I Bite With Inaccurate Teeth
Dear love,
a life of good conduct and a festering depression under. pus nationalists cling to
the spleen well. this dissolving unadaptable country—how the white charnel ground
offers its despoiled body. rotten segments pass through the official pleura.
an intestinal consciousness. as always our bodies are slaughters in the making
historical beings of nuclear bile mesentery lamentation. in the precious crush of national arousings
we become, again weapons against the immigrated. a haunting perception arisen we
long blue animals defiled by an economy of suspicion. instill the spectre of venereal
nationalism, as if objects of calming. blood clings to the wastelands skin on the election door.
The delusional state—shiny, shiny, shiny.
“I bite with inaccurate teeth” is a frankenpo, an invented method that randomizes and combines several texts, so the end result is composed of individual words from those texts. The poem draws language from a speech by POTUS45, a white supremacist manifesto, a reflection on the repulsiveness of the body (Patikkulamanasikara) in the Satipatthana Sutta, and an essay by Grace Lee Boggs, “Naming the Enemy.”
Feature Date
- October 22, 2019
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Copyright © 2019 by Kenji C. Liu
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Maya Washington
Kenji C. Liu is a visual artist and author of Monsters I Have Been (Alice James Books, 2019) and Map of an Onion, national winner of the 2015 Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize (Inlandia Institute). His poetry is in numerous journals, anthologies, magazines, and two chapbooks, Craters: A Field Guide (2017) and You Left Without Your Shoes (2009). He is an alumnus of Kundiman, VONA/Voices, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and the Community of Writers. He lives in occupied Tongva land, Los Ángeles.
"Liu relishes the absurd and the happenstance, that 'tornado gorgeous' that becomes possible with a non-utilitarian approach to language."
—Publishers Weekly
"Monsters I Have Been leads by example in showing how experimental writing can be an act of communal love."
—Tupelo Quarterly
"The monstrosity of the times speak to us through film-scripts, internet writings, faux-apologies, divinations, public utterances, and savage declarations that hit from all directions—letting us know that the patriarchal, capitalist, heteronormative inheritance of poetry no longer suffices to meet the demands of the day. Gone is the poet’s singular voice, the poetic transmission from muse or god or anguished affect. These frankenpos, as Kenji Liu calls them, arise from the thick and twitching mass of language constantly exploding between our ears—the overflow is rebellious, unapologetic, multilingual, and fierce.”
—Sawako Nakayasu
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