Joshua Tree

Assignment: Write a bilingual poem, with the subject matter of your choice.

The desert sands glowed with a dusty light

Gleaming from beneath

The sun only a meek competitor

Against the fire of the earth.

Los guerreros de la arena,

Mi seguridad

Tu seguridad.

We hoist our lives onto our backs

We plunge into another world

Where the earth becomes the sky

And death is a friendly hand

Placed lightly upon your shoulder

El sol te cubre,

Tu sabana de fuego

La luz, y el calor

Te cubren.

The great granite monsters are piled high

One atop another

Broken relics of a lost age

Their jagged silhouettes pierce the dusky moon

As we slap the cold from our fingers

And our breath goes sharp in our throats

Los ojos del desierto nos miran

Con furia, con tristeza, con amor

Y aunque nuestros ojos se cierran

El desierto jamás duerme

Es el vigilante permanente

Con sus ojos

Reflejando el mundo.

moody in june

Sadness, or this dull throbbing
Has rendered me slow and heavy.
Dragging thru the days like a dishrag

Punctuated by real emotion, for no, I am not a zombie! Not the undead. I feel stuffed tho.
Mounted, on a plaque or base.
Posed in my most natural postion in a box, painted to look ike my natural habitat

Where have the days gone?
Me a slow, comatose, cumbersome character.
Unsavory.
Ignoble.

What to say , are there real words?
There is lead
Where my vital organs should be.
I’d love to sleep in the sun, for years, months. Void. But not death, to feel the warmth of the sun.
Just void. Or perhaps to cry.
But not to sit, alone, cracked like dry desert mud, with nothing to expend.
I cant explode, for I am merely smoldering.

Who replaced my eyes with beads?
Who filled my veins with stones?

Who painted my life beige….who.

Sawdust, sand and granite all have more meaning than I.
I would not float in the Dead sea.

My summer soaked rant.

The old leather box containing the 1930's typewriter grazes my knee, as i bang away and the ungrateful pang of these plastic keys. The door to the toliet is open and the resedue of sourdough pretzels lines the pink insides of my mouth. Its a summers day, i am silent because I feel as though there is no noise needed. The sun is shaded by the murky sky outside, toning the ivy behind me in varing layers of illuminated greens. A list of phone numbers lay beside me, next to the krazy Glue i used to glue my bosses broken plate together. Phone numbers range from Pasadena, Van Nuys, New Jersy, West Los Angeles and Brooklyn area codes, beyond the list of estranged numbers associated with my list of friends lies a list of phone numbers of Psychics. That was my job today, psychics, finding ones good enough that would cure a writers block. This hasn't been glanced at yet, which is most of my feats here, only looked upon after the editors meetings, or the soundtrack teastings ecetera. Its nicer that way, because i hate when people read something i wrote infront of me, its the feeling of being mortally naked. As thier faces expand and wither with each word or concept you conveived and the perpetual neuroses of what you THINK they're thinking. I put on a Sylvia Plath outfit today, as i walk around in it i feel uncomparativly fashionably backward than anyone on the streets of Williamsburg. Was Sylvia Plath gone with that Gwenith Paltro film? Must i only wear gladiator sandals and jumpers? It is common in a Plath reader that you take upon her characteristics, I suppose in this moment of noise absence i have. Which is quite funny because im not really all that depressed. So the sun moved lighting this small apartment differently, allowing me to hide from its rays.
Im off to a studio..(i like when brits say with a linering j. Studjio: sort of like that)

anyways.
my rant.
thank you.

A Memoir Class Quick-Write

My mom's neck is not unusual. 

Sometimes I'll lie awake at night and think about African women with those rings around their necks, stretching them so far up that they look like ebony cranes, and I wonder if they work in libraries: the perfect helpers to grab those books at the top of the shelves. 

My mom does not have that neck.

DMV, you a dirty mistreater, a robber, and a cheater

Stepping inside of the DMV is like hurtling into the alternate universe of 1950's futuristic ideals. Lines of people bisect each other and move in diagonal conveyer belt formations, like some sort of avant garde production on the utopian freeways of the Jetsons, people symbolizing the pea pod automobiles. 

And in front of a flickering, 24-inch TV showcasing a plain blue screen with appointment numbers scrawled in block letters are a group of automatons seated row after row, all eyes strained toward their impending turn. I had the feeling that if I put a lighter underneath one of their noses wax would slowly drip off the tip and form a puddle on their lap, proving that I was actually looking at an exhibit in Madame Tussauds.  

The DMV made me inch closer to unlawful driving, if only to spite what I think is a house of horrors. A place filled with salivating teenagers straining against their harnesses to grasp onto a driver's license and shame-faced adults enduring chastisements from bureaucratic evil-doers.

Im far from it.

Last night I was caught in a New york rain storm. My copy of Bell Jar got wet. The black dye from my skirt seeped onto my legs. And I left my journal as i rushed away, in my friends bag. Everything was cinematic then.

Well, what does that mean?

