Phaneric Display No. 2:
The Meta
By Duriel E. Harris (’99-’01)

The intellect must be taught | extremities are first to go babythataway™ |_red scotch plaid skirts and vests kneesocks and peterpan collars | poppa wheelie into dream poppa rave cap and cruise | blank as normal templates’ throaty viral erasure | intellect is the primal faculty | plucked swollen like a muscle | guitar neck cave secret hand-thrown into a shallow bowl | blood cooling to jelly on the blue rim | where you have been collecting | you need not know the name of a thing to know it | pinkseamed joint and toes the child will chop the blonde | mop to sheer plugs and plastic until the frames collide | but she’s always looked like that

and raggedy ann™ and raggedy andy™

Copyright © Duriel E. Harris. All right reserved. Used by permission of the author

Duriel E. Harris is the author of Drag (Elixir Press, 2003). She holds a doctorate from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MA from New York University. A writer/performer, Ms. Harris is the recipient of a 2001 Illinois Arts Council Finalist Award and a past winner of the Gwendolyn Brooks Writer’s Conference Poetry Slam. Currently at work on Soma, her first sound recording, Ms. Harris is Poetry Editor for Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora and a co-founder of two collectives: Text(ure) and Black Took. In collaboration with the other members of Black Took, she is editing Os Sacrum, an anthology of oppositional/experimental writing by emerging Black poets, formally announced at the 2001 People’s Poetry Gathering. In addition, the Black Took Collective Statement and "Pourmoreformore PoMoFunk dunk, dun paramour," Ms. Harris’s Statement of Poetics, appear in Fence 8 (Fall 2001). Other Harris work appears in Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Role Call, nocturnes: (re)view of the literary arts, and African American Review.

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