Upon entry, The Hierophant hears two patrons state, there’s nothing in here, which may or may not be true, depending upon one’s position, what is seen, unseen. The question of visibility, what is worthy of recognition, what’s hidden. One’s proximity to, or distance from, the length of a foot, a lead pipe, copper wire, two shadows triangulate between sanded cedar blocks. If it sounds boring, it may be. What if I asked you to draw me a map, and made it mine? Am I a thief? What are the measurements of ownership if everything is stripped to millimeter, access to any and all information outside the numerical, denied. What if you are forced to draw your own conclusions, your only clues a pencil-thin sequence descending a sheet of white, a library of one-liners filed in metal cabinets. A whiteout room singing sterility, galleries cloaked in opacity.
in obscurity.
Poem copyright 2026 by Krista Franklin. All rights reserved.
Study to show thyself intuition exists, iridescent orb, the third eye crown jewel between of bull’s horns. A closed mouth nestles the sacred on the bed of the tongue. Listen, the whisper that bellows beneath the conscious self, in the shadow grows the seed of god shifting in you. To tune the ear is to sit at the altar of silence, hush the chatter of the mind’s preschool, soothe the fretful heart in the blue waves of regret.
Poem copyright 2026 by Krista Franklin. All rights reserved.
If you have never missed rude banter, witty tête-á-tête with the man who part-made you. If you cannot recall cooling his death bed brow, standing near his ashes, watching him grasp at his life with tales, with vinyl, messages scribbled in blue BIC pen on their worn sleeves, you do not know this. What it means to have a staring match with God. That the body is a trick, a black tophat with a false bottom, a white rabbit somewhere in-between. You do not know the tricks played, the spades, payday loans, debts and disappointments. You cannot imagine sifting through the debris, the deadend documents of unpaid bills and mysterious correspondence, plastic bags tied in plastic bags tied in plastic bags tied in plastic bags, like some strange Russian Dolls Tucked beneath the bed. A sealed manila envelope with some porn inside. This is not yours, if you have not screamed at your sister, into a pillow, averted your eyes from the catheter cascading from his white sheet, walked down the hall from his hospice room in a sticky rage so thick, wanting it to be done. You are not ruined enough for this.
Poem copyright 2026 by Krista Franklin. All rights reserved.
“History, especially in certain places, is not a dead thing. It is a wonderful, almost holy experience.” —Kasi Lemmons.
“Big Bang,” 2011 (Krista Franklin 14)
“You imagined this archive to be quiet, didn’t you? Shelves lined with labeled boxes and black-and-white documents, stolen artifacts carefully organized, records of the past neatly ordered alphabetically. Maybe a little dust here and there, gathering beneath iron shelves left undisturbed.
But that is not what you will find here. Forget what you were conditioned to expect.”
In Too Much Midnight, Krista Franklin transforms her artistic vision into something disruptive; it comes alive. In this poetic universe, the archive is haunted, fragmented, and infused with living bodies within a single body. These figures appear not as quiet, stable forms but as pieces, ghostly silhouettes, mythic figures, and collaged forms of remembered presences, reflecting the artist in her multiple spirit forms. As you move through this archive, the boundaries of perception will dissolve, revealing this body of work as an invitation into the metaphysical, a transformation of self that urges us to perceive the archive in its spiritual form. The archive was never intended to be a static space or mere record; rather, it is a dynamic realm where the body remembers, resists, and reimagines history.
Too Much Midnight functions as an entire spiritual body, where the synthesis of collage and poetry grants the artist access to a portal of radical imagination and ancestral connection. Through surreal imagery and layered language, Franklin constructs an archive composed not of official records but of memory, history, and imagination. In this space, the body serves as both a site of preservation and disruption, carrying the weight of personal grief and collective trauma, particularly the experiences of Black bodies that have often been erased or distorted within traditional archives. The resilient Black body is a central thread that runs through Franklin’s poems. Nevertheless, beyond the body, there is a call. Franklin invites us to partake in a ritual of remembrance. Your body, her body, his body, their body— the body reappears, shape-shifts, and speaks.
Before you enter the archive, you must know:
This is spiritual. This is political. This is the way of the artist.
Draw near, look, listen.
The Metaphysical Body
When you open this collection, the revelation will become clear— the physical self transcends mere flesh; it serves as a vessel for history, an elaborate archive within itself. Within the cellular memory of Black bodies, spiritual moments surface, deep internal recollections that challenge the forces that have long been in charge of documenting history. Contrary to the uniform image typically projected by imperial regimes, the relationship between power and knowledge was [and is] far more fragmented and inconsistent in practice (Reid and Paisley 2). There are often thwarted sentences, tampered artifacts, and millions of hidden pieces. But in Franklin’s world, bodies speak where objects and documents fail. It is in this gap between official record and living memory that Franklin steps, inviting us to an astral plane:
“Give me the night, you beasts hissing over the face of this dead woman, I climb into your eyes, looking. To those who would sleep through the wounds they inflict on others, I offer pain to help them awaken, Ju-Ju, Tom-Toms & the magic of a talking burning bush. I am the queen of slight of hand, wandering the forest of motives, armed with horoscopes, cosmic encounters, and an X-Acto knife. My right eye is a projector flickering Hottentot & Huey Newton…” (15).
This section of the first stanza of “Manifesto, or Ars Poetica” serves as the beginning of the collection’s first invocation. The poem is a clear declaration of intention, conjured through three sacred stanzas that read as a spell cast on the “Killing Floor.” It introduces the sacred cycle of creation, preservation, and destruction that will unfold throughout the collection. The artist takes on the role of builder of worlds, the maker of rules, and wielder of magic. From the very outset, Franklin takes on the artistic duty of dismantling misrepresentations and erased histories to reconstruct a new world from the omitted stories. The spell maintains a torrent of declarative sentences that mimic the cadence of a chant or freestyle, embodying the breathless urgency of oral performance and the continuity of Black cultural inheritance. What makes this poem particularly compelling is the way it anchors the cosmological in the personal. When Franklin writes, “my right eye is a projector flickering Hottentot and Huey Newton,” she positions her own body within centuries of Black performance and pain. “Hottentot” is a derogatory term used to refer to Sara Baartman, a Khoi woman, who was often sexualized throughout history, even posthumously. Her skeleton was on display until the late 1970s, with her brain and genitals also stored in the Musée de l’Homme Naturelle (Lyons 327). The allusion to Baartman in “Manifesto, or Ars Poetica” draws our attention to the historical spectacle of Black bodies. Black bodies have been placed on display as objects of curiosity or racial spectacles that have been stripped of agency and made to perform for the (white, male, colonial, etc.) gaze. However, Franklin immediately disrupts the historical narrative pattern by referencing Huey Newton, a co-founder of the Black Panther Party. While the projector highlights the history of fetishized and dehumanized bodies, Newton’s presence interrupts this projection, revealing that, beyond the shadow of objectification, a spirit of resistance persists.
