reports from detroit

2012-02-06T11:45:00.000-08:00

Dear Dad,

The way you would hover in the attic and watch the neighborhood. Me coming home, or changing my mind about coming home, or talking on the stoop outside our yard. Some of them didn't want to go home. The way we lingered on that curb. Throned the fire hydrant, half swung our weight on the branches of the tree you planted, which was too young then to swing from. The passing fire trucks. The low riders. The old men with carts of wood and the younger men with boxes of copper. The mail carriers that rushed through on a quick foot. The people who thought of knocking, then thought better of it. The women with grocery bags, some of them with a limp. The young ones with their magic markers and cheap cans of spray paint. The little kids on tricycles with six house boundaries, moving past their marks. The birds and the fat, brown squirrels. The possums lingering with hung tails on the leaning fence. The hang of your music through the screen. How you blew filterless smoke through the open breeze.

Your windows have rubbed off on me.

Always.

SuperStein

2011-10-05T05:47:00.000-07:00

You know that old joke that goes: You know who you look like?
Gertrude Stein.

That's the only thing I've ever heard about her. That and feminist.

And that's it. The buck stops at feminist.

Feminist: (noun/adjective) anyone without a penis who does whatever the fuck she wants to do.

I'm not saying I have enjoyed her readings, exactly. Though I'm more intrigued, now.

Mostly, I'm marveling at the lack of conversations that make it to the tables I've occupied. In the way of superheroes - whose story does and doesn't get told over brew and poem talks. The history that doesn't make it to my ear. This, of course, is my fault. I never looked her up. I've relied on too much word of mouth. Her visitations with the GI's reminds me of Johnny Cash and his travels to prisons. And Cash was a cowboy, wasn't he. (Though I don't think he ever had a horse.) Stein's venerable guitar was just a host of words coiled around words. Nouns, mostly. As she might put it. Nouns broken down into repetitions of more nouns to poem the nouns. That, and apparently, she threw a great cocktail party.

There's nothing terribly sexy about nouns. Or repetition. We like to imagine the poetic zorro (with penis) as a wielder of complex newness-es that do nothing over again. With a vocabulary that nears science, and their complicated grammatic structures, they twirl rhythms and mind-splitting anacronisms with ease. Who ride off into the proverbial sunset and leave behind them a trail of shadowy phrasings (no one can quite remember how they put it, so deft) panting vixens, pretty homebodies and (we know, though not part of this iconic sketch) snotty-nosed timesucks, whom at least have history to look forward to.

I am the daughter of an Artist. He went off to the world to vex the masses with his witty tongue. I was quite young. I am over the hurt. And have his legacy, which lives on in my blood.

Meanwhile, Stein had her tongue stuffed into Alice B. Toklas. For life. Collected artworks and amassed even more money that kept her family in happy food, and famous artistic circles, and kept her pen to paper. Not terribly sexy I guess.

Prince has a song called "Joy of Repetition", which as much as I like it, does contribute to the reason why I liken him to the Spike Lee's of the world - their image of chicks as a one-way looking glass. Saying:

Love me. Love me. Love me. (She said) Love me.

Skunk

2011-09-23T09:09:00.001-07:00

There is a dog down the block who is off its leash. I've been trying to train my cat to come outside, now that I have a front yard, but to stay around the house.

Critters want to chase things though. And a wayward squirrel will send him reeling into the street. It scares me. There is so much roadkill here in this green town full of trees and pretty spiders. I don't know what's become of me. But I rarely kill critters anymore. I put out the spiders. I've even taken to jarring the smaller centipedes and putting them outside in the grass.

The other night, I saw something dark in the road and veered. Then it moved and I stopped. Let it pass. Tiny skunk. Making its way across the, then, empty Jackson Road. Busy street by day. Its bristly head down, it skulked off to the other side of the street. I wonder how many people stop for critters. I know sometimes you can't stop. But I wonder who does or doesn't stop, even when they can. Sometimes, I've stopped, instinctively, and almost been hit from behind.

Critters don't understand the curb. The road. The cool of the hardened tar must feel good on their bellies, because they lounge there.

And those bellies, undone, is what you see, everyday, leftover in the road. Turned inside out. Mangled. Juice red. Pummeled to inedible meat. Dogs litter the highways and I wonder if someone loved them.

People complain about the smell of skunk here. It often smells like skunk. I kind of like it. A sign of defense. Of awareness. The smell is a lot like weed, actually. And I actually hate the smell of weed. But the dense reek of skunk takes up the sky. Is larger than their timid bodies.

Lingers long after they've hidden themselves away, where nothing can get to them.

boat ride

2011-08-09T02:50:00.000-07:00

and then you are gone.

it's coming up on that point when you and i would have talked by now, unless you were out of the country, or in between places, or recording. or just didn't talk. or just didn't run into each other. or just didn't. but then it's coming up on that time, where one of us would have called to say, why haven't i seen you in like forever.


David Blair, photo by David Lewinski

people don't really know what to do for you when you're grieving. there's not much that can be done, really. but sometimes it's just nice to have someone sit with you. i remember the summer after my father died, which was not long after my mother died, and i broke up with my boyfriend of a few years (who was also a close friend of yours. i never told you how much i appreciated you being objective about things.). and things were heavy with me. probably the heaviest they've ever been.

and one sunday you dragged me out of the house to go on a riverboat ride with a progressive church group headed by a queer pastor that you were playing music for. and i remember you played a tom waits' gospel song for the church group. and i'm pretty sure you also played "when the saints go marching in", and i hope i'm not just thinking that because they played it at your memorial, and the whole boat rocked with you and everybody sang and it was so loving. and then we ate spaghetti out of aluminum serving tubs. and we took the salad and chicken wings, and it tasted warm in the heart, the way church food made by church ladies always tastes. and i remember after the crowd dispersed and people went back to sit with their families, and i stared out over the detroit river and you stared out with me for awhile. and then we just looked at each other for a long time. and i finally said "my mother always wanted me to go on one of these boatrides with her, but i wouldn't go with her because i thought they were cheesy. i'm really regretting that right now." and you didn't say anything for awhile. we just kept looking at each other and out at the water. and then finally, you laughed real hard. and you said "they are kind of cheesy."

and we laughed for a long time and then just kept watching the river go by.

thank you for that day, my friend. thank you for so many days like it.

i miss you so much.

graduation

2011-07-18T16:17:00.000-07:00

without them, my voice feels soggy. i want to bring them home from their vacations - water skiing, cayman islands, mountaineering, down south relatives, cruise ships, beachsides, peopleless cabins, walking the dogs, grooming the parrokeets, driving just driving, french teashops, patisserie romping. i want them back in the classrooms ...

