Characters contained within: shepherds, little girls, baby elephants, Venus flytraps, grocery stores, famine, God, meat and money.

SWEET BLOODY SALTY CLEAN

"Kritikos’ spare and severe poems in Exercise in Desire outline a female subject in all her discomforts and wants." —Ben Fama

Exercise in Desire

Animals Don't Go To Hell is a love letter addressed to a "you" from an "I" who are both simultaneously predator and prey.

Animals Don't Go To Hell

My sickness
isn’t worse
than anyone else’s

but I’m too dark
to turn blonde


When Our Desires Shift, We Call It Recovery

History has taught us survival lies
in bending over, spreading wide

Four poems

No brand
No loyalty

I go to CVS
and Walgreens
interchangeably


Three poems

Steel chains for baby
elephants
he told me

Then once it learns
it won’t get
free

twine is all
a body needs

Two poems

Perfect things have nothing alive in them, I keep noticing.

Perfect Things

Going to the store
for calla lilies and 7-up


I believe in beauty
and famine


in my beauty
and my famine


We tell ourselves stories that make the shapes of our landscapes take on some dark and personal meaning, if only for one obligatory scene, for the fleeting lyrics of a temporal tragedy, for "a bad season in the city."

Remembering Joan: Why Her Writing Is Poetry

I still stop to catch my breath
at every black car

My equal, I need you
to tell me the truth

What part of my body extends
beyond itself

to torment you



Francesca Kritikos

Books

Selected work