Say their names…
The deliberate invocation of historical figures is crucial to the practice of remembrance; it simultaneously serves as both a tribute and an act of resistance. Though the past is steeped in pain, a lingering defiance endures, and it is this defiance that fuels the poem’s central demand. When the persona demands that the night be given to her, she is claiming the darkness as a site of power rather than fear, for it is in this time of day that she accesses the portal where the past comes alive, where she can cut through historical fluff with her creative weapon: the X-acto knife. It is through this image of the knife that Franklin makes explicit what her work has been building toward. “The Ars Poetica” half of the title is a pointer to the poet’s role as an artist and her significance in what Sadiya Hartman calls critical fabulation: the practice of utilizing the existing archive, often marked by violence and dehumanization, while simultaneously challenging its authority and its omissions through the creative imagination (11). Art, Franklin suggests, is how we tell “the impossible” stories. Furthermore, that is how she invites us into her spiritual practice of entering an archive of tumultuous histories. Not as passive readers but as participants in the ritual. Not as consumers of pain, but as witnesses to reclamation through the metaphysical.
The Medicalized Body
“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say that you enjoyed it.” — Zora Neale Hurston.
After “G/gnosis II Discipline” (for Ruth Ellen Kocher), 2009, (Franklin 40
Anarcha Betsy Lucy
Their names sit at the threshold like ghosts waiting to be let in. Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy are three women whose bodies were cut into, without consent and without anesthesia, in the name of medical progress (Cronin 8). Their pain became the foundation of modern gynecology, and their silence was never theirs to keep. This is where the story begins. However, for the Black woman writing today, the story does not stay in the past. It lives on in the body. The personal becomes the spiritual; those ancestral cells become your cells. Cellular memory holds what the voice might leave unspoken.
In the work of humanizing the dehumanized, Franklin draws on her own flesh to tell the stories of others. In her interview with Amy Danzer from New City Lit, she traces this lineage back to her first book, Under the Knife, which emerged from her experience with uterine fibroids and the silence of the women before her. She explained that her mother and sisters refused to share their stories, leaving her imagination to complete the gaps. The book itself bears this idea with the red stitching that runs through its pages; a visual echo of bodies cut and repaired signaling a raw and intimate approach to medical narrative. Later, in the interview section of Too Much Midnight, Franklin reflects on how her family has always been written into her work (95). This interplay between the personal and the ancestral pulses through Too Much Midnight, especially in its first section, where bodily memory takes hold. Her body becomes the body of the women in her lineage, channeling their untold stories. But the poems also suggest something deeper: a history of trauma encoded in DNA. In “Fifty Percent of Women Have Them,” the fibroids are removed, yet the scar remains on the skin, a permanent inscription, a witness. “She draws the line/ where she’ll cut me open/ like a cardboard box” (43). A cut is a portal into the body and into the history of the women in her lineage and all the women on whom the history of medicine was built.
To be opened is to be made vulnerable, but it is also to be exposed as a site of meaning. The incision does not just reveal tissue; it reveals a legacy. This legacy becomes the focus of the “Extrapolating Motherhood” section, where Franklin turns explicitly to the historical treatment of Black bodies marked by unethical experimentation, invasive procedures, and a medical establishment that viewed Black women as subjects rather than patients. It is in this section that the poem “Lucidity (Ars poetica #1)” appears, opening with the phrase “let’s close her up” (47). The line presents the female body as an object, a door the surgeon can enter and exit at will, capturing the unsettling reality of a woman undergoing surgery while remaining consciously aware of the invasion. The poem pulls into focus the complex and often violent relationship between Black female bodies and the medical field, a relationship that (as the poem suggests) did not begin in the operating room but in the examination tents. The Black female body has long been viewed as a threshold for suffering. Black women have been labeled “superbodies,” a term reflecting how white society and medical professionals have perceived and treated them, particularly during bondage, as beings capable of enduring extraordinary pain (Owens 109). The historical imbalances surrounding J. Marion Sims, often called the father of modern gynecology, highlight a significant oversight: the lack of acknowledgment for the Black women who were integral to his research. This point is illustrated in his own memoir, where he reflects, “That was before the days of anesthetics…the poor girl, on her knees, bore the operation with great heroism and bravery” (Sims 4). In this context, the Black female body is depicted as a formidable super force that is subjected to the advancement of medicine through pain.
If “Lucidity” presents the body as a closed door, “Probe” examines what happens when that door is forced open. The word “probe” serves as both a medical tool and a synonym for examination, establishing a historical connection between contemporary medicine and the experiences of the enslaved. The poem is divided into three sections. It begins with “i. The Office,” continues with “ii. The Observation” in the middle and concludes with “iii. The Diagnosis.” In the central stanza, the poem critiques modern medicine by exposing how the Black body is treated as a subject of surveillance and scrutiny under clinical hegemony:
“ii. The Observation
Latex is a language of orifices and appendages, snapping tongue of the biohazard, a probing way of touching, without. Doctors and lovers both speak it, safe inside its sterility, reaching themselves in the closet of you, the places you house the most intimate.” (45)
Here, there is a clear contrast between lover and doctor, violence and gentleness, intimacy, and invasion. Both figures enter, but only one claims ownership of the interior. The lover seeks connection through making love with care; the doctor seeks knowledge by examining the body. However, in the history of medicine based on experimentation on Black bodies, the two have often been indistinguishable; the body probed has been studied and entered without regard for personhood. But the poem reminds us that “plastic can’t protect us/ from that…”(45). In this context, “plastic” symbolizes advanced technology and sterile practices that fail to address the underlying history of harm. Furthermore, it suggests that medicine becomes hazardous when the intent behind medical procedures is driven by cruel curiosity rather than genuine care.