...demanding more of more of more of me.

graduation has not been easy.

I miss being told to fuck off in bible lingo...

2011-04-04T06:48:00.000-07:00

You know what I miss about Detroit today?

People telling me to "Have a Blessed Day" when what they really mean to say is "You're a worthless piece of shit who even Jesus has to work at loving and who is really not worth anybody's time, particularly my own...so fuckyou."

Y'all know what I'm talking about.

How it's pronounced "Have a Blesst Day!" How Blesst and Day are both given the same amount of emphasis. So if you were to scan it...you would get:

/ - / /
Have a Blesst Day!

A trochaic opening with a great spondee finish! What better way to tell someone off with Christian altruistic flare. The perfect resolution to any argument. To any altercation that might otherwise inspire hostilities, or rile a good old-fashioned, secular beatdown. Such conflicts are surrendered to the lyric of the emergency-glass blessing.

"Oh, you gonna' interrupt me while I'm still talking? You have a Blesst Day!" which ends conversation. Have a Blesst Day always ends conversations that might otherwise get out of divinely inspired control.

"I don't think you know who you're talking to. Have a Blesst Day!" ...

...and scene.

Ah, home sweet home.

now showing: david wojnarowicz's "fire in the belly"

2011-03-28T22:46:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you're already gone.

2011-03-19T12:18:00.000-07:00

I wonder if there's a word for feeling like the world has shrunken down into something the size of a peephole. Suddenly takes on the sound of a chattering television - only the way that chattering sounds in film. Or the way radio sounds on television. A medium of a medium.

It's kind of like looking through the wrong end of the binoculars. But from above. Everything feels small and moves just a clip faster than normal. It's all unimportant. All the decision we make - Jesus, we make so many decisions on a daily basis, and we think they're so fucking crucial. So critical to something that will change the course of history, ecology, theology.

Through the peephole, you can't even see these decisions. Not only can't you see them, but you can't even see the people or places or animal that all these crucial decisions impact. It's a mission from above. Everything is a blur of color, crowding around itself like microscopic germ clusters on a smear.

Am I dissociating? Sometimes I wish it would last longer. It lasts an hour, two. I guess if it did last any longer it might be formula for sociopathy. I wonder if this is what the world looks like to someone with no feeling. That would suck, too. But it is nice to be able to detach though, to pull back, to feel so less tortured about every little thing in your head.

Then you come back to big life in regular slow-motion. And even your dreams take on the big-life form of being carjacked and trying to negotiate with the guy in the driver's seat. Trying to come up with a good reason why he shouldn't take the most basic machine you depend on. And then you're on his little side of the binoculars. Futile. Small. Laughable.

put my poem in water

2010-12-27T13:56:00.000-08:00

"what are you?"

2010-11-06T18:07:00.000-07:00

i can't win with the ethnicity stuff. answer your question, it's a personal betrayal. don't answer your question, i risk you rolling your eyes and saying "good lord woman, what's the big deal?"

but that's exactly what i think when people ask me this. i think ... what's the big deal? and it makes me feel very strange.

so here it is. for the record:

ahem...

i'm the lost child of a glacier chaser. my poor papa lost me in a sledding and i was raised by wolves. i tried to teach them my icelandic tongue, but they had roots in detroit. they just weren't down for it. so they swallowed my native language one night under a full moon and now i can't remember...where i'm from. next thing i knew...

i was buying superman icecream at the corner liquor store, the chilly blue of which reminded me of a home i knew long ago and far away.

Noise of Emergency (hałas wyjątkowego)

2010-10-26T21:10:00.001-07:00

Flier posted on Emergency Room Wall, Krakow"

"POLICE MEMO:

This boy's corpse [or body?] was found in a pond on March 19, 2010 in Cieszyn.
If you know this child, tell the police."

mp3: hałas wyjątkowego

the rain, its cheek.

2010-10-13T18:05:00.000-07:00

chasing off the run of summer, has its way. has wound down and the cool kicks where the soft edge of buildings, most vulnerable. chins. kneecaps. summer's groin. the wind is steel-toed, soft spoken. the leaves cover bodies like handprints. as if to say, was here. is here. is all over you.

autumn, a touchy tom. peeps in doorways and fingerprints windows. full monocular, wide eyes. one gutter drenched lake of fallen leaves. one wave of black umbrellas. the sky swallows night atoms, and shivers to a hush gray. a static of blacks and blue veins on the backs of red shrub.

the rains push her cheek to the back of your hand. hustle you off to a doorway. takes your eyelid. opens your wet hands.

detroiters listen with their throats.

2010-10-10T00:29:00.000-07:00

when you are at a reading and a poet does something lovely, it is not only the landscape of the brain where the epiphany lands. a turn in a poem, be it volta, or voltage, gets you right there at the bottom of your throat, just before where your heart vibrates, and in detroit, when it hits... we go:

"mmmm." or we go "mmnh." sometimes we go "fuccck...yesss...." or quiet, real quiet, we say "gotddiymn."

it's almost as if when the poem does hit, something in the diaphragm, in the vocal chords, in any part of the vibrational body must come out to greet the poet's voice halfway. must run out to the gate. must throw open its vocal arms. we have to. just have to. keeping it in? well, it would be like talking to the poet through a peephole. for the whole visit.

here, we let them in. and maybe, we, just a little bit, eat our poets. voice to voice. rocking sometimes, in our chairs, as their iambs and dactyls ebb and riff and take off and implode.

suffice to say, at readings, here, we talk back.

in all fairness, i've been to other cities where this happens. i'm inclined to think it might be a kind of familiarity with the world of open mikes, spoken word and slam. the interactivity. the engage. reader is not just reader. poet tells you her allusions. poet tells you some backstory. poet wants you to understand. it is not a trick, it is not a code. we are talking to each other.

sometimes, when i read other places, i have to get used to the dead quiet. when i visit other venues outside of detroit, i have to gurgle back to my poet at the stage...so soundlessly. undetectable. the poet, sadly, never knows he has been consumed.

and i've been to poetry sessions here in bars, coffee shops, libraries, schools. and make no mistake. detroit's audience is one of the most attentive i know. there is a stillness, a need, a hunger. oh, we listen.

sometimes we just makes noises when we eat.

