Paranoid Soliloquy

The mouth is a razor blade. A machete. A foil. The tongue seems harmless. Rubbing its bumpy flesh against sides of molars like a kitten against an ankle. Tasting the insides of lovers’ mouths. Lighting up on the first bite.

Don’t let it fool you.

The tongue is a bulldozer. A spade. An itchy trigger finger. Words swirl like organisms
in primordial ooze. Waiting for just the right subatomic particle to gestate into
something nuclear. Toxic enough to liquefy you from the inside out.

They’re eating us. Thoughts lunge from the basement like a captive gorilla hurling his body against bars. What is hope here? Can you hear the silence shrieking? The sky is a dream. Where in the world are the stars?

found spam poem #99
8.8.04

yokuts, consultant had gone, scour, do you happen, sylvania, ivan learned from. blare, and
right then, donate, sliced and thickly.
scrimmage, alexandrovich berlioz before, corporeal, a bitter wrinkle, childbirth, threatened
to slide. do, who is this, assemblage, sterlet on their.
helical, and here some, matrimonial, when the outburst, homicide, to one place. changeable, governed
by someone, mumford, and then somebody.
found spam poem #68: clausterphobic
7.18.04

agreeing, they probably have, barbarism, and everything after, clever, varenukha was presently, panama, uhuh-uh!’ the former. buyer, some are lucky, siderite, but it does, flagellate,voice that yeshua, dilatation, ever departing from.

[agreeing, (they probably have): “Barbarism,” and everything after. Clever, Varenuka was present (and also) Panama.

“Uhuh-uh!” The former.

Krista Franklin is a poet, visual artist and educator who hails from Dayton, OH, and currently works and resides in Chicago, IL. Her poems and visual art have appeared in/on several literary journals and websites, including Nexus Literary and Art Journal, milk, Warpland, Obsidian III, nocturnes 2: (re)view of the literary arts, www.semantikon.com, www.milkmag.org , www.ambulant.org, and www.errataandcontradiction.org . She has also been published in the anthologies The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order and Bum Rush The Page: a def poetry jam. She is a Cave Canem fellow, and was a featured poet in the 2000 New Voices New Worlds Series in St. Louis, MO.

two poems

Ars Poetica

He gave me a book and I opened it. The first line I noticed was, “The child with the blank face of an egg.” Then, I felt my face erased to its skull.

There was a missing space. So I peeled off a piece of a letter from the next page. And I nudged it carefully between the i and j.

She said, “How does it feel to have your head stuck in a zero?” Silence in a moment is imagination and I replied, “It is my halo.”

I erased a zero and it appeared in someone else’s thoughts. The sum of a zero and zero is zero. I wrote it again; this time it made sense.

He said, “We raise it to the lips of the nearest ear.” So I began to open books, listen for ink boiling, the scent of words; coffee brewing in my ear.

I watched the clock as if reading a sentence. The numbers were letters. The short hand was a subject, the long hand, a predicate, and the seconds, a verb.

We both stared at the ceiling. I said, “My eyes feel as if their inside cups.” Then she said, “Shall I pour your eyes back into your ears?”

I heard a circle as if it were a clock. It did not tick; instead, made the sound of an insect: it was a number in the shape of a cricket.

Language structures what we see without saying it. But I began to pull bones from sentences, and rearrange letters into skeletons.

I opened an envelope addressed to me. I pulled out a blank sheet of paper, unfolded it. In the letter: no message, no sender’s name, just a white space.

“I like that you exist,” she said. Like the lowercase i, my body felt present on a page: fitted in a dark suit, white necktie, and inside the black dot, a smile.

But it was the way her skin felt as she dressed into a black outfit. The way her body slipped into a long dark dress shaped like a shadow.

He picked up a stone; held it to his ear. Shook it like a broken watch. He opened it, and inside were small gears, shaped like a clock.

I am a skeleton. I am a sentence, too. Although like you, I am neither a meaning nor a structure, just a silence in a complete thought.

Bone milk

Write the O.

Dip skull

into bleach.

Press the letter.

Bones soften

into calcium.

Smear a zero.

Hair dissolves

into ink.

Erase paper.

Skin evaporates

into foam.

Boil subject

and verb;

condense

into liquid.

Fade from dark,

the shade of milk.
Suck out period.

Tooth heats

into fluid.

Now pour skeleton

into another skin.

Orlando White, is Diné (Navajo) from Sweetwater, Arizona. His clans are of the Zuni Water Edge People and born for the Mexican Clan. He is currently a creative writing student and holds an A. A. degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM. He is the co-senior editor of Bone Light, a journal of Neo-Modern Literature and a Zora Neale Hurston recipient at Naropa Institute. His poems have previously appeared in Ploughshares, 26, and are forthcoming in Ur Vox.

in the Quarter

for now, we’ll breakfast on remoulade with violins,
our lips lush with lies and grenadine. let Paris kiss the feet of New Orleans.
pretty women with skirts that reach for their knees
twirl wickedly at the sky. cigar smoke teases rose-colored light.
duty soon will call us through her tropical hourglass, counting our names
like the grains of sand inside.

doors creak open under water while birdsong pilfers your ear for a nest.
turning to this morning’s third dawn, you mention a lover who complained of your stingy kisses. be her, you ask. wail for my mouth til I beat you. then you may suck my tongue.
I had been frightened that first time. dildo snug, lube in hand— I felt the amateur again, your voice spinning me invisible.

that afternoon I found you in Madrid— your blood wouldn’t wait on nobody’s siesta, they’d better come out and sell you some pads—that afternoon I’d been ill-equipped. it was orange leather then, not the strawberry suede cat-of-nine you lately prefer. three of these months that yawn like plump kittens and I’m clutching for my sanity the way you wrench the sheets when I’m precise.

machete is our music, pianissimo the cut. I sing into the dip between shoulder and spine. elucidate the nape. how the belly infuses the barren palm. hallow, hollow, shaved and slit. become my oven and terra cotta me until we see the sun. fingers pruning what your suddenness has sown. do not, do not loosen. do not bend.

I want to tell you something about myself, I admit between gasps, and this I cannot say to a stranger. you twist the apricot of my upper thigh, by way of reply. the bruise will last for weeks. I knew I could not keep a pact of anonymity. succumbing. you un-promise yourself as well. Tequila, you are called. Tequila Brown.

Lib(er)ation

gaggle a bones
pocket fulla holes
chain gang roster
my name in bold
face tight, windows
wide shut.
transfer
(dancer)
all your days is done
asphalt head, tv dinner
no barracuda nothin.
justice.
strange as lightning
these poem days
a quicksilver lexicon

burnin for a kiss, a jump
the broom kind
of long nite’s promise
‘cause tonite we
may be sent
away and away
and gone, baby