the sky, destroying hundreds of acres of fields of tobacco, the racist white farmers battling them with pitchforks
I would like it if at some point there was some scene in a movie or TV show that shows a young vagina in her evening gown, sitting at a concert piano, with a spotlight on her. Surrounding that is a huge dark stage
As she bangs out the initial chords of an elaborate symphony, something by Rachmaninoff or Brahms, in the beginning she’s doing quite well, making the key changes successfully and nailing the sweeping arpeggios, but by the middle she’s tired, and by the end she’s so exhausted she’s almost heaving herself at the keyboard, in a way that seems at first kinkily, then uncomfortably sexual, making the society types in the audience wince as each note hits, and finally turn away completely when her piano explodes in a shower of splinters and strings and cracked treble clefs and bloody quarter notes, as the vagina herself crumples to the floor, half in the spotlight, half out
When our economy implodes, and our empire collapses into war and corruption, we should have built a giant spaceship by then to take us all away somewhere else, to start over. The ship can be shaped like a giant vagina, or be painted to resemble a vagina on the outside. I don’t really care, as long as it gets us out of here
Mark Leidner is the author of one print chapbook, The Night of 1,000 Murders (Factory Hollow Press, 2007). Some recent poems have also appeared in ActionYes, Invisible Ear, SIR!, Sixth Finch, and Skein. He lives in Northampton, MA and his blog is located at http://trembyle.livejournal.com.