Kiik A. K. 

pomegranate

I realize I am one instant in the sequence of scraps

My mother ate a mouse, I came out of her a little mouse

I swallowed a cricket, the noise I sang was partly cricket

When I strike down another man

It is something like I’ve watched my father do before

When I am struck I fall into my father’s dustbin

I understand I am one word passing through your eye

Its debris feeding the hunger of every other word

I know the voice is an invisible barb sent up

Into the fray of ornithological tatters

I know the wind measures the length of my voice

By its longing to devour the next mouth

Another sack of flour is carried through the crematorium

The voice is rinsed in bathwater and ash

The pomegranate spits hot blood on the sand

I am bleeding into the bag my brother is wringing

the organ

 A poet ate her own hand!

That is worse than the average cannibalism

A cannibal that swallows his teeth

Has to gum all the person he can

We have charred the limbs they twisted as they cooked

We strung the fat the fire reached up to guzzle it

Now we dance around a pouch of caramel

The eyes are crème brulee for the children to spoon at

Why her own hand?

Is that not her reproductive organ and

How will she get scratched?

Every day a poet should dip her hand in poison

Every day another coat of barbs

To chew your ambition only provokes appetite

As when you lop a finger off and

The neighboring fingers grow superpowers

Pull a white hair and the

Alzheimer’s becomes more fierce

You can try and be rid of your nature

You can knit a sweater around the torso of a chimp

And teach him in origami how a diaper

Is also an envelope

But one day he will strangle you

As you walk in front of his bananas

You think reifications won’t strangle

You think they won’t clog the tunnels

Of your neighborhood

They are suffocating your neighbor this moment

At her birthday party and laughing

The poet can cast all her flour to the grease

But that is only to eat your fire in a mouth of gasoline

BIO

KIIK A.K. earned an MA from UC Davis where his poetics thesis was titled “THE JOY OF HUMAN SACRIFICE.” He is a current graduate student at UC San Diego where he is working on a collection of counter-internment narratives, tentatively titled, “EVERYDAY COLONIALISM.” His work has appeared or is forthcoming in iO, Washington Square, Alice Blue Review, Barge Press, The Brooklyner, Scythe and CutBank. “pomegranate” and “the organ” are dedicated to the poet and musician, Ben Doller.