flyer looks dope!
LOUDER THAN A BOMB 2010
The Real Renaissance
The 10th Anniversary of Chicago’s Youth Poetry Slam Festival
February 22 – March 6
Feb 22-28 – Preliminary Bouts at Columbia College – Chicago
Feb 25-27 – (Evenings) The College Slam
Mar. 1 – Semifinals at Steppenwolf (1650 North Halsted Street)
Mar. 6 – Finals at the Vic ( 3145 North Sheffield Avenue )
For ticket reservations, contact Shadell Jamison at shadell@youngchicagoauthors.org
this is the piece written for and performed at the January 2010 EncycloShow, where the topic was “Obsolete Diseases.” My assignment was the lovely smallpox. Title credit for Part 3 goes to Robbie Q Tefler btw. Audio to come soon:)
Part 1: The first Thanksgiving wasn’t really a party til She showed up
She is a skeleton with charred bones and throat filled with bullet shells
men in war coats have kidnapped her in their lungs
carried her in boats across the sea
they keep her in their spit like a secret and cough her out into wollen blankets
and give them to the people like presents
these men run hands up her sides like gun barrels
hook their fingers round like a trigger
pointed towards the new world
by now
the people have all gone bad
rotted out faces and soggy throats
blotchy red mold on their skin
it smells as if they have been puckered open
slowly un zip locked
so the death inside them oozes down their cheeks now
staining the sink
the river has already turned red
her skin is a flickering mound of blistered embers covered in horseflies
she is pointed like a canon into the forrests mouth
she has turned this ground into a stove top
midnight screams percolate smoky through the air like teakettle whistles
she is making the people so hot
the water in their guts is burning
her breath turns mothers into blubbering sirens holding broiled babies with pomegranates for cheeks
these mothers hold children wrapped in wollen blankets
which men in war coats have coughed into and given to them like presents
they are bewildered watching skin on their babies
turn from burgundy bubbles to black scabs
and they try to scratch them off like dollar lotto cards but they keep losing and losing
and she keeps breathing til men in war coats put down their guns and pick up needles
sticking prodding her veins til there is almost nothing left of her
til mothers stop crying cause they are empty and alone
and the new world is burned bare and ready for building
Part 2: Shitala Mata, Hindu Goddess of Smallpox, does not apreciate being called “Obsolete”
In Mumbai mothers are whispering praise across her toes
There she is a comely woman with cold milk skin and saffron perfume
she has four hands and twenty fingers drawn out from silky arms like white spider legs unfolding
she carries plagues in two palms
remedies in the others
people try to stay on her good side
when she visits they dust and broom the house like you would if a goddess came to call
she comes scattering spores like poppy seeds
watching red flowers pop up through brown skin soil
neighbors compliment each other on their gardens with pained smiles
while she pinches children’s cheeks and leaves them spotted pink with her fingerprints
neighbors admire the rosy freckles like signs of a blessing
they wouldn’t want to offend her
now call up the doctor
he feeds the freckled victims yogurt and coconut milk
bathes them in icy water because shitala likes cold things
now call up the priest
he will hang neem tree branches from the ceiling
pray for the goddess to come take her flowers back
when she returns she shrivels the red blooms like winter frost
fevers drop like icicles from her fingers
and the people are left breathing cold smoke
lungs rattling like the sound of wind through frozen garden weeds
but they wear their scars proud like sacred pendants marking where she came and went
Part 3: From Russia, with Scabs
one day you will get a letter in the mail
with your name written in leaning letters on the envelope
you will open it, inhale
and your throat will start to close
you will dial 9-1-1
nurses will faint at the sight of you
doctors will say you have a week if you’re lucky
and your skin will feel like mid-summer chicago asphalt
and you’ll see everybody spinning
everybody playing hop-scotch
they’ll poke you with wide needles and tell you to stop screaming
cause your trachea might rip
but you’ll keep laughing and laughing
because what you don’t know is
someone has dug up coffins of red spotted corpses
collected the powdered skin inside
and has been saving it somewhere overseas
underground in test tubes for decades
what you don’t know is
right now
she is curdled up in an erlenmeyer flask alive and kicking
as we speak there are men with curly mustaches towering over her
wearing white lab coats twiddling their fingers
they are titlting their heads back aiming vincent price style cackles at the ceiling
what you don’t know is
they are hiding these resurrected scab crumbs in the free food samples at Sam’s Club
they are secretly dusting the metal handrails of the CTA with pox germs
they are sprinkling rotted skin flakes into the air conditioning vents at your job
and soon you will inhale and find that that mole on your shoulder
is not a mole
that pesky case of backne, is something a lot more deadly
No, Mother those aren’t hot flashes you’re feeling
it’s the revival of the smallpox pandemic at the hands of unknown bioterrorists
somewhere overseas underground
and they do not play nice
so beware
it is only a matter of time before we will al be burning black with fever
scratching blindly at burgundy pendants on our skin
with no goddess to come save us
no vaccine to make it better
just the warm sizzling feeling of your very own
red and pimpled face rotting slowly
off the bone
if you’ve never been to an encyclopedia show… now is your chance!
this wednesday eve @ 7:30
chopin theater, chicago
$6 @ the door
a spoken word show featuring franny choi, fatimah asghar and yours truly
if your are in providence, come!
if you aren’t, send good thoughts!
fury pits in my stomach like apricot
or is it misery?
unfortunately
i’m an all or nothing type
let me rot
on the countertop