Politics and the Compassion of Art

2010-10-08T08:24:00.000-07:00

In my College Writing class, I am trying to teach my students the notion of counterargument. As I have always been suspicious of this notion, I have not simply offered them a black and white definition for the term. Truth be told, I'm not very good at black and white definitions. I am suspicious of most of them.

So, I sort of talk around it in class. I talk to them about the notion of "complicating" an argument. Of offering alternative points of view. Balanced perspective, I say. Symmetry. or – Understanding that there are other perspectives your reader will expect you to, at least, acknowledge, if not engage. I talk, too, about the idea of reconsidering your thesis once all the facts are in.

I'm not sure if it's hitting home. I could just tell them what I was told: "Counterargument: Include a reason why someone might disagree with your opinion - and refute that."

Refute that.

Reel it in and dismiss it. Mention it, cast it aside. Those are the strong arguments.

But I don't believe that. I believe the strongest arguments come from a sense of engagement with other perspectives. If it means that the argument, ultimately, only seems weighted towards a conclusion, then that’s fine. In my mind, those are the most engaging arguments, anyway.

So, it seemed like divine confirmation, that after Kazim Ali’s incredible reading at the University of Michigan tonight, during the dinner conversation with the MFA students, he broached the area of political involvement. More importantly than fellowships, he reminded us, we have to find a place in the world to contribute in these troubled times. We must be engaged, he said. Involved.

Kazim Ali is the author of several books of poetry and essay, including recent works Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities on Wesleyan and a book of essays: Orange Alert on University of Michigan Press. Knowing that Ali's work, particularly his essays, take on the difficult subject matter of language and (mis)translation, of otherness, of queer desire and the navigation of both multi-religious acceptance and spiritual embrace, I have always been curious about the pure lyric of his poems. The unabashed beauty in them. The resistance, it seems to me, to a kind of preaching that I think a lot of well-intentioned poetry falls into.

"Do you," I asked him "separate your political self from your poetic self?"

"No," he said "though I don't think I write political poetry."

"No. Which is why I'm asking. How do you keep from leaning toward moral imperative in your work?"

I told him that when I was more engaged in political activities, I felt like my writing suffered. Horribly.

"Maybe I think of the poetry as a way of complicating my own arguments."

And here, I knew exactly what he meant. Surprised, excited, mystified that he used this phrase. The very phrase I had used, almost as subterfuge only hours prior, in class.

"Poetry," he said "as much as activism, demands compassion. And I am above everything a humanist. It is compassion that drives me, not judgment. So while, for example, I am certainly pro-choice and will probably always be, I can understand, when I look at those photos at the pro-life rallies, of discarded babies, or when I talk to friends who have been traumatized by their decisions to have abortions, even medically traumatized, I can see the other side of this story. And I can write that into my work. Because the work is mostly about compassion. And the lyric, the mystery, then is part of that process."

Years ago, I left my activist circle, largely because I felt like we spent too much time judging others and less time being compassionate about people's situations. Less 'helping' and more 'raging'. I am still listening to some of my more compassionate friends from that time and have a lot of respect for them. But I guess I figured the rage sounded better in my poems. Not in the imperative, but in the language itself.

And here, I feel I've been given some license. A kind of permission (which as a cultural-Catholic, I suppose I always hunger for), to feed beauty back into my lines in a hunt for a kind of lyric justice. What comes now, I can’t say, and won't testify. I'm a creature of slow change. But I'm grateful to Kazim for these words. I thought others might be, too.

No Watching on Chris Armstrong Watch?

2010-10-02T04:13:00.000-07:00

In the last few days, Andrew Shirvell has decided to 'privatize' his watchdog website on object of political ranting desire, Chris Armstrong. Strange choice, considering that his argument has been that he was simply staging a campaign of public protest against Armstrong's "radical homosexual agenda".

Now, his blog is open only to invited readers. Which seems even more insidious. Only his select group gets to hear his slander?

I was curious about Shirvell's extremist labels of Armstrong. When he wasn't calling him a Natzi and a radical homosexual, he was calling him a racist. And I wondered what that was about. His methods of challenging Armstrong's position of Student Assembly President of the University of Michigan are whack and warrant his dismissal as Assistant Attorney General, but it seems strange that he has chosen, now, to censor himself, when he has finally raised massive attention to the issues he wanted to raise around Armstrong's ethics as President.

So maybe now, we'll just never know. Surely he wasn't suggesting that Armstrong is a racist because he wanted co-ed dorms. It seems like there might have been a more productive way to stage a critique than tossing around empty epithets that just leave the taxpaying Michigan public and the University of Michigan community mildly horrified...and by the way, confused.

Anyway, it looks like Cox's office, or perhaps a separate ethics committee has heard our disgust.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/us/politics/02michigan.html

Shirvell has taken leave. And is facing a disciplinary hearing.

As he should.

An Open Letter to Attorney General Mike Cox

2010-10-01T01:16:00.000-07:00

Dear Attorney General Mike Cox:

I am writing with great concern about the level of unprofessionalism from your office by your tolerance of Assistant Attorney General, Andrew Shirvell's recent actions. Your inability to censor his aggressive and hateful campaign toward college student, Chris Armstrong at the University of Michigan, is not only disappointing, but suggests that your office supports his agenda, whether it does or not.

As a Michigan taxpayer, I am very concerned that you consider this an issue of free speech. First, I would hope and expect that the Attorney General of a diverse Michigan, would understand the difference between free speech and hate speech. And secondly, I would expect that your office would uphold the legal premise of public servants conducting themselves in a professional and unbiased manner, which does not exception “private time” to the responsibilities of those servants to the taxpayers. We expect that public servants in your charge demonstrate service to the public, not promote hatred and hostility toward any of its citizens, particularly because of their sexual orientation.

