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Summer
2005
Krista Franklin
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VISUAL WORKS
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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,
milkmag.org , ambulant.org, and 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.
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| krista
franklin, chicago, poet, poetry, performance art, public schools,
teacher, visual artist, def poetry jam, |
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50%
of Women Have Them
In
lieu of a baby
my uterus decides to grow
tumors instead. Fibers,
like tiny tentacles, winding
around one another like
the strands of DNA
they wished they were;
winding themselves
like a tourniquet,
or a tight ball of yarn inside me.
When
my gynecologist presses
her cool fingertips to my abdomen,
she says: I'm going to have to do
surgery. And with one index finger
hanging in the air like an
exclamation point, she draws the line
where she'll cut me open
like a cardboard box.
Later
I tell a friend:
I want to see it when she's done.
And imagine the formaldehyde-heavy
specimen of all my tiny
obsessions, thin
blue fears intertwined
like copulating lovers.
All
my worries
grown like zygotes,
solid, benign
but for the beat
of my pulse.
The stillborn mass
of my inner Medea.
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