Poet’s Statement
“In April 2020, I took part in a found poetry challenge for National Poetry Writing Month, organized by The Poeming. Our task was to create 30 poems in 30 days using Michael Crichton’s classic novel, Jurassic Park. It was interesting to see how the words in the book suddenly came alive in a topical sense, infusing my poems with a consciousness that pervaded our current pandemic. Remixing allows me to put words, lines, and phrases together in new and exciting ways.”
White Smoke
We all start life as females, / a cloud of chalky dust
the summary of our work. / Rake the world in a moment
before a metallic wind / exhales white smoke in crescents.
Source: A remix composed from several lines/phrases, picked at random, from Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton.
rediscovery
a child’s scribble
is an accident waiting
to happen;
[never interrupt your work]
two full summers
of uncontrolled scraping
erodes right before your eyes
—invent the unanswerable
on a graph—
is there anything you’ve waited
your whole life for?
Source: A remix composed from several lines/phrases, picked at random, from Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton.
by T.W. Selvey
Tunnel
Your whole life
has the same shape
as a single day.
Driving through a bright green
tunnel of leaves, scattered
images come to you like death.
Look at the curvature—
the voice of God cannot help
us decide how to live.
Source: A remix composed from several lines/phrases, picked at random, from Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton.
Rebirth
You can’t see / the other side
until you are there.
What are they going to do to us?
Life is a game we all intend to win.
A static crackle, toward the far end
of reason, sounds different
with the loss of control—
we just squat here,
waiting like buzzards
until our rebirth.
Source: A remix composed from several phrases, picked at random, from Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton.
Shloka Shankar is a freelance writer and visual artist from Bangalore, India. She enjoys experimenting with Japanese short-forms and myriad found poetry techniques alike. A Best of the Net nominee and award-winning haiku poet, her poems and artwork have most recently appeared in Hedgerow, Modern Haiku, Heliosparrow, Kissing Dynamite, and Burning House Press among others. Shloka is the founding editor of the literary & arts journal Sonic Boom, its imprint Yavanika Press, as well as Senior Editor for Human/Kind Journal.
Recently, T.W. Selvey’s work has appeared in The Babel Tower Notice Board, Ligeia Magazine, The Pi Review, Feral, talking about strawberries all of the time, and petrichor. T.W. tweets sporadically @docu_dement, and is the proud curator of a haphazardly curated blog, www.documentdement.com.