I do not want my tax dollars going toward paying the salary of a bigot who even in your words is "immature" and is obviously ill equipped to handle the position of power with which he has been entrusted.

Thank you for your time.

francine j. harris
University of Michigan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwObjKZg9Jw&feature=player_embedded

the dead leave wishes, first

2010-09-27T11:11:00.000-07:00

perhaps the dust of the dead settles in the rememberance of the reality of relationship. when the dreams shake off their mythic foothold on those gilded edges of your loved ones faces and the real relationships rise up above the angelic steam.

having mourned my mother's death for four years, there has been a private unconsolable ache in the pit of my throat, and chest. and the dreams have been fantasia, wild monuments to river citiy boatways and skyriding crusades against archenemies.

and then last night, i dreamed ... clearer. a ridiculous argument. where i was trying to mix a perfect scent. trying to show off to friends that i could do it. i had a base scent, and a rare supply of it. add the right dose of coffee and amber - and i could unleash perfection. and my mother (pragmatist soul that she is) took the ration of base scent and made me - a cup of coffee.

my friends tucked their laughter into their shirt collars and i threw the ruined mix into an outdoor shrub. as violently frustrated as i always was with that woman, my that woman, - whose common sense often clashed with my hunger for decoration.

private note to post, i suppose. but what is it, i've been asking all morning, that has lightened the thumping void below my collarbone. what else, if not the simple hint of real memory. in honor of the truth.

flying in the face of awake-ness

2010-07-07T21:54:00.000-07:00

Nine hours to Krakow. At least, the longest leg of the layovers. Nine hours isn't that big of a deal, I guess. When one considers it's just a really good night's sleep. Eight hours plus an extra dream or two. The good dreams don't kick in until about 6 hours, anyway.

Actually, I think REM theory is suspect. I fall asleep dreaming, and wake up dreaming differently. So what about all that time in between? Some little librarian OCD'er in me wishes I could catalogue all those forgotten dreams. I wonder if the ones in the middle are as intense as I think they are. Does the dramatic formula follow us to sleep? Is there some hour in there, just past the midway point, where the suspense of all the backstory culminates into one huge, tearjerking, mindblowing plot twist.

Arguably so. When a storm hits and the thunder rocks my windowpanes, or the cat knocks over a glass in the kitchen...oh, those are the dreams I wake from – engorged. The dreams with the thickfaced protagonists, or murky, smoke-colored villains...those are the ones that resonate. The ones that steep fragrant in the foreground until I can calm myself. Drift back off. Go back in. Nightmares don't really bother me much. I enjoy their intensity. They make my heart race. Clutch the pillows. I love dreaming, period.

But flying is a different story. All that wakefulness - for all those hours. All that staring out the window at little square sections of predetermined land and sea. Counting the rows, and accounting for manmade patterns. Interrogating the cloud shapes of their gassy masses. Fuel steaming off the wings...

No sleep. No sleep for so many hours.

Always wish the long-term flier her dreams. Wish her dreams that saturate and yank and glorify and outlandishly frighten. Anything but the sore-eyed fit of lidless, reptilian limbo. The torture of waiting. And wanting to grab the stranger's hand next to you.

Sometimes doing so. That’s always awkward.

Where are the patriots, now?

2010-07-04T07:36:00.000-07:00

It's not that I'm all pro-fervor or anything. But i do think it's interesting that there's been no outcry against the Brits considering it's their multi-billion dollar company and its CEO who are, as we speak, ruining an entire region of the country. Where's the patriotic outrage at what foreign profiteering is doing to American soil? No conspiracy theory. No profiling. No clampdown at airports, no no-fly lists for the English, or double checking British VISA's. Can you imagine the commentary if Tony Hayward reigned from the Middle East? I guess it wouldn't make too much difference, as long as he had that accent.

Ah, fuck. I don't really care about that. I really just wish they'd arrest the motherfucker. If only for the level of his insensitive and snide comments, like "No one wants this thing over more than I do...I'd like my life back" or insinuating that part of the problem was that his company had "too many people working to save the world". Yeah. 'Cause that's what happened.

(silhouette) what can't be shared.

2010-03-26T22:44:00.000-07:00

you can imagine that around the things you find beautiful, you can build a frame. and dance them off to the world. and everyone will lift their glasses and touch our common sky with their eyelashes. you can imagine that the perimeter of shadows you know will edge into the skin of others. that their pores, like your pores, want not only to be filled with a corona of light, but that you can argue its radiance, and relay the logic of its beauty.

but it's not true.

beauty is loneliness, too. the damp dusk of a lover's fingertip is smattered with a privatized soil. small moments bring some to revel in the deep fragrance of sweet mud. others only see the wet dirt. the mess. the inconvenience, the primitive grit. beauty is the taste bud lingering in the section of your mouth that loves the bitter, the sour, the sweet, yes, but also the simple bass note of matter. personal particles which you sip and swirl around your own tongue, may only ever be yours.

my mud of life, god your pungent kick. marry me, and lay down here in this dirt. roll me blackened and stuck together with brick vine and sea-bottom colored bark. like you. you, the earth.

Confessions of an MFA Addict

2010-03-14T23:23:00.000-07:00

it's silly. don't watch it, you've got better things to do.

(socket) Been thinking about Ellison this week. Check out this installation photo...

2010-03-05T22:03:00.000-08:00

After Invisible Man (1999-2001)
and other photographs by Jeff Wall

andy warhol should have stuck with film ...

2010-03-05T00:33:00.000-08:00

...although i guess all his actors needed to be high, but i still dig this....until she starts talking on the phone, you can skip that part.

(neon purple) the avoided alley and other tags.

