Krista Franklin
through the shape of mystery
Collage on ledger paper
2017
Marie Says, Bow Down
What I long for is the sound of the drums.
The hollow pounding of calloused palms pinking
against the dry stretched hide of sacrifice.
It’s shocking to think about time
rolling back, planets spinning retrograde,
the fingertips of those women, men,
scarred thick skin tough as cured jerky
hanging in the smokehouse. I rub
my forefinger against my thumb,
and remember the years between us.
Try to imagine their hands as soft as mine;
when would that be? How am I?
And all the years in-between. Imagine.
They held each other’s names in their mouths
like overripe cherries. Their songs breaking
the sun down to dusk. Those hands,
the thick skin of sacrifice, pounding.
The taut fur of a skinned thing, they were
skinned things remembering a time
of togetherness, notes scored in blood.
I need you to remember with me.
The drums. Their skin. Their voices
breaking the crystal fragile nerves
of their owners, captors, fathers,
breaking the veil, conjuring frenzy
in infected imaginations.
What year is this? Do you know
how long the cops have been called?
My love, before there were even phones.
Can you imagine? Even then, when
those tender names were little more
than numbers and decimal points
in leather-bound ledgers that rested
on a desk in the den.
The only thing that fuels me
here is imagination. I stand at the gates,
a spectre there. Watch her, in all white,
the officer insists she break it up.
The drums, the song, the black mass of spirit
thick in the heat. I need you to imagine with me.
The heat. His pinking face, wet, his
nerves fragile as Waterford, her, an
all-white haze, her free woman hands
smooth and soft as mine, lifting lightly
like the wand of a conductor standing before
a symphony. His uniform, stiff, blue.
His pink face, reddening like the sun
at dusk. His knees buckling under
Her mouth an incantation his thoughts
a murder of crows a small wave of rejection
her tongue an ocean of ancestor spelling
him into animal into all-fours into all
bark and no bite. Imagine. That moment.
The drum. The song. His woof.
Blood Meridian (Or, DeVante at the Blood Meridian)
Ink, chalk, charcoal, pencil, and collage on paper
2019
Black Freedom Nebula: a meditation
for Folayemi Wilson’s Dark Matter: Celestial Objects
as Messengers of Love in These Troubled Times
i. S.O.S.: Postcard to Space
everything’s happening bad here
we are without sound
in impossible America
drum beating ourselves raw
our notes implode
illusions overflow messed up minds
ii. Deep Space
sirius a.
In the Beginning, Black was born an inky spread across the circumference of sky freckled with glittering
rocks that surfaced from the cavern of her. Black became bored and birthed a universe for entertainment,
the first TV, a projection of her imagination. What are the sounds of light?
One late morning, Black got gas and belched the Sun, a ball of fire suspended in Black. Black picked her
‘fro, and stars scattered, a symphony of hiss and wink in her wake. She thought, all children should have
mothers, and formed the moon from cooling lava flicked from the sun’s surface. You can’t make this shit
up. Black was so beastie she birthed an immeasurable universe.
Black dutty wind to the singing rings of Saturn, and broke a sweat so wet, it birthed a billion water bodies.
sirius b.
Have you ever heard of a child who’s never seen a star? All light man-made and un-magnificent. No doubt,
Edison stared into the sky for inspiration, how to harness luminescence, drag the moon into living rooms.
Once there was an epileptic who used a star as a GPS, led an entire people to liberation.
Even enslaved folks fell in love, wore the night as camouflage, and snuck off to touch, tender, in the blue
bruise of inhumanity. Space is not the place, but even now there is a child trapped at a border, his eyes
turned up to the borderless, using a constellation as comfort.
If you want to find deep space, go inward. There is no more mystifying place than your mind; the final
frontier between your ears. The ocean of your body sways with the moon, the wombs of women everywhere
hypnotized by her call. What is the gravitational pull of blackness? The dusky matter of you is stardust,
miniscule scatter from the sky. You wanna run the universe, but can’t even converse in universe. Every
breathing thing you want to bridle and bend the knee, build walls, and bulldoze, drill into and fire hose. (If I
say ‘dracarys’ will white privilege burn to dust?)
Mother Earth is pregnant for the fifth time for y’all have knocked her up. The extraterrestrials peek
through holes in the ozone, whisper about the bullies of the galaxy, the earthlings who measure time in
dollar signs, who speak in tongues of barcodes and blood spill. What is the spell for invisibility?
iii. Neutron Star Structure on Black Imagination
with Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil, André Breton, André Masson & Harry L. Shipman
The Crab pulsar revealed a number of puzzling phenomena:
the quality of abstract black,
a new sentence transposing the sky
liberated from shotgun shells & white anxiety.
(What is the formula for escaping white privilege?)
What does it feel like observing time, light, shadow,
hierarchies; blackness in chains,
terrestrial imagination in deep
participation with brutal imagination?
The past, present, and future are a continuous current
of aquatic transmissions, a nonlinear star clock
ticking a spiritual frequency like the flickering
of Mother Board church fans during Sunday service.
The vernacular architecture of other realms
floods the smallness of earthling egos,
encourages us to contemplate the revelations:
farewell to the familiar as a point of focus.
We are little specks of dust on the earth.
If the whole world is struck at the center
of our sense of safety, based on these data,
Blacks will form
a safe space of ritual & meditation
emotional core energy
a sense of continuous suspension the ether
of magician tricks in the key of metallic blues
To the neutron star
Black imagination
is an astral contour
bathed in a glint of love.
Optical pulses too; blowing glitter
over the red stripes
of american mutilations
As a repetition: Black imagination is not corporeal
it’s a projection of sound that induces
a cleansing in us in the emotion felt
at our least stable.
Only at the moment when, as human beings
we learn the precise measurements of plant-animal infiniteness
a feminine & masculine temperance and to not speak
SCARCITY can black freedom b(l)oom.
Krista Franklin is a writer and visual artist, the author of Too Much Midnight (Haymarket
Books, 2020), the artist book Under the Knife (Candor Arts, 2018), and the chapbook
Study of Love & Black Body (Willow Books, 2012). She is a Helen and Tim Meier
Foundation for the Arts Achievement Awardee, and a recipient of the Joan Mitchell
Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Her visual art has exhibited at Poetry Foundation,
Konsthall C, Rootwork Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Studio Museum in
Harlem, Chicago Cultural Center, National Museum of Mexican Art, and the set of 20th
Century Fox’s Empire. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Black Camera, The Offing,
Vinyl, and a number of anthologies and artist books.
Note: Portions of “Black Freedom Nebula: a meditation” were constructed from the
cut-up method, and contain fragments and echoes from the writings of Suzanne Césaire,
René Ménil, André Breton, André Masson, and Harry L. Shipman’s Black Holes, Quasars,
and the Universe. Section i., “Postcard to Space,” is from Aural Anarchy, a poetry
collection and album inspired by the life and music of Jimi Hendrix. The album was a
collaboration between Alison Chesley (Helen Money) and Krista Franklin, and was
released on naïveté records in 2007. Section ii. of “Black Freedom Nebula” contains an
interpolation of a line from Tricky’s “Makes Me Wanna Die” and Funkadelic’s “Maggot
Brain.” This poem first appeared in the catalogue for Folayemi Wilson’s Dark Matter:
Celestial Objects as Messengers of Love in These Troubled Times (Candor Arts, 2020),
which includes an LP of a live performance of the poem with musician Ben LaMar Gay
and interdisciplinary artist Joelle Mercedes.