Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Undercover

I am me, an unfinished beast
All I had to do was stitch her

dumbfounded, thrashing, shaking,
it becoming apparent my Papa
had only one ambition, to punch.


An iron-grey morning with a low sky,
his hot face flashed at me, grunting,

She’s going to spew it all. I’d kill her but
the cunt would take the stack, computer,
library microfilm, drawings, photographs.


It never happened, of course.
I pulled out a sweater, smiling,
quashed it, would have forgot
(the cleaver dipped its square tip
into the cutting block and stayed).


A bright, warm morning in Arkansas,
carnival in daylight spurred under-
standing — rain fell, a stream
of frosty nuggets washed around me
and made it right: Papa will pay for it.


There’s a lot of that undercover
if the outside world would say.



Following instructions for PoMoSco's DIALED IN badge, I used the digits in my complete phone number, including area code, and decided each in sequence would correspond to the number of pages between first lines, repeating the complete sequence three times to generate text for this found poem.

Source: Katherine Dunn, Geek Love: A Novel, New York: Random House, First Vintage Contemporaries Edition, 2002. Print.


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