2010-03-03T00:55:00.000-08:00

there's a graffiti alley/permission space in ann arbor that i've sort of avoided since i moved here. it's hard to explain why. didn't want to do the tourist thing i guess as long as i felt like a tourist. plus, i guess i just didn't think i'd like it, to be honest. or maybe i thought i'd be mad at it. i get mad at weird things here. sometimes i get mad at the tree lights along liberty. but you know...different story.

it's not clarion alley, but it's pretty cool for what it is. i think the part that makes me the most happy is that you can cut through it to the other side. i like shortcuts. and i like colorful stuff, so there ya go.

i was happy to see a good amount of color in the alley, and some care paid to the artwork instead of a bunch of crappy tags. i'll probably go back and get some more shots, just to flesh out this frame.

oh, and i'm throwing in some other ann arbor graffiti, not from the alley, just because i have it in my camera and kinda' dig it. i do like photographing graffiti 'cause it's a wordy way of documenting walks you go on, and who says "hi" to you as you pass.

i think this one is my favorite (my friend turned it into installation which is better)

i feel like it's hard to get good color with this digital camera. but maybe i should read my manual (i keep saying that)

although apparently i'm good at orange....

*** end of alley***

this is from a train bridge overpass.

under the bridge. i feel like i'm just practising my color palette. some part of me hopes a bunch of little montessori kids did this....

this is easy. from along the railroad tracks.

nearby park...i forget the name of it, but i could show you....

along a different part of the railroad

and finally ... just cutesy:

(black yarn) my mother taught me how to darn my socks...

2010-02-28T00:28:00.000-08:00

you start with a light bulb. stick it in the sock under the hole, so that when you mend it, you retain the shape of the sock.

you can either use a piece of fabric like on the purple socks, or you can just stitch across the hole like on the black and white one (hard to see? good, that's a good stitch).

use thin yarn about 1/4 inch thick that looks too thin to knit with.

and then stitch.
for awhile. watch a movie or something...

so why am i telling you this?

because there are certain things you can do, certain ways you can sit and busy yourself in the same way you learned from them, that will keep people with you.

figure out something someone you love knows how to do. some little thing that keeps their hands busy. learn it from them and do it with them.

it's best if the end product looks kinda' nuts, like how my mom's socks used to look. something almost like these...

goodnight, mrs. clifton

2010-02-14T20:12:00.000-08:00

wishing a universe of stars to light her way.

here rests by lucille clifton

photo: from pbs.org

(beef shank) Monday, February 8, 2010

2010-02-08T12:29:00.000-08:00

Deadlines are my friend. I would say it doesn't matter rather or not I make them, but the truth is - I grew up Catholic. I make the deadlines. There are some things you can't shake. I wonder about all the self-sufficient entrepreneur types I know. I wonder how many of them are Catholic. I should take a poll.

What better impetus, after all, than having the image of my professors and administrators and all otherwise ominiscient figureheads to whom I answer - dressed in vestment at the altar - swinging various genres of crosses above my bowed head to get me to confess...i mean turn in my papers.

Deadline is tomorrow for the Hopwoods. In case anyone forgot. Not that anyone can forget the day we bed damned. For those who don't go here, this is the annual manuscript contest in our program.

I make things when I'm nervous. So I'm making beef soup. I hacked up a beef shank this morning, ripping through various arteries and tubes that used to connect various gurgling and concentrically girating parts. It was disturbing, to say the least. Nothing worse than forcing a butcher knife through parts of an organism that it really doesn't want to go through.

I suppose it will prepare me for this last leg of the editing process.

And maybe season my shot nerves.

(blue stone) Wednesday, January 20, 2010 - computer gliches

2010-01-20T12:44:00.000-08:00

lately, i've been thinking the worst impetus to our intellectual aspirations are computers. more specifically, multi-functional, hardwired-internet ready, portable, pullable, pushable, wearable, kissable, doable, robotniks with pretty skins, smooth hairs, soft backed, pull-to-me-closer-digitally boned dummies.

Or maybe, to be fair, and even more specific, I've been thinking that computers are my impetus. That the level of distraction I experience on a daily basis is compounded by the flashing, beeping and blinging and blinking piece of machinery by my picture window, which pulses with its blue, blue strobe and which the cat nuzzles up to when i am unavailable. so i'm been thinking lately, that I'm sort of .... doing myself in with it.

And then...it died. The whole thing, just whistled down into its own muck pile and died. Blue pulse still beating, so I know it's not brain dead, but wouldn't speak, wouldn't touch me back....so to speak...just sort of squoze my proverbial finger when i asked if it was still alive..

So off it goes, with its corrupted motherboard (was the preliminary diagnosis), back to the dummy factory, to be rewired and recircuited with all its faceplates and gamezone chips and nifty speakers and dangling USB limbable sockets.

Which will take several weeks, they say, even under warranty. But for which, I must say, I think I"m grateful, to be released from my ball and chain...my binary half.

Besides, working in computing commons centers has a certain charm. But that's tomorrow's entry.

(eggs overeasy) The Teeny Bopper Job

2010-01-11T05:55:00.000-08:00

Part of the beauty of getting older is that you're old. You just don't have the patience for things you used to have patience for. If you see a circle you don't fit in, you don't really spend a whole lot of time trying to shove your square parts into it. You know the drill. You know there are likely one of two outcomes:

A) You get all your square parts into the pi hole, only to realize you've shaved off something you really kinda' liked about yourself. or needed to reproduce children.

or...

B) You never fit in in the cakehole anyway, and everyone jeers you for being 'fat'.

Neither of these sound very good, so you just quit. The job. The relationship. The neighborhood. Who has the energy?

The teeny bopper job might be ok for awhile. Until one day you come in and everyone is gossiping about everyone else. And nothing is sacred. Not other people's 'employee profiles', not their love lives. Nothing. And then....

...you're right back in high school. That big black laughing hole. That even your teeny-tiny little square body could never fit into. And spent alot of days banging its head against the huge, black, inky walls trying to get in. And so...

... you quit. Something you couldn't really do in high school. Or in the neighborhood you grew up in. Or in your own mirror, sometimes as a kid, how much you wanted to. And so I know...

the 'healthy, progressive' answer here may involve the suggestion to work through such moments and find a way to bring the team forward and all, given your maturity and your ability to lead....but then, that's the best thing about teeny bopper jobs...

you can just quit. no pension gone. no organized projects to frail at the edges. no annual events that won't come off under your direction. no slack that people wouldn't be happy to work a double to pick up cause everyone wants more hours anyway.

you can just quit. and without the guilt, quitting feels so fucking good.

