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The Exquisite Corpse - A Journal of Letters and Life
Edited by Andrei Codrescu
ec chair poetick kultur anti-amthropomorphism
gallery zounds the making and unmaking of person
new economics of late capitalism
diaries and memoirs translation and her retinue
working class sweat
the corpse reads classics letters the book of revelations and epiphanies
the making and unmaking of person
The Book of (Demotic) Revelations and (Common-sense) Epiphanies

For Bernadine Dohrn and Future Meterologists:
by Shauna Rogan

I smashed a window.

I shot a cop.

Connecting red to blue, the impact was impressively white.

I stripped naked and covered myself in red paint.
The color ran, but I stood still as all around me

my brothers were swept up
in waves of dissent.
Any man can throw a
rock in the adrenaline heat of a
spontaneous revolution, but if

a woman feels the screech of smoldering rubber
inches from her nose,
the strength of her convictions lie between
her and the fender.

My forehead blistered and peeled for a week,

and women with convictions don't have lovers;
convicted women don't have friends. They have
hands and minds and comrades and ideals and they

stay awake until sunrise, stay up for days
on end. Fueled by passion,
by sublimated impulses. Revolutionary women sound
like it's always that time of the month. Men shoot first and
ask questions later. Women just shoot, having already asked
and answered the possible questions, having heard the
jury's verdict and banging
gavels in their sleep; knowing history and
the census won't count them, knowing their data is stored in
a dusty file cabinet somewhere and their opinions
won't skewer telemarketing polls because

they don't answer the phone
briskly at dinnertime.
Dinnertime isn't for eating.

Dinner is a cup of
coffee in a basement or a
hasty bagel on the train, and
breakfast is not the most
important meal of the day.

Breakfast is an interruption.

Women get shot first.
Children second.
Cops and soldiers hide behind
helmets and horses and tanks,
impervious to direct sunlight and intense heat.

Blinking away the cherry burns from cigarettes
extinguished on my hand, I ripped
thin pillows apart in effigy and kicked
holes in my brother's arguments.

They kicked back.
I refused to back down.
I refused to cry.

I smuggled a piglet into the mayor's office; it squealed in hunger and fright. Regardless of genus or species, Infant hunger is infant hunger. Infant hunger is infinite hunger and though its form is sometimes appalling, it cannot be ignored. A pig stepped on the piglet as they wrestled us apart and led me away in disgust.

No piglet deserves to be orphaned.

The tear gas burned. I couldn't wash it away.

Blood lies at the heart of battle.
Futures lie bloody at merciless feet while
countless voices swim upstream through
restless generations of
bleeding hearts: voices of low murder,
quiet reason, apocalyptic wonder and
cataclysmic joy. These voices of gunshot
flirtation erupt in covertly girlish whispers
and gales of colloquial laughter regardless of
whether our daughters rocket from wombs
like daredevils shot from cannons
or gracefully untangle themselves from
umbilical coils like placenta-soaked wailing Houdini's.
.

They brought me to the station in
an antique trolley car, hands cold and
wrists cut from plastic restraints, bound
like a loaf of bread or a length of fence.

They ran out of cells to hold everyone.
I ran out of patience for outdated protest and
folk songs so I started composing
slogans of my own--cadenced words
that will never be heard in a radio world of
uptown girls and downtown
trains, where women don't make news
unless they're pretty,
white,
and dead.

 

 

 

home archives submit black market comrads hot sites search ec chair peotick kultur anti-amthropomorphism
new economics of late capitalism gallery zounds the making and unmaking of person
diaries and memoirs translation and her retinue
the book of revelations and epiphanies working class sweat
the making and unmaking of person the corpse reads classics letters

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