Anarcha, Betsy, Lucy. Their names are no longer just ghosts at the threshold. In Franklin’s work, they are given bodies again. Her body. Moreover, in that cellular memory, they speak.
Say their names…
The Muse Body
“With my eyes turned to the past, I walk backwards into the future.” — Yohji Yamamoto
“I Let My Tape Rock,” 2012 (Franklin 60)
The past is heavy, but Black people have always been creative. The “Heavy Rotation” section makes clear that, after all the pain and trauma, the Black body remains her own muse, a portal to her creativity. Too Much Midnight presents art as a spiritual practice conducive to healing work that the artist must undertake to transform turmoil into cathartic release. After the title page of this section, you will land on the 2012 piece “I Let My Tape Rock,” which invokes transatlantic time, Biggie’s era, and Franklin, the future. A popped cassette spills its coily reel from the plastic frame. Just beneath it, the opening lines from The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy” appear in highlighted caps: “I LET MY TAPE ROCK / TIL MY TAPE POPPED.” The blue surrounding it becomes the ocean where millions of bodies sank, a marker of the tumultuous past of Black bodies during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. But the tape and the lyrics complicate that darkness. The popped tape becomes a metonym for Black cultural resilience, a cycle of rebirth: from a history where bodies sank into the enveloping blue, to a future where Black creativity keeps popping back. In Franklin’s hands, the boundaries between rap, poetry, and collage dissolve as she merges the past and present to reveal the multitude of her creative process. This merging continues in the poem that follows, “Invocation Wünderbar,” a contemporary litany whose repetitive chants create a ritualistic effect:
“Come muse, come nouns, come verbs, come Epson, come books and ex- slaves with one eye seered shut for trying to read. Come reading, come hours, come paper and pages, come hours, come paper and pages, come vision, come paintbrush, scissors, glue, old book. Come Kahlo, come Jean-Michel, come Andy, come Walker, come studio, piles of National Geographics, clipped things, feathers, ripped signs, old art, come smoke” (61).
In this poem, Franklin calls on the spirit of creativity and the spirits of fellow artist-travelers who worked between identities to build art from the fragments of history. Their presence in her invocation signals that this creative act is not solitary; it is a conversation with those who have also transformed pain into something lasting. Something that heals. “Invocation Wünderbar” is a litany of breathing and releasing, a spiritual reckoning. The repetition of “come” is an invitation to an ongoing process— a celebration of creative making, a continuous (r)evolution. It traces the lineage of mandated silences through anti-literacy laws to an era of brilliant writers and artists. But the poem “History: as Written by the Victors” reminds us that “time is not a line, it is a series of concentric circles” (82). Time, in essence, is a cyclical structure that permits healing through its creative processes. It is in this vein that Franklin, the artist and container of magic, begins gathering the broken clippings of Black history and modern life, which becomes a form of metabolizing trauma from the body through presence and creation.
If the body is an archive, then creativity becomes the act of activating what the body holds. Bodies hold memory, rhythm, pain, and resilience. We are all artists-magicians. We are creative in the way we still survive despite life’s turmoil. In the final section and the last poem of the collection, “Call,” Franklin invites her readers to a collective healing practice. She reminds us that imagination can produce scripts for the “Death Machine,” which churns out the destructive narratives we have been forced to ingest, but it can also serve as a tool for knowledge and repair. “Call” is more than simply a call to action. Rather, it serves as a connecting loop to the opening manifesto, which challenges us to embrace new possibilities through a ritual of remembrance in our artistic practices. But to activate this process, “we must think about Black flesh, Black optics, and ways of producing enfleshed work…” (Sharpe 21). In other words, this collective creative work requires a refusal to repeat the archive’s violence. It is a spiritual work that requires us to revisit the past with care as we tell the stories of those who came before us. For communal healing of collective trauma, you must “Grab the hand of the person next to you and make a break for it. French kiss the idea of Humanity” (89). This is the conjuring of a world where our breath is the only border. This is the alchemy of survival, the weight of the haunting—a reminder that the archive is never finished with you.
Works Cited
Cronin, Monica. “Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy, and the Women Whose Names Were Not Recorded: The Legacy of J. Marion Sims.” Anaesthesia and Intensive Care, vol. 48, no. 3_suppl, Nov. 2020, pp. 6–13.
Danzer, Amy. “Stitched Together: Krista Franklin Discusses Under the Knife.” Newcity Lit, 1 Jan. 2019, lit.newcity.com/2019/01/01/stitched-together-krista-franklin-discusses-under-the-knife/.
Franklin, Krista. Too Much Midnight. Haymarket Books, 2020.
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, vol. 12, no. 2, June 2008, pp. 1–14.
Lyons, Andrew P. “The Two Lives of Sara Baartman: Gender, Race, Politics and the Historiography of Mis/Representation.” Anthropologica, vol. 60, no. 1, 2018, pp. 327–46.
Owens, Deirdre Cooper. “Historical Black Superbodies and the Medical Gaze.” Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology, University of Georgia Press, 2017, pp. 104–23.
Reid, Kirsty, and Fiona Paisley. Sources and Methods in Histories of Colonialism. Routledge, 2017.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.
Sims, James Marion. The Story of My Life. D. Appleton, 1884.
Nikema Bell is a Jamaican creative and scholar whose work bridges art and literature. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Literatures in English with a minor in Creative Writing from the University of the West Indies in 2022, where she received the Peepal Tree Prize and the Departmental Award. Recently, she completed her Master of Arts in English at James Madison University, with a focus on Caribbean and postcolonial literature. Her writing has appeared in Banyan Review, where she was recognized as a finalist for the 2025 Banyan Poetry Prize, the collaborative chapbook Worlds Within and Without, and County Lines Journal, among others. Currently, Nikema serves as the Special Projects Coordinator at the Furious Flower Poetry Center, where she is dedicated to supporting programs that celebrate and highlight Black poetic traditions.
a transcription of the poem read on the home pageof this issue
Krista Franklin reads “Lucidity (ars poetica #1)”
by Krista Franklin
“Let’s close her up,” says, surgeon, Dr. No Name, masked under lights, white, hands wet with blood, rich and worrisome.
Listen as the belly bubbles in its new arrangement; organs elbow each other like professionals in a crowded elevator. Try to create space and flow in an atmosphere of darkness, (and) invasive procedures.
