Phillip B. Williams
-after “Mao Sugiyama Cooks, Serves Own Genitals At Banquet in Tokyo”
—Andy Campbell, Huffington Post, May 24, 2012
Here: hooded meal. Hooded
flaccidity, leather hood pulled
over its slit-shaft and the shaft sliced
from the slim head to the source.
To know appetite made new,
then his own body known
as a stranger, feeding himself
to the highest strange price.
Every mushroom’s round and oil,
each fresh hand of parsley holding
his once-throb down to the plate’s
cool face. Such heat and to taste—
nullified canvass? Hobbled art? Tender.
Still. The eunuch travels the throats
toward evolution: body neither
male nor female; a door that, opening
into a wall, now opens into a house
that only they can enter: burning house,
knobs too hot to turn: themselves
a turning from useful to useless, useless
to an anti-length—such art into the fire
and forgive its mighty smoke,
which is a leather tongue, saluting.
 |
Phillip B. Williams is a Chicago, Illinois, native. He is the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels (Arts in Bloom Inc., 2011) and Burn (YesYes Books, 2013). He is a Cave Canem graduate and received a Bread Loaf work-study scholarship in 2011 and social staff scholarship in 2012. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, The Southern Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Sou'wester, West Branch, Blackbird, and others. Williams is currently a Chancellor's Graduate Fellow at the Washington University in St. Louis, working on his MFA in creative writing. He is the poetry editor of the online journal Vinyl Poetry. |