(bonzai) doing a little reading through my beloved powell's

2010-01-07T21:03:00.000-08:00

DO: shop powell's.

i love powell's in portland. i do. they have the best bookstore i've ever been in. multiple floors of catalogued books - including their used books. friendly staff who, from what i remember, actually know about books. and whom, by the way, created a union within powell's without any murders or buyouts or weird mergers. (hey stodgy has its shades). plus the fact that it's in one of the prettiest cities in the country, i think, well all this keeps me supporting powell's way out in portland, and tout it as the strongest independent and fair alternative to the onlinebookmonster i know of.

and though you can apparently buy the oxford unabridged online for about a buck i guess from the bookhulk, i bite as much bullet as i can bite and shop powell's whenever i get a chance.

they usually have a pretty great selection, and since they're a real bookstore, they give a fuck enough about literature and non-fiction to highlight great authors, make sound staff recommendations and have real people at a real address you can ask advice or questions to over the phone.

as for my experience with them - everything i've ever ordered from powell's has come in exactly the condition it boasted, sometimes better. they wrap carefully and efficiently, don't over or understuff their boxes, so their shipments are always functional and presentable, and as in few boxes as possible. (there's nothing worse than getting a mass market in a box big enough for a carton of paper).

my books has always come on time, never later than a day on a snail mail delivery date estimate.

so they get all 10 of my thumbs up.... :-) except...

DON'T: ever order a mini-book

...so i'm gonna' take this one for the powell's team and read the Miniature fucking Minibook of James Wright's The Branch Will Not Break in the size 2.5 font that Wesleyan thought would be ... cute? a nice impulse item? a fucking stocking stuffer? i don't know. but i ordered it, and the label "mini-book" must have been in mini-type someplace, cause i didn't see it. but i'll read it....

...and ruin my eyesight, powell's just for you. 'cause you and me, baby ... we're right here (i'm giving you my mini-eye to mini-eye). i got you. oh wait, i have to find the book ...oh yes, there it is... under my bobby sock.

DO: check 'em out.

to browse and shop so that part of the proceeds go to the powell's union, choose the browser through powell's union or if you're a lazy bastard or otherwise amoral scab you can just go to their regular site at powell's.

and remember - keep an eye out for minibooks. bad. bad news.

(rabbit) magic trick

2010-01-06T19:37:00.000-08:00

it's a belated happy new year. but that's ok. today was the first day of classes, and i have to admit it was not a bad idea, how much rest i got in between these chunks of time. when i opened the door to the gray and cold and snow, it was like a winter corsage folded into my book spine.

i remembered that it is a good idea to get out of the house, stop holing up, which i feel like is easy to do in this town. i shared my sesame chicken and read at the bookstore until it got late enough to strike back out on the trail back to the house.

still not done with this paper. but closer. i read eliot's essay on vers libre at border's. it felt like something a grumpy teenager would write in between sticking gum on the back of someone's neck and ripping out their baby hair with it in between cranky hyphens and periods.

but what i think i learned from it is that what we're writing - free verse - doesn't actually exist at all. according to eliot, since free verse, or vers libre - i'm still trying to understand the difference - is defined by a set of negative parameters (verse that's not rhymed, not metered, etc.) then it actually doesn't exist, since nothing with only characteristics of negation can actually exist. hmmm.

all this time, i've been writing - nothing. we all have.

how cool.

(trail of silence) Wednesday, December 30: In memory of Professor Don Belton

2009-12-30T14:46:00.000-08:00

There is some news that is so senseless that it does not register, takes awhile to process in the senses. I am one of those people who pays attention to this kind of news in the headlines. But when something happens to someone you care about, there is ultimately only one bit of news that matters. That someone you cared about is gone.

I only met Professor Don Belton a couple times in my life. Once at IU when I was weighing my decision on which school to attend. And then saw him again at AWP, where he was just as happy to see me as he was to meet me in Indiana. Don struck me as the kind of person you could be close to immediately. He barely knew me and opened his home to me, told me stories about his life and his hopes. He was a friend...already. Sometimes you meet people like that, and they last in your memory forever, even if you never see them again.

There are things I want to say, which are more about me, and less about Don, and so maybe I'll reserve those things for some later date. But for now, I just wanted to dedicate this space to someone who I remember having a rolling laugh from the belly like a hot spring. And who wore a funny hat and made an adventure of going to breakfast buffet at the organic grocery store in Bloomington. And who could talk about anything in between the laughter and get serious when it was important and then laugh some more. And who I remember on a trail in Bloomington, picking at pine cones, or acorns, or whatever those tiny little blossoms were hanging off the trees in the chilly winter morning where he made me feel so at home.

Some people will just be missed like family because of their warmth, as if you'd always known them. Rest in peace Don Belton, sweet soul. Thank you for your kindness.

http://advocate.com//News/Daily_News/2009/12/29/Gay_Indiana_Professor_Murdered/: This article has mostly facts, less focus on speculation.

Thursday: December 24, 2009 (red leaf)

2009-12-24T02:40:00.000-08:00

It's Christmas Eve and I am realizing that I've forgotten how to write a paper. I mean I know, theoretically, how to write a paper, I think... but I have forgotten how to start.

I remember a time in my life, when I forgot how to write a poem. As in, I knew what a poem ... was. I could still define it. I could probably still pick-out-one-in-a-toy-store kinda' thing...but I couldn't remember how to write ... one. I would try and it would come out sounding horribly phony, as if it were not my voice talking. Not who I was, or how I really thought. I forgot ... how to say anything.

I remember being in 8th grade in World History, and the teacher asked the class about an article in the paper on Russia. It was about the cold war, obviously. And a couple boys in the class piped up and responded to whatever question he'd asked, to let him know they know - that they'd been "keeping up". But I never quite knew how to "keep up", because I wasn't sure where to start. I have a bad habit (probably a Capricorn thing) of wanting the whole entire story before I ever feel informed about anything. It's not to say I don't express my opinions, I do. But when it comes to needing to say a thing, sometimes I feel like I need to undertand it from the beginning of time in order to say anything about it.