*
The blood on his hands is mine. The organs mine, all named, though I only know a couple, and never their rightful place like my mother, who never just breaks bones but fibulas, tibias, the proper names of things trapped in the vice of her mind.
My mind is on the surgeon’s tray, the scalpel, the bounty carved from me.
Poem copyright 2026 by Krista Franklin. All rights reserved.
Look around: language is everywhere, but doing different things, manifesting in different ways. In the spirit of Krista Franklin’s work, this prompt invites you to construct a poem by collaging language from at least three disparate sources. For example, how might you pull the language of an ad, an instruction manual, and a ballot into conversation? The constitution, an overheard conversation, and a grocery bill? What delicious frictions or unanticipated connections might you (and only you) create?
As a poet and visual artist, Krista Franklin invites those who encounter her work to consider the world not as a given to abide by, but as given to us to alchemize through our own unique minds and bodies, and through which we can imagine and manifest alternative possibilities of being—perhaps more just, perhaps more loving, perhaps more fun, perhaps kinder, perhaps softer or sturdier. Perhaps free. Her work is physical and deeply embodied—acutely alert to the heft and matter of the body, the material reality of place and personhood, but also steeped in spirituality and presence always deeply aware of the otherwheres in the here. One might call it soul. Whether collaging images through words or visual material, she returns the familiar to us as fantastic. She upends the ordinary— the patterns and practices to which we have been habituated – and invites us to do the same. The world rendered through her eyes is both potent and empowering.
Another word to describe Franklin’s work is “full.” Her poetry collection, Too Much Midnight, throbs with color, is heavy with intellection (there are 4 introductions and an interview) and, of course, there are the poems—a veritable cornucopia to feast upon. This richness is not mere opulence, but rather a poetics that positions itself in opposition to the stereotypical discourses of scarcity and struggle that often overshadow Black narratives. This is full-figured defiance of paucity of mind, body, image or mood. This is the full Blackness of the universes—both internal and external—claimed for the self and the community. We, like these poems and in these poems, are defined by magnitude, abundance, and depth. Franklin’s 2018 artist book, Under the Knife operates under a similar logic of heft. Its 280 letter-pressed and hand-stitched pages hold the fullness of generations. Expressed in lyric, prose, artifact, photographs, images, documents, and more, Under the Knife is a brimming archive of existence in which no thing is extraneous. Even the forgotten, the erased, and the silenced take up their space in the body of this work as it spills forth the memories, stories, experiences, held in the body—particularly Black, female bodies.
Franklin’s is clear-eyed, yet hopeful work. In the poem, “Call,” which closes her poetry collection, Too Much Midnight, Franklin writes: “Here’s a mirror, look behind you, beyond you. Here’s a portal. Jump through it. Make magic, follow the breadcrumbs, the north star, the scary crackle of tree branches just ahead in the dark. Take the darkness into your fists and smash it on the warm stones of daylight. Make daylight. no more caskets for us to all crawl into. No more remixed autopsy recitations, not more black masked mammies, no more brown bodies on your cooling boards and studio floors no more satirical snark crafted to suffocate, no more grabbed bodies, no more public/ private intellectual masturbating no more twentieth century icons as dead talking head to justify injustice.” A call out, a call in, and a wakeup call all at once, the poem asks us to do better. To be better. To imagine better. It points us to the abundance of the world available to us, and the power we have to transform with and through it.
Krista came to Harrisonburg as the guest of the Furious Flower Reading Series, and as a presenter in the Boundless Bound symposium held in Oct 2025 here at James Madison University. We were pleased to host her for an interview for The Fight & The Fiddle. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
Welcome to the Fight and the Fiddle, to Furious Flower, to James Madison University, to Harrisonburg, Virginia. Welcome. We are so happy to have you here! I want to talk to you about your journey as an artist, as a writer. We were in Cave Canem in 2004. In a group with Patricia Smith. And when I think back to all the ways that I’ve learned about writing and learned about living as a writer, and you’ve been doing it in multiple disciplines! I’d love to hear about that journey.
It’s a little hard for me to track sometimes, I think because I’m a person who very much lives day to day. I very rarely think about the time that it’s taken me to get to certain things. I think that I was very interested in keeping those two parts of my life separate: I was making visual art at the same time that I was writing, but a lot of people didn’t realize that I was doing both things. There would be some folks who knew me as a writer, and some people who knew me as a visual artist. Where I am right now in my career, is really trying to bring those two things together. I always said that my two disciplines are segregationists. They’re not gonna be segregated from each other anymore. They don’t like each other, but I’ve tried over the past, I would say, five to 10 years, to try to start to bring some of those things into focus together, even though oftentimes they’re not directly communicating with each other. When I’m thinking about the writing, I’m not necessarily thinking about the work that’s visually engaging. So, the track to get to where I am now is somewhat loosey goosey, and doesn’t really have straight lines—a lot of swirls, no straight lines. But a series of beautiful relationships have been formed—relationships with people, relationships with organizations, relationships with curators, relationships with other poets, like you, and just allowing the flow of creativity and the flow of being an artist in every way that that possibly means to stay open to that. So it’s been a long and weird, winding road, but a lot of it has taken place in Chicago. So I would say that, if anything, Chicago is the place where I was able to do that multitude of things and still maintain some sense of strength.
You’re in a space that is so rich in poets, Patricia Smith, Gwendolyn Brooks, Angela Jackson… And you’re also from Ohio, and that place birthed some geniuses, too. Those are two really interesting legacies of place, and I’m curious if they have any impact or influence on your work.
Absolutely. I would say that they both have an incredible impact on me and my work. When I lived in Ohio when I was younger, I often thought about Morrison being from here, but often thought about Rita Dove being from there. I also would think about the period of time that Nikki Giovanni was there as well. And it really gave me a blueprint. Their existence made me believe that it’s possible to be a Black woman and to write for your life, for your living. They really established for me the possibility that I could be the thing that I dreamed of being, and that there have been people who had done it before who were also from the same area and became very successful at a high level. Conceptually, in the writing, they were operating on a super high level, and it just gave me something to shoot for — the stars.
