frankenpo[modern_footnote]A frankenpo is an invented poetic text created by collecting, disaggregating, randomizing, rearranging, recombining, erasing, and reanimating one or more chosen bodies of text, for the purpose of diving or revealing new meanings often at odds with the original texts. “Visa” is a frankenpo combining texts of Presidential Executive Orders 13769 and 13780 (Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States) + Octavia Butler’s The Books of the Living, verses 1-66 + “Reflection on the Repulsiveness of the Body” from the Satipatthana Sutta.[/modern_footnote]
1.
Dear love,
I have arrived in
the national hair.
Already, my prey nerves
are in the burn of growth
the ongoing build
of god
mucus.
Everywhere, government
sponsored fanaticism
multiple acts of teeth.
Our love in a time
of inappropriations
of malicious inadmissibility.
The under
state
swarms our
documents. Our
lungs.
2.
Dear proclamation,
how many
statutory galaxies in
a single body? My internal
shape
hemmed in
by procedural pleura. I am
a subsection
of light
drowning
in a fiscal country, where
case by case life
remains
in the shape
of prayer.
3.
Dear disaster,
today I was
a swarm border
a spleen of
biometric information
pliable synovial data.
I was day
light
in an embassy
of flesh.
In bones, fat
the gift immigrants
of us
water asks for
reciprocity.
Here we rain
everything.
4.
Thus have I heard:
We are visas
in a national
drowning.
Each of us an executive
decision, pursuant to clay.
Each a subsection
of protocol
and yet.
Memoranda: I am a train light
country
vetting
the president of
his
terrorist
shape.
—
Kenji C. Liu (劉謙司) is author of Monsters I Have Been from Alice James Books (2019), and Map of an Onion, national winner of the 2015 Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize. His poetry can be found, among other places, in American Poetry Review, Anomaly, The Feminist Wire, Gulf Coast, Split This Rock’s poem of the week series, several anthologies, and two chapbooks, Craters: A Field Guide(2017) and You Left Without Your Shoes (2009). A Kundiman fellow and an alumnus of VONA/Voices, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and the Community of Writers, he lives in Los Angeles.
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