Too Much Midnight Arrives

Her book arrived in a thunder of banging and ringing. My neighbor worried the package on my stoop there now a second day even though she knew I had been out yesterday because my car moved.

I don’t even know if it’s mine as I picked it up it was mine, and my neighbor talks worry again sometimes just bang on the wall and say I am here

yeah the same, you can always bang on my wall and ask if I’m okay or bang or ring like you did 

we are standing there maybe a little less than 6ft between us 

without masks 

after a month 
only the second day 

I didn’t leave the house. 

It’s been hard to get my exercise now that they’ve closed both my parks. After a week the mind easily congratulates for staying inside along with support of the propaganda. 

We would’ve exchanged phone numbers but neither of us had our phones. 

I knew what it was but didn’t as well. a wonder as I ripped open cardboard and the yellow spine like a children’s book for our kind of children. Of course. Love. Arrives in a thunder and a worry. I had been watching the Tiger King. Drinking the last dregs of coconut rum neat, smoking the last American Spirits menthol, the last crumbs of a little gifted baggie of weed, meditating on this as the possible last night of that. I build up a lather and wash my hands for 20 seconds. 

In the dining room I turn on the lamp by the crate and pull out Donna Summers live, Bach’s Magnificat, Queen Latifah on now, and Sun Ra for Call. I sit in the white leather arm chair by the lamp in the living room feet up on the brass and glass coffee table by the baby blue haze of Elsie’s Plate and the tall green blades of a sod of wheatgrass. 

I read every word that my eyes can make out. I pause for colors and patterns and cuts and the gallery wallpaper pastedown. 

I stop and flip sides, change discs, gently lay the needle. make tea.

It was a mission tonight of the most urgent. I’m holding in my heart my friend Josh Singer who just died and Monica Hand who died four years ago and Michael Brown who died six years ago.

I can respect a book that begins with a manifesto ars poetica, 

I believe that children are the future: love them now or meet them at dusk at your doorstep, a 9mm in their right hand & a head noisy as a hornet’s nest later. Your choice.

and ends with a call,

It is You. Here’s a mirror. Look behind You, beyond You. Here’s a portal. Jump through it. Make Magic. 

I can adore a book of poetry with the pacing of an art book with introductory essays at the front, 

Read aloud. Pay attention to what your skin tells you. Breathe. Do not stop breathing no matter the pain or joy you feel in places you have denied fear and desire. And love. -Maria Eliza Osunbimpe Hamilton Abegunde

To read this book of collected poems and collages is to experience an artist’s multitudes in symbiosis. Her words cut. The images speak. -Jamila Woods 

Too Much Midnight is a long-awaited opus of conjoined miracles for Franklin’s cult of admirers, devotees, and disciples. -Greg Tate 

The Prussian blue of the cyanotype becomes other kinds of blues. Can we just sit with the blue for a moment? For many moments?” -Cauleen Smith

and at the back an interview with our beloved poet artist, Krista Franklin,

Some days, the realization that I’m still alive and can find moments to laugh with abandon in this brutal world is a transformative experience to me. 

Too Much Midnight by Krista Franklin is published by Haymarket Press 2020. Get your copies here!