Right after one of my years at Cave Canem, I moved to Chicago on a whim. It wasn’t a thought-out plan. It was very impromptu. Let’s call it “intuitive.” Intuitive is a great word. And when I got there, the doors just flew open, especially with the poets. The poets were so giving, so generous, so sweet. They just immediately embraced me and gave me jobs, allowed me to meet students that they were working with. And it changed my life. It was there also that even though I had been making visual art in Ohio before I got to Chicago, I was doing it when I had writer’s block, so I wasn’t really making visual art all the time. I was making it when I felt like I couldn’t write and the words were escaping me. When I got to Chicago, it became more of a ritual practice about making work, or making collages, primarily, and also drawings and paintings. And it was the poets who encouraged me to start to show the work. They would see it in my apartment, hanging on the walls, and were very curious about them— “Who made this?” “Who made this?” “Where’d it come from?” And then when I would reveal it was me, they asked “Well, why aren’t you showing it in galleries? Why aren’t you putting this in the world as something that you do?” It took me a while to come to grips with that as a possibility, but when I finally did, it was the right move. But it was really about learning how to balance those things.
Chicago as a geographical location has been so formative for me, not only because of all of the heavy hitters that are from there, and all of the rich Black history of that location, but really the rich history in general. They have this reputation that I like to brag about—that it’s the last bastion of American freedom. And I feel that those are where the fighters are. Those are the folks who believe in people’s human rights. Those are the people who believe in the possibility of a world where we can have an equitable future where we can live alongside one another and be neighbors and be kind to one another. It just gave me a different landscape in my imagination, a possibility of how to live my life. And I’m getting a little misty, even thinking about it. I owe great debt to that city, a great debt.
I love the idea of the city structuring your internal landscape—the landscape of the city building that internal landscape. And I love that’s what’s in the city, because sometimes folks outside of Chicago don’t understand that reputation…
Oh, it has a terrible reputation outside of that area.
But its internal reputation is about justice and freedom and possibility, and I feel that it is so evident in the poems! There is a movement in the poems to be 1) imaginative. I love the surprising things that encounter each other in a Krista Franklin poem. And also that there is 2) a concern with social justice. And so, I want to ask you to talk about art in relation to those pillars of social justice, equity, freedom, etc. What’s the role of art? What’s your role as an artist?
That’s a tough one right now for me. I feel that I’m at an age where I am really interested in the notion of art for art’s sake, and I never would have said that 10, 15 years ago. That wouldn’t have ever come out of my mind, or out of my mouth. I feel that it is important for us as artists and as writers to follow our spirits around whatever it is that we feel is compelling us. And sometimes those things are very intense—notions around social justice, notions around equity, notions around our liberation as a people, as a country. And then sometimes those things are about what I would call the mundane—the everyday encounter, the beautiful moment of looking at a sky and being transfixed by a cloud, or being swept away by birds and butterflies and the things that we attribute to children, really. We don’t really think about adults being caught up in the whimsy of life. And because we live in a society right now that is so intense and so challenging on so many fronts, we have to still find those moments and those opportunities of whimsy and play. I feel that the role for me as an artist is to continue to tap into those things that make me, Krista Franklin, on a fundamental level, those things that people would maybe not even consider to be very interesting things about me, about my life, about what I find to be beautiful, what I find to be compelling, etc. My notions around beauty are pretty complex. Sometimes to me, the grotesque is beautiful, horror is beautiful; I have a semi-twisted notion of beauty. It’s more expansive than just what we think of as pretty. Not pretty, but it’s compelling. So, what is compelling us? Where are our spirits at? What is our role in our own personal lives as well as our larger lives? Our public lives? What do we need to be talking about? How do we need to be connecting with one another? And sometimes those things are very small, mundane things. We get our coffee at the same place. We hang out at the same bookstore. These very small moments that have great impact on connection.
Thank you for that. And I love that idea of connection. This might seem like a weird jump, but I feel that collage is a segue from connection. Collage is one of your primary media, but in the poems, collage is a poetics. Can you talk to me about collaging as poetics and artistic practice.
Why collage? I feel like my brain is…now we have these words. We didn’t have these words years ago. But we have these words now that describe people whose minds work in interesting and original ways. And I think that I may be one of those people. I think everybody is, too. I really do think that a lot of people’s brains work differently, and we don’t allow ourselves the opportunities to be open about that. I think that we live in a world that wants us to conform. And when we have these options of conformity, then everybody wants to fit into these little boxes and articulate their lives in these very simplistic terms. But my brain is pretty far reaching, and it does some interesting things, especially because my interests are so varied. I can read X-Men comic books and watch Marvel stuff all day. I can also be over here reading a Toni Morrison novel. And then also be over here listening to Duran, Duran. All of these things that are happening don’t feel connected, but they are because I am the connector. I’m the connector between these things. I found collage to be the most reasonable way for me to piece those disparate elements together. I like to talk about my grandmother as well, in fueling my notions around collage, because she was a quilter, and watching her take fragments of things and piecing them together really triggered something in my brain that I wasn’t even able to articulate at that time, but it helped me to figure out that you can take fragments… that you can disassemble something and put something back together in a new way, and that being a revolutionary act, an act that helps you to see things in a new way, see things in a position and from a vantage point that is not the first vantage point that you thought of. When you put two ideas together that are not necessarily connected, the collisions that happen between those things can generate some really interesting stuff.
I was thinking of this quote “art is thinking and labor” that is attributed to one Krista Franklin. I’d love to hear about your actual practice. What does that labor and thinking look like in the making of the things?
I just had an interesting conversation with one of my students last week about this very thing. I was trying to have them understand that “being in the studio” means a lot of things. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I am painting, or I am working on a sketch, or I am storyboarding my next film. You could be in studio time when you’re daydreaming. You could be in studio time when you’re driving your car to go pick up your groceries because your brain is still producing things. I remember, and I know you have stories like this too, where I’m washing my hands or washing the dishes, poems would start to come up, lines would start to come up. It’s doing these very ordinary chores around the house that generates, fuels even, the genius of your work. So it’s about allowing studio time to just be anything.
Now, because I don’t have a traditional studio anymore, because of the relocation from Chicago back to Dayton, Ohio, I have learned to, once again, use my bed as my studio space. So, I could be reading a book, I could be writing a couple of lines down that are compelling to me, I could be doing some small watercolors in a sketchbook—whatever idea my brain cooks up on that day. And sometimes it’s nothing; sometimes it’s not about the production. It’s about resting. I think that all artists, all writers, need to have that space where they’re not doing anything at all, sometimes for long stretches of time. We live in this world where we are supposed to be generating something all the time, we’re supposed to be producing something all the time, like machines. But we’re not machines. We’re human beings, living in these bodies that are fragile. These bodies that are fragile, these bodies that have an expiration date to them. They’re finite. And so, we have to take that time to use the studio of the mind, to rest.