There is some small part of me that is still stuck in the 8th grade, thinking I don't know enough. Thinking I'll never know enough. So every time I start to write this paper, it climbs up on top of me and smacks me in my ear with its knuckle. And it keeps jingling at me - something like "Do you think you'll say anything that hasn't been said a thousand times before, and BETTER?" and then of course, I must reply:

No. No I don't. Not when it comes to papers.

Poems, maybe. Sometimes. I feel like I can. Try that.

But papers? Opinion based on facts. Facts elude me. They change at every hour. I am sometimes mistrustful of facts. Facts are slippery and surely sometimes based on cynical agendas. How do I know when they are or are not? How do I know what facts weren't concocted out of the need - to write papers. The need to confine some kind of knowledge to a logical structure, and order, and chronology, enough to fill a book? Surely, I am not saying there are no good papers, or books on theory, on fact. Don't misunderstand me. I am only talking about my frame of mind every time I sit down to write this paper - my own neurosis, when I attempt to draw from fact, from theory.

I mistrust what I trust. or...I mistrust what I mistrust. Or...

I mistrust that I can draw from what I trust and make it logical. And then if I trust what I trust, then I become mistrustful of my trust. And everything changes again.

So you see, I have written, by now, 15 pages, or so. Which is the length of my paper. Unfortunately, they are 15 different papers, which just keep starting all over again. Which character was it in Camus' The Plague..who kept rewriting the first paragraph of his novel over and over again?

*sigh* ... I mistrust what I know, incidentally, about the Cold War too.

Tuesday: December 22, 2009 (shiraz)

2009-12-22T02:18:00.000-08:00

(shiraz): As these are offerings from the experience of my academic life, I think I'd like to name the offering I am making at the academic altar of these writings - and since wine and cheese are poetry staples, I figure I'll start with that.

Let me start by saying that when I finally got to my first university at, oh the tender age of about 25, I remember being a bit overwhelmed, but enthralled. My first class in summer school was Western Civilization at Arizona State and I remember feeling like I was drowning every day, and the terribly tanned Greek instructor I had that summer was certainly a grueling, but fascinating, history professor, who seemed to take a strange snake charmer's delight in inundating – us generally, but me particularly, since I sat center row first aisle – with the allegories, legends, warriors, myths, victories, and tales of demise from several hundred years of European history leading into the ‘new world’ that I had little information on, having come from public school on the deep east side of Detroit, via community college, where most things were just sort of … summarized.

Since that time, I've obviously learned and read a lot. Probably not enough. And now, I am struck again with the terrible ghost color of that professor's grainy blue eyes and his sandy face lording his monarchs and trojan wars over me all over again, and sometimes, suddenly it's a very long, hot Arizona summer day. But, those eyes seemed then, not to curse me for all that I didn't know, nor to judge me for how terribly quiet I sat under his yammering (and he was one who knew he yammered, he taunted us with it), but who below everything seemed to somehow appreciate me...

...for listening. I was a good student. Less jaded. More enthralled. I felt free from all that had weighed so heavily on my education in Detroit, where learning failed me and I failed it right back. In college, I was bright-eyed and attentive. I graduated with honors.

Bit different now. Pride gets in the way alot of times. Hard now to feel like I'm still on the receiving end of being told how to think, by folks who are from places so different than where I'm from. I think about that a lot. Too much, I think.

I struggle with what I DO know now, and how sometimes I feel like what I know isn't in a book anywhere, not really. Not like that. Not a text. I feel like what I know is not worth arguing about anyway, because that's not what we came here to talk about, right? So there’s all that, and then those dusky Greek blue-gray eyes, with all that those eyes know – are still there. I feel like that same hungry, empty sponge - but ... with a chip on my shoulder. I wish I could remember his name.

Anyway, it’s hard. And I love it. and Hate it. And it Hurts. and Excites. and Calms. and Invigorates. and so, you see, I'm all cut up - from all this ...raw. Most days.

It's very different now. I figured I'd do this blog journal to talk about how.

Starting now.

academic offerings

2009-12-22T01:06:00.000-08:00

i have decided to attempt a rather risky journal session during the remaining two years of my graduate school experience. i expect that in this process, i will consistently risk playing the fool in my own drama, and that's ok. i have the need to keep this outlet alive and this seems the best way to go about it. i will try in my best endeavor to journal here as close to something daily as possible.

i also realize that some of what i write in this blog may involve close-to-the-quick scenarios, but i will make large efforts to be diplomatic and respectful, of my colleagues instructors and my program, as it is merely my intention - to offer a portrait - of what graduate school looks like for me, a girl from the east side of detroit, among other descriptions i or others might give me.

my first post will be something of a summation, and though i am currently at recess, i will start the blog as of this writing, and continue it in to the school year.

all this light in sunny ann arbor...

2009-10-23T01:27:00.000-07:00

...and i had to buy a plant bulb from meijer.

because there's not enough light in my apartment. half garden, bottom floor buried. subtle in its white shadow of eggshell walls. every time i look at the bulb, i think of iguanas.

one of those animals, i imagine, that people buy as a sign of surrender. or retreat. after all, what else, exactly, do you need, when you yonder forth, light starved and bone dry, to an oasis of sand on a pilgrimage to forsake humanity and its vile ways? you've got a milewide dune of all-by-yourself. a mirage of solipsist bliss to shield you from the rag-a-tag world you've left behind. though i do picture, said trekker in this particular allegory, as a man of about 42, a shave shy of a mullet, in a black muscle shirt, faded black sweatpants with uncomfortable areas of wear, faded gym shoes tilted away from their origins. some belly fat. some shallow breath. and - for some reason - ankle weights. also black.

maybe i should take the bulb back to meijer. it, apparently, is not even intended for what i thought it was. once i got the bulb home and double checked the bulb fine print - which i bought thinking it would replace some lost chlorophyll for my greenies - indicates that for $4.97, it is guaranteed to "make plants look greener and healthier".

which i guess i do need, after all, considering the fuckers are withering away.

