Krista Franklin

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 sleight of hand wandering the forest of motives, armed with horoscopes, cosmic encounters & an X-Acto knife. My right eye is a projector flickering Hottentot & Huey Newton, my left eye is prism of Wild Style, gold grills, lowriders, black dahlias, blunts & back alleys. At twenty-one, I stood at the crossroad of Hell & Here, evil peering at me behind a blue-red eye. I armed myself with the memories of Pentecostal tent revivals, apple orchards, the strawberry fields I roamed with my mother & aunts in the summer, & the sightings of UFO lights blinking in the black of an Ohio nightsky. I am a weapon. I believe in hoodoo, voodoo, root workers, Dead Presidents,Black Tail,Black Inches&Banjees. I believe in the ghosts of 60 million or more & black bones disintegrating at the bottom of the Atlantic, below sea level,Not Just Knee Deep.I believe that children are the future: love them now or meet them at dusk at your doorstep, a 9mm in their right hand & a head noisy as a hornet’s nest later. Your choice. Black, still, in the hour of chaos, I believe in Royal Crown, Afro-Sheen, Vaseline, Jergens & baby powder on breasts, the collective conscious, cellular memory, Public Enemies, outlaws, Outkast, elevations, “Elevators” &Encyclopedia Britannica. Under my knife, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz laughs with Muhammad Ali, a Lady named Day cuddles with a Boxer named Mister after traumatically stumbling on strange fruit dangling from one of the most beautiful Sycamores evah. Under my knife, Marilyn Monroe enjoys an evening out with Ella Fitzgerald, meanwhile,Life shows me a gigantic photo. I am a weapon. I chart voyages of unlove, high on a man called crazy who turns nigger into prince. I believe in Jong, Clifton, “Dirty Diana” & Dilla, paper, scrilla, green, gumbo, coins, Batty Bois & Video Vixens. I believe that beads at the ends of braids are percussive instruments in double Dutch. In the reflection of my knife, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington & Thelonious Monk argue in a Basquiat heroin nod. I am a weapon. I believe in goo-gobs of deep brown apple butter, alphabets, Alaga Syrup, Affrilachians, A-salaam Alaikum, Wa-Alaikum-Salaam, & African Hebrew Israelites. I believe in Octoroons, Quadroons, Culluds,Cooley High, Commodores, Krumpin, Krunk &Burn, Hollywood, Burn. I am Sethe crawling a field toward freedom with a whitegirl talking about velvet. I believe in tumbleweaves, hot combs & hair lyes, Chaka Khan, Shaka Zulu, Mau Mau, Slum Village &Buhloone Mindstate: “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless. Like water.” I believe in water. My body is pulp. I bleed ink. I believe in the Fantastic, Vol. 2, The Low End Theory, Space Is the Place&The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Tucked in the corner of my right ventricle sprouts a Tree of Knowledge, lives a Shining Serpent & a middle finger. I’m on a quest for the Marvelous. My face is a mask of malehood, malevolence, one big masquerade. Metaphysically niggerish, I am a weapon wandering the forest of motives, a machete in one hand, a mirror in the other, searching for the nearest body of water.

I didn’t want one child. I wanted a thousand. Because though you may try, you can’t kill all of them. My body couldn’t birth a thousand, so I didn’t even bring one here. I let you have them. One by one, and I had my first surgery when I was eighteen. No, seven. No. I had my first surgery when I was thirty-five. No, when I was forty-seven. I almost had my first surgery today. The doctor drew an all-seeing eye around my wound to diagram the length and width of the scar with a purple magic marker. To be honest, I had my first surgery when they pulled me deadfirst headfirst from between my mother’s thighs. But I don’t remember that one; the separation of my flesh from the source of all I’d known. Muddy vessel, crumbling temple. This carved body, overgrown garden, nest of the narcotic. My first ten years were mostly marked by my relentless pursuit to not look pregnant when I went out in public. One of my goals each day was to not have someone ask me in public — hopeful look in their gesturing gaze, so excited by the prospect of a coming Christmas miracle, “Are you    ...?” and to have to shatter their hopes of Dream Baby, and simultaneously begin the Emotional Labor of soothing their embarrassment after hearing, “No.” Because a woman with a swollen or distended abdomen can only mean one thing. And that thing is always joyous and awaited with excited anticipation. A woman with a distended abdomen couldn’t possibly be dealing on the daily with something gone terribly awry. Couldn’t possibly be engaged in an ongoing war for her body, a custody battle for her own self. A woman’s swollen belly is everybody’s Good News, everybody’s Business. So that’s how I spent five years in my thirties: running around evading expectations my deceptive uterus induced in family, friends, and rank fucking strangers. What they took from me: What they scooped out of me: What they carved from out of me: What they excavated from me: What they dug out of me: What they released from me: What they harvested from me: What they pulled from me: What they birthed from me: — a colony of tumors — an archive of NO s — a battalion of rogue dreams — an inheritance of heartbreaks — a lockbox of my foremothers’ molestations — a cedar chest of secrets — four generations of the miscarried and stillborn — a library of zeros — a ledger of names written in decimal points — my grandfather’s shriveled aspirations — a moldy cellar of witnessed whippings — a  jewelry box of swollen tongues — a Bible of abducted children Everyone is invested in policing the Black body. Yes, even you. And there’s a particularly virulent investment in the surveillance and policing of the Black Woman (née “Female”) Body. In fact there are multiple systems, most of them economic, that hinge upon controlling, corralling, and commodifying the female body in general. Why do you suppose, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Seventeen, the ocean vomited up twenty-six dead Nigerian girls on the gorgeous Mediterranean coast? Pussy and Blackness are two of the first moneymakers ever recorded. And if you got both, well then, you know what time it is, right? [Bend over so I can swipe this credit card down your ass.] What information is passed through a genetic line? What memories are housed in our cells? Are our memories the memories of some memories of some long-dead, unknown Ancestors along the line? What traumas do we carry that we picked up along the way, that were never ours to begin with?