Labor is art. I love that quote because it really marks a specific time and period of my life, where a lot of things that I said in public, at that time, especially, tended to be fueled by hostility, my anger, my rage. I wanted people, at that time, to understand that art is a very serious thing. People think it’s so whimsical. The Bohemian artists, the starving artists, right? But we’re working—this is work. We have to do research, like everybody else does. We have to read the books, buy the materials. This is an investment. It’s not just this frivolous thing where, Oh! The Muse jumps down! Now, I do believe in muses, but it’s not just about the muse jumping down and then suddenly I’m overwhelmed with this poem. It’s a labor. It’s a craft. And it takes skill. It takes time to refine it, to master it, and it’s not something that comes down on you. But sometimes it comes down on you.
You mentioned the body—the fragile, finite body. But embodiment—the body—is such a robust part of the work you do, both visually and in the poems. Also, I feel like there is such a surreality there. So I’m curious about that tension between embodiment, the irrefutable fact of the body, and all these sideways possibilities that are the opposite of real, factual, material present things in the work.
The corporeal world has always been something that has intrigued me for a very long period of time in my life. I think part of that has to do with health crises—really seeing the body as a space where anything could happen, and a lot of times those things that happen aren’t wonderful. As women in particular. And this is not to say that other bodies are not equally as mysterious, equally as magical, but there’s always something that’s happening with your body when you’re a woman. From the time you hit puberty, it’s on. It’s all the way on. It’s like all of this metamorphosis that’s happening. Possibility is a great word because things begin to shift and change so rapidly that your brain can barely keep up with it. And so then, because there’s that gap between the logical mind and what’s happening with your physical being, there’s all of this space of possibility, what is really happening here, that liminal space is a mystery space. It’s an empty space. And so you’re forced to try to make sense of the thing. And the ways that we make sense of the thing may not always be in a logical way. We jump to fast conclusions about things. We race to WebMD. We try to self-diagnose. We’re doing all of these things that lend themselves towards the preposterous, towards the fantastic, towards the horrific. And in that little space of life where the body is trying to catch up, where the mind is trying to catch up to the body, there’s all of this space of wonder and horror. And so, having gone through different health crises and watching people in our families—we watch people in our families go through different health crises as well. My mother struggled with cancer twice. My father had cancer at one point. My mother and father had heart conditions. My father died of a heart condition. So there’s always something that’s happening around our body, around the physical space of the body. And so it’s been an obsession over my life of writing through the fear, the anxiety, the reality of what it is of not being respected or heard at the medical facilities. There’s this legendary dismissiveness, especially that Black women face, when we go into the doctor. And so, I try to use my writing, in particular, as a space to process and sometimes visual art as well. There are kinds of misshapen body things that are happening in the collages. But there’s things that happen where we have to grapple with that. So I use the body to do that.
When I was trying to think of what acts as a hinge between the written word and visual art, the idea of the image comes to mind. You work very much in both spaces and work with creating those sensory image details. So, talk to me about your relationship to the image.
I think that if I were being super honest with myself, I would say that I am a spiritual photographer; I am constantly looking at things and making images in my head. Also, images surface, either in lucid dreaming as well as dreaming. There’s always this notion of looking at something and I’m trying to make sense of what I’m looking at, or I’m trying to capture what I’m looking at. I think that gaze is the throughline through all of my work. It’s me observing, which is why I like to use scientific motifs as well in the work, because I’m investigating, I’m looking, I’m observing, I’m holding something under the microscope. I’m taking something apart, I’m dissecting it, even with lucidity. It’s about me being a surgeon in the writing. Me taking things apart and taking and looking at them very carefully. I think that is something that goes through all of my practices, this notion of the images.
I was very interested in the Imagist poets back in the day. I was very interested in poetry that felt very visceral to me, that felt corporeal. It had to have a resonance of physicality, too. Which is why I also think even some of my poems and my writings and even some of my visual work that hints towards violence, or aftermath or carnage, is me trying to tap into some sense of viscerality—the images that I feel arrest us. That stop us in our tracks. I’m interested in generating images that are arresting. Whether they be arresting because they’re beautiful, or arresting because they’re strange or hypnotic or weird in some way. I’m interested in doing that in the writing as well as visual work. So it’s the visuality, the sensual world, the senses, the sixth sense. And all of them are very important to me in the way that I want to articulate my being.
So the other part of that plurality, spirituality, and surreality is this idea of the sixth sense, the mystery. And I also think it’s such a foundational part of the work. I feel like that emanates through. Is it part of your practice as well? How do you materialize that into language and/or into the collage and the visual art space?
That’s the challenge, isn’t it? I’m trying to figure it out. In my childhood, I was deeply in the church, because my mother and my grandmother and my aunts were all church-going women. The churches that they went to walked the line between Baptist and Pentecostal, so there were a lot of fantastic things that were happening— people were speaking in tongues, people were getting slain by the Spirit. This was something that was so pedestrian that I would literally bring friends to the church to just watch them react to what was happening in the church. To watch people go through phases of euphoria, of ecstasy. To have these bodily reactions… these visceral reactions to something that was unseen. All of a sudden, somebody who’s standing next to you is jumping up and down but there’s nothing that happened. Nobody told them to do that. Something was in the room that could not be identified that was making that happen. So that’s always been a part of the way that I moved through the world—that there’s always a seen world and an unseen world, and those unseen things, those unseen forces, those unseen beings do affect what happens in the physical world. And vice versa. So I am constantly about the business in my writing of trying to work through and articulate what that means and what that looks like: How does it show up? What are the images of that? How can I show through writing, or even through an image, or a photograph, or a picture, or a collage, or a painting, this unseen and seen world operating around one another? And for me, it’s gone now beyond religion and into a more cosmologically-based thinking, that’s what I think about the world. It doesn’t have anything to do with a dogma. This is what I know to be true because I’ve lived it. There are things that are happening that we can’t articulate, define, understand. They’re mysterious, they’re cultish. And how do I — as a thinker, as a writer, as a being, as somebody who believes in all of this — how do I write through that, and make that legible for people who may or may not believe in such things?
If you could be workshopped by or workshop with five writers — past or present — whose eyes would you want on your work and why? Who would you want to be in a conversation with?
