Donika Kelly

ELECTRONIC SUPERHIGHWAY

after Nam Jun Park
installation assemblage

Imagine overlaid, these states,
these minds, this matter, with neon
gas, with glass too big outlining
the river’s edge, the mountain range,
the arbitrary boundary that marks
each cardinal plane, each state
of mind. The television shows us,
no longer vacuum tubing, no longer
bowed glass and wooden housing,
but plasma but LCD, a vibrating surface
that shows in every state a black person
shot dead, the red and blue lights
strobing over their bodies in the dim
or bright, in the highest of definition.

DONIKA KELLY is the author of The Renunciations and Bestiary. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a founding member of the collective Poets at the End of the World. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa.