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.

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.

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

Dear folks at Guitar Hero,

First of all I want to say that me and my wife really dig your game. All the artistry, craft and fun that went into it shine through. I appreciated the behind the scenes extras… I really felt like I got a feel for the staff making it all happen. We actually bought a second controller which is a bit of a big deal for us as we are not “gamers” in the conventional sense.

As a generally happy customer I just wanted to inquire about what I felt was a lack of black characters and songs with black folks behind the strings. On GH2 you have Slash on “Sweet Child of Mine,” and then there is only one black character and he’s an unlockable - not even available to use as a character until you’ve progressed to a certain point in the game.

I think it’s pretty common knowledge that Rock and Roll started out as black folks’ music. But perhaps i’m wrong… perhaps you might not have been exposed to those black artists and musicians that helped innovate the craft and continue to do so. Much like I was introduced to some newer white artists by playing GH1&2.

In the interest of sharing, here is a list of some of my personal Guitar Heros:

(more…)

“SO DO YOU REALLY believe that in the future we’re going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?” a student asked me as I was signing books after a talk. The young man was referring to the troubles I’d described in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming.

“I didn’t make up the problems,” I pointed out. ‘All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.’

“Okay,” the young man challenged. “So what’s the answer?”

“There isn’t one,” I told him.

“No answer? You mean we’re just doomed?” He smiled as though he thought this might be a joke.

“No,” I said. “I mean there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers–at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.” (more…)

We’d like to point out that we’re aware of the fact that some of the cartoons listed below did not originate in the ’80s. However, they were on during the ’80s, that’s when we watched them, so they’re ’80s cartoons to us. It’s like when we refer to bedwetting as “late ’90s behavior.” Without further ado…

CARTOON: The Smurfs
LESSON: Communism works!
For naysayers who point to the Former Soviet Union as proof that communism is inherently flawed, may we merely direct your attention to Smurf Village, where everyone shares everything, wears similar utilitarian clothing, battles Gargamel and his turn-Smurfs-to-gold get rich quick schemes and obeys the dictates of a bearded, red hat-wearing, benevolent authority figure. Quoth Comrade Papa: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Really, he actually said that.
How it affected us as adults: Secret communist agendas ceased being dangerous, or really any adjective of consequence, years ago. The worst thing communism does these days is make Ivy League students waste a couple of years wearing ugly clothes and attending boring meetings. However, the sexual politics of Smurf Village, with its one female for every 30 guys, did go a long way towards preparing us for freshman year of college.

(more…)

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