That’s interesting. That was a great question. Who would I want? Past, present? Visual artist or poet? I’m saying Hannah Höch, Jimi Hendrix, Douglas Kearney, maybe Romare Bearden, and this person who looms large in my imagination, who was a traveling preacher, who used to come to my mother’s church, brother Fred O’Dell. He was the first medium that I ever encountered. So those are my people.Most of them are gone. Is that crazy?
It is not at all! I want to ask you about editing as a process. I don’t know how you begin to edit a collage. But I know creation is one practice, and editing is another, so what are some of your editing practices?
I love editing. It’s actually my favorite part of writing. The hard part is getting the words down there. The shaping of the words is what really excites me, removing words, putting new words in. I do a lot of looking at synonyms. I’m trying to expand and get as close as possible to what it is that I’m trying to say, to be as incisive as possible. I’m going to look at this line; I’m going to begin to move words around. I’m going to begin to maybe move a line to the bottom or to the top. That process of rearrangement and reorganizing and taking things out is very exciting. I love it, and it does mimic the collage too. The cutting things away, the getting the scalpel and really working things out. I think in collage, it shows up as the way I don’t glue down anything until the end. Sometimes I’ll trick myself by gluing things down to make it permanent, and then I’ve got to work around it. But for the most part, there’s a lot of rearranging that’s happening. There’s cutting, and then there’s reorganizing, reorganizing, reorganizing, and then deciding that this is the formation. This is the organization that it should be in. So I think it is a process. It’s the process of writing. It’s the process of making something that’s the exciting part for me. The final outcome is okay. But I’m more interested in how long it took me to do that, how many times I had to think through something to get it to that final space.
What have you inherited and what have you had to invent?
First of all, can I say I love these questions! What have I inherited? I feel like spiritual understanding is an inheritance of mine. Family inheritance. I feel like I have inherited notions around time travel and notions around the body. What have I invented? I don’t think I’ve invented anything, strangely enough, because I am really of the mindset that there’s nothing new under the sun. So even though it may appear as innovation or as invention, I feel like there has been somebody else who’s done this, but maybe we just don’t know who they are, or maybe not in the way that you’re doing it.
But you have a fingerprint.
Of course, exactly, I’m inheriting and then taking that inheritance and rearranging it in a particular way that feels like it might be new or original. But really…I’m constantly looking at old stuff, old archives, old paintings, or collages. When I look at the work of somebody like Romare Bearden, I think it’s unbeatable, it’s unmatched. There’s nothing that I could do that would match that. And this is a person who was making that in the 1930s, 1940s, ‘50s. When you think about that, I’m simply using these tools, the inheritance of how to see something, how to rearrange something, how to think through something, and then reorganizing it in my 21st Century moment. I want to think longer about that question, though, in terms of inheritance, because I feel like it is something that I write about a lot, too, and I don’t often think about inheritance as a good thing all the time. So, I’m gonna spend some time thinking deeper about that.
You definitely, unquestionably, write from a space of Blackness. What I love in reading the work and seeing the visual art is that it is always such a full space. It’s a space of abundance, almost excess. There’s a decadence to your language and your collage. Things are always spilling out of themselves. They refuse containment. There’s a sense of abundance. I’m curious about the “extra” or “too much” — that’s what we say now — so talk to me about that Black fullness that you inhabit and portray so beautifully.
In graduate school, my cohort used to call it “muchness.” Muchness. We talk about “muchness” all the time. How did I come to that? I think it may just be the way I think my brain works. It’s so packed full of things and ideas and images and pictures, and music that it does spill over. There is this spill. And I’m also interested in moving things outside of the boundaries of what we are accustomed to seeing. It’s like you have a piece of paper, and the collage may spill outside of the margins, because that’s how the world is. It’s uncontainable. You could try your best to make things as orderly as possible, sometimes to your peril, because you’re gonna be sitting there being very upset when you realize that you cannot control it.
There’s also this notion of Blackness as an infinite space, Blackness as an idea that holds and contains almost everything, or everything, and then things that we don’t even know. When you think about even the simple idea of going into a dark room and you don’t know what’s in that room. You can’t see what’s in that room, but your brain is immediately going to start to imagine what’s in the room. That fullness of understanding Blackness as a space where anything could happen: any possibility of joy, any possibility of magic, any possibility of horror, any possibility of love, of romance, any possibility can happen inside of the Black space. And so I think about our people, that we are uncontainable. We have been moved through so many places in the globe, both by force and by love, that we want to go somewhere else. We need to go somewhere else. We’re so rich. I’m saying it’s so extraordinary for me, so extraordinarily beautiful, almost breathtakingly beautiful. I’m getting emotional just thinking about it. The capacity of our beauty, and not just physical beauty — although that’s incredible and true. I’m talking about the beauty of our spirits, that we can be welcoming to people who are not welcoming, that we can forgive people who have done awful things, and our capacity for gloriousness. I want to keep going to that well. That’s the bottomless well for me. And I want to just keep going back there. Because whenever I go back into that well and pull something up from it, it’s always new. It’s always fresh. It’s always something that I never knew before. Whether I think, “I’m gonna go to a different island. I’m gonna go to a different location, geographically.” That newness of Blackness completely excites me. It stimulates me. It makes me so excited to think about how I will never know all of the ways that we exist in the world. And that’s a glorious thing. It’s miraculous. It is. It’s a bottomless well.
I’m thinking about you saying, “I invent nothing.” Because you say that, we see how it’s ancestral, there’s a whole old newness.
And it is that old newness because we re-encounter it, so it feels like it’s original. But it’s something that’s existed for millennia, right? But we’re now having this moment with it that feels very new and original.
One of my favorite words is “alchemy.” I’m thinking about the ways in which we make it new, how it alchemizes in us and in our context for and in ourselves. That’s the part that makes it into something new. How do we alchemize experience, trauma, history, relationships? The big things. Love is love, but we alchemize that uniquely in all of our spaces. Thank you, that was a beautiful response. I said two more questions. Now it’s two more. Tell me one thing about passing it on as a teacher, as an instructor, as a mentor for other artists and writers, what are some of the guardrails or instructions for moving forward that you try to give those folks here who are just getting started on the journey?
