1. On the knees sucking a pestle. [Gripped in particular horrors: the stinked history of other inappropriate drills— being a girl.] Becomes revolving locale, cataclysmic obsession, a time-warp nightmare. In motel rooms: a ditty, a slim filth; asking questions such as when does one become whole, gentle whore? [Unfillable state.] 2. Which language rankles? Unsettling […]
Black Took Collective’s Call for Dissonance
FOUNDED: 1999 LOCATION: CAVE CANEM RETREAT FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN POETS, ESOPUS, NY At Cave Canem each year, a suite of black poets are invited to a castle to write poems. One night in 1999, we who have become Black Took called the other fellows down into the dungeon to begin to create an alternative sphere […]
Your Duck is My Duck
Way back—oh, not all that long ago, actually, just a couple of years, but back before I’d gotten a glimpse of the gears and levers and pulleys that dredge the future up from the earth’s core to its surface—I was going to a lot of parties. And at one of these parties there was a […]