89.1 fm all night can only do so much.
i can talk to them till i'm chlorophyll in the face.

they want some sun, man. some ann arbor rays.

i'm hoping for some strange freak of miracle diffraction to come bounce some shine off the array of apartment walls and window bays blocking my plant's lovely view, and nose dive into my apartment - to splash in and cover my violets' furry little limbs.

maybe i should get some mirrors. or some solar panels. and don't say 'fuck the plants'. i can't. they were my mother's.

any advice you have would be great.

new town - new name?

2009-09-20T21:51:00.000-07:00

well. i'm not entirely sure if i ought to change the title of my blog now. somehow reports from ann arbor just doesn't feel right.

at the same time, i'd feel like a bit of hypocrite to leave it. so i'm in a quandry. what do you all think?

now that i'm going to school in ann arbor, am i die hard detroit enough to keep that title. i mean if you want to count birthplace, then i guess i've always been a hypocrite, considering i was born in a little town for psychiatric care that no longer exists.

but for sure, detroit is still all in me. everytime i turn a corner and see yet another coffee shop, book shop, shoe shop, i'm painfully reminded what people don't come to detroit for. the hockey game, or some band at the state being among the top reasons i hear people talking about going into my hometown.

i knew coming in that i didn't want to talk about detroit with people here. i don't want to hear anyone's take on my town. not now. not yet. if i hear that rhetorical "wow, i bet you're glad to be here!" from anyone else here, i might get all weird.

but what else to expect? there's no american apparel on woodward, the border's is always threatening to close (if it's not gone already). i wonder when we started judging a place by what we can buy in it.

because in some ways, that's the best ann arbor seems to offer just right now. lots of stuff to buy. this is what they call a livable town. i'm not saying i'm not enjoying it here. i love school, i've met some really good people, and there's lots of shady trees and crickets.

but i'm stuck in that post-relationship mode of comparing one with the other. and even though i broke up with detroit, my new lover is suffering my nostalgic wrath for a certain intensity.

Some initial thoughts after hearing R. Dwayne Betts read from A Question of Freedom

2009-08-21T03:58:00.001-07:00

Reginald Dwayne Betts came to Dearborn yesterday to read at Border’s. He was reading from his memoir: A Question of Freedom, recently published by Avery.

If nothing else about Dwayne’s work, I’ve learned that I generally come away from hearing him with a new direction in my thinking. There is always some assumption I realize I had, some foggy generalization that Dwayne calls into question. He always gives me stuff to think about.

Here are a couple thoughts I wanted to share, and welcome feedback.

One (Elements of Humanity)

I found the way he discussed survival in prison pretty powerful. And one of the things struck me pretty hard. To paraphrase, he said: People think there is only the viciousness in prison, but if there were no humanity in prison, I could not have gone in at 16 and come out at 25.

In that moment, I realized my own assumptions about what prison must be. I think I have always assumed that people must get used to that viciousness he talked about, and that was the only way to navigate it.

I have wondered though, where the nature of the viciousness lay. Considering nobody goes to prison just to fuck with people, I’ve often wondered if everyone is so deathly afraid of prison, there must be a lot of folks in the population who really don't want to fuck with anybody. Just want to do their time and get out. There must be more to the aggression than just bullying.

And that made me think about a lot of other things, particularly how I have had to try to explain growing up in Detroit. It’s an awful conversation to have with people, really. Because at some point I find myself frustrated by all their misgivings and misunderstanding. On one hand, I want to be clear that growing up on the east side of Detroit was no fucking picnic. On the other hand, I want to be clear that it wasn’t a nightmare 24/7 – even though it was – kinda’…at times…but it wasn’t. I think – I just don’t want people to make assumptions about how I grew up, what I went through. But then at other times, I get upset when people ask me dumb questions like: You didn’t read Alighieri in high school?? Ultimately, I think I just wish people understood. And they don’t. It’s too much to ask. It really is a whole other world.

But in listening to Dwayne talk about his experience in prison (and yes, I guess I’m comfortable making the comparison just right now), I found something of what I want people to get about living in the hood: it’s still human territory. There is humanity there. And all the complexities that go along with that.

Two (Trying Children as Adults)

I’ve been thinking a lot about childhood sentencing lately. How our nation qualifies crime and what reasons we give for how we punish those crimes.

Rehabilitation is hardly ever a question of budget or economy or tax dollars, or any of that stuff. People in this country (maybe others) view education as a privilege. Some may not be willing to admit that. But people who oppose rehabilitation don't think 'criminals' deserve to grow. Isolated incidents do define people in our society's eyes. And a felon is not worthy of certain status, or progress, in this country. "You don't get to take someone's life and get a college education for it" is what that sort of talk sounds like. Even though everyone knows prisons are not filled with murderers and rapists, largely. They are disproportionately filled with poor folks with insufficient education, mental illness and drug addictions.

So, the idea of tossing kids into this pot, frankly, sickens me. Children being tried as adults seems horrifying to me philosophically.

And here’s the thing. I’m not a lawyer, so maybe someone can explain to me how it’s even constitutional, considering the following:

A- I don't understand how you can put someone on trial and charge them as something they are not. For example, no one would ever try an adult as a juvenile. And you may try an adult as someone with a mental illness, but then there is a necessity during the trial to prove to the court that the insanity actually exists. You would never charge someone with “acting like a sociopath”. You would not try a person as an alien, or as a German (and I’m not referring to immigration status here, I’m referring to identity and legal status), even if they built a new Gestapo in their own neighborhood. You could only base your trial on their actual identity, which would be based on their physical state of being. Kids are not adults, by any other legal definition. What’s with the situational convenience?

Dwayne said the judge who sentenced him said, during the sentencing: "I am aware that I am not sending you anywhere that will help you." which says a lot, and doesn't really speak to the facility, as much as it speaks to how we view punitive justice.

B- I’m not really clear on how you can charge someone who does not have the agency to defend themselves. Consider the comments of the father of a 14-year-old Liberian refugee in Arizona, who is being tried as an adult for participating in the gang rape of an 8-year-old-girl (also a refugee):

“[My son] does not even understand the people he’s talking to…he does not speak English very well…he did not go to school. He started going to school when he came to the United States. And so we deduce that he cannot really understand what is going on right now. And so everything that has been said to him, he has no choice but yes, to accept it. Even though he did not understand.”

Kyra Phillips, of CNN, said as a follow-up