To listen to themselves and not other people because I think a lot of times we are so conditioned to follow instructions. Some of us don’t by nature, but I think that there’s always this energy around people who are artists and writers to find a mentor, find somebody who can help them to get to where they want to go. And that’s all well and good, but I think that if you don’t first connect with your own internal voice, you won’t be able to do anything interesting. And so I think one of the things that I try to do, especially now with the young people that I have the pleasure of working with, and the honor of working with, and learning from as well as alongside, is to follow their gut, follow their intuition and listen to that inner voice around their making, around the way that they move through the world, around with whom they engage with and interact with. I think it’s very important to help people to understand that you do have a guiding voice inside of you, and that it’s quiet and it can’t be heard over the din of all the other voices outside. You have to get still, and you have to spend that private time and that quiet time to refine your ear, to listen to that inner voice. That’s one thing I’m trying to encourage the young people that I have the pleasure of working with right now to do.
Another thing is to try to research. Research is so critical because of this world that we live in—this social media world where we’re constantly inundated with all of these ideas, images, other people’s stuff, other people’s baggage, other people’s life. Getting outside of that, how do you find that originality, that’s your thing, and make sure that you’re not replicating what somebody else has already done. I always joke around and say that I’m replicating things that have already been done but the people that I’m replicating are dead. They’re not on this planet any longer. They’re not in this dimension. If I’m replicating that, I’m thinking about history. That’s a whole research project. I have to go to the library for that. That’s not going to be easily accessible to me in the internet world. It could be, but I’m going to have to do a little bit deeper digging to understand what was motivating them; why they were making this work; how they were making that work; why they were writing those poems at that time; what they were living through at that time; how were their lives influencing what they were thinking about at that time. To be more thoughtful about the ways that we’re engaging with our making practices and our writing practices.
And I want to take a minute in between these questions just to say to you, Lauren, how influential you have been for me as a writer. I know that you probably do not know this. Your series, years ago when we were in CC [Cave Canem], when you were diving into Trinidadian folklore, and you opened up for me an entire world that I had no knowledge of through these gorgeous poems, and it really triggered in me a deepening around my pan-Africanist leanings towards learning more about other cultural Blacknesses, and spaces that I had not yet been introduced to. It opened up a whole other world for me, and it also really sharpened my eye and my ear around that other work that I was doing that we talked about earlier, around the spiritual world business, the magical world business. What does that look like when we’re Black people? Morrison has also given us that gift in a lot of her work, too. We have always encountered something supernatural in her work and having that moment in time with you really opened up a door, a portal for me that is still giving. So thank you for that. Thank you for your work and the work that you do for us as poets as well. It’s very meaningful, and we are very, very grateful for you.
Oh, my goodness, thank you! All right, back to you. What’s next Krista? What’s brewing in Krista-land?
I am really thinking about how it’s really, really, really beautiful to be here at James Madison University, and working with Furious Flower this week, and being invited to participate in this incredible symposium. The Boundless Book Symposium and Art Book Fair has been really beautiful for me at this time because I have been thinking a lot about publication, about books in a non-traditional sense, which is something that I think about a lot anyway. It’s not new that I’m thinking about this, but I am thinking right now about how my future projects going to manifest. When I’m thinking about the book and about the writings that I’m doing, which are not necessarily poetry too much these days—I would just call them writings, lyric essays… whatever you want to call them, it doesn’t matter the writings—but thinking about the ways that these writings can show up in the world when we’re talking about zines and we’re talking about artist books, and we’re talking about these other more ephemeral-based tactile experiences that have to do with writing. That’s where I’m at right now, I’m really meditating on how the next phase of the writing looks.
Part of what is bringing you here is this Boundless Book Fair, which is celebrating these non-traditional forms of book-making and print. And one of my questions was what is the definition of a book? It sounds like that is exactly what you’re thinking about right now. What does it mean to make a book?
What is a book? That’s something that I’m constantly asking myself: what is a book? Why does it have to be in this form—these traditional forms that we’re accustomed to? What are the possibilities? Another one of our favorite words, what are the possibilities of the book? It’s exciting.
Lauren K. Alleyne is Editor-in-Chief of The Fight & The Fiddle, Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014), Honeyfish (New Issues Press April 2019 & Peepal Tree Press, July 2019), and co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern University Press, 2020).
![in this sea
of questions
that
quested
to understand
me. [struck out]
I am
buried
in an alphabet
of answers,
half-
cocked and still
drunk
from the nights
before.
An ocean of A's
work overtime
trying
to tow
me
from
the wreckage
of
an overactive imagination [struck out] myself.
One should say
the names](https://i0.wp.com/fightandfiddle.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Mourners-Corner-Pic_Page_2-edited.jpg?resize=800%2C1037&ssl=1)
![of the angels who try
to save
them -
so I say, April [italicized]
Angela [italicized]
Andres [italicized], a season
of tulips erupt
like tiny
insurrectionists
in the grave
of gray
matter, the smoky
haze
aftermath
of
wildfires
decades
away -
let me make
it plain:
every
day
I dream
of cracking
this
body
open
like a melon
against
pave-
ment](https://i0.wp.com/fightandfiddle.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Mourners-Corner-Pic_Page_3-edited-2.jpg?resize=800%2C1038&ssl=1)
![There.
wiping
his forehead
with a wet
rag,
impotent
Against Death,
heeding
his warning
to throw [italicized]
water [italicized]
on Blackbeard [italicized]
and get out [italicized]
of the way, [italicized]
not knowing
there was nowhere
I could run
to escape
the end of this
story.
Once,
in an audience,
on the heels
of my 53rd
year, a woman
from my hometown
asked:](https://i0.wp.com/fightandfiddle.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Mourners-Corner-Pic_Page_5-edited-1.jpg?resize=800%2C1035&ssl=1)
![what does it feel like [italicized]
to be an elder? [italicized]
I spun
into a tower
of babel
but should have said:
you [italicized]
tell me. [italicized]
You are still [italicized]
trying to crawl [italicized]
from the carcass [italicized]
of our dead [italicized]
city, [italicized]
back [italicized]
again [italicized]
in the [italicized]
bedroom [italicized]
of your eighth year. [italicized]
I am still
a daughter
kissing the
forehead
of a man no longer here, try-
ing
not to weep
into
his smooth brow.
What the fuck
do I know](https://i0.wp.com/fightandfiddle.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Mourners-Corner-Pic_Page_6-edited.jpg?resize=800%2C1038&ssl=1)