For whatever reason, my recent dreams have been saturated with spit curled suffragettes who lindy hop their way down city streets. The kind of women who gather as many admirers as the number of glass beads that are draped around their necks, keeping those sailors happy with their penetrating, bedroom eyes. Whether these girls are living in the damp underground of the subway station or are playing figure study on a spread polar bear rug, they encapsulate the feminine prowess that all precocious minded little girls dream of attaining as they toss sand in a red-cheeked Junior's face. Already getting ready for the later tarpaulin of makeup with a

smile from grape juice purple lips.

a sodden, heavy pirouette---
An oak leaf falls. You press it into your palm…the spikes make little craters in your hand.
Years pass,
you are crying
so the world will go round,
the craters fill and the Indians grind their hard, purple corn in them.
They scoop out the meal, mix it with your tears
And feed their children

Little estuaries spring up, geysers from the crook of your elbow
The children pinch their noses
Men come
And build boardwalks
you are rubbing dust into your
eyes, you are
folding spores into your skin
your muddy marrow and your salty blood
Your bitter lips and your spiny ribs.

The souvieners of McCollister

Last night i had a dream: it depicted my dead grandmother, whom which i share the same German legs as her. In the dream she was resurrected.

A few weeks ago my family's hometown of Louisiana Missouri was choked under the muddy waters of a Mississippi flood. The ghost like town inhabited by my family for generations, floating under murky waters. So, alone in a search for something tangible i find as many things in family lineage dies or gets wet, lost, torn, burned, disintegrated. Today, I found in the crevasses of my fathers oak sock drawer, pictures of a phosphorescent New Orleans, of children with beautifully pure faces mussed up by the bayous heat. I found my grandmothers legs, twine and a winter prayer from a congregation my father seeked in Louisiana for i guess guidance. This is what small towns do, lull you to a Huckleberry coma until something dies, your mother, until the floods hit again and you have to find a sin city to scoop you up, get you melancholy and drunk and parade you into a humid state of loveliness, where nothing has recognition, where everything is blurred by the past, your subconscious and the absinthe you drank, with the reefer you inhaled, with the fat man you took pictures of. Until the loss of your town and your mother doesn't hurt and spirits become steady in your skull.

A summers prayer.

Not My Family

Your sons are spoiled rotten. Their blond heads are matted with tears, running and dribbling over their eyelashes to come and rest in the dimples on their cheeks. Each time you unwrap a shiny new plastic toy, all you will be rewarded with is gnashing teeth and flailing limbs, kicking, beating, biting, filling the air with electricity and panic. How dare you let me into your house? Each time they call you, "Mommy, Mommy!," your jaw clenches in fear, screaming back at them. You look at me apologetically, gently nudging them from the room. The finger paint coats us thinly, in my nose, my mouth, my eyes. They have become smudges in my eyes, little dark whorls on the lawn. Your husband tries to keep them out of the laundry chute.







"Great, I'll be back Saturday, Mrs. ______"

declarations----spring of last year

you used to wade in the brackish estuaries

you used to lick the resin from the trees

you used to be the desert

you used to jump and the milk in your belly became butter

you used to sing a song over and over

you used to have bark and branches

you used to perform for the wild animals underground

you used to feed the roots

you used to cull the fools gold from all the mountain streams

you used to fuzz all the newborn peaches

you slept in the hoof-prints in the snow

"Just a biting bug been following me from town to town"- Ma Rainey

Virginia bluesman Luke Jordan

It's when your soul starts melting inside and slides out of your eyes and ears and nose like spoonfuls of hot oil. It's when your heart starts beating a mournful epitaph in 12/8 time. It's when your saliva becomes a harsh gin, burning your throat and shooting out between your lips while you howl and wail the same bitter line over and over and your fingers pluck the guitar strings till the blood's pounding at their tips.
Or it's a playful beat crushed into wood floors with quick-tappin' feet. It's spit-shine salutes to the underground minstrels who puff on the top of moonshine jugs. It's an 80-year-old mama who uses the grey hairs on her head to count her chores and whistles to her rough-kneed kids.

True blues music has passed, but that doesn't mean the left-over proof of that period of strained heartstrings can't be enjoyed these days. Sometimes, when my mind's hurting and my head just feels so heavy it might drop onto the floor and roll away, or even when I feel like a rugged, southern farm girl who justs wants to put her feet up and close her eyes to the tune of pure enjoyment (which happens more than you'd think), I'll listen to those recordings and the only action you'll see me perform is the slow nod of my toasty head as the strums and grumbles send me soaring.

My blues pick of late-
"Cocaine Blues" by Luke Jordan

barbapapa

by jean-robert cuttaia

Kneecaps and harriet the spy.

There is a lovely thing that happens when a young girl reads Harriet the spy she become increasingly aware of the cuts and scrapes on her, awkward silences, beautiful urban objects and commodities, she becomes a walking sarcastic goddess whom has interest with curiosity for the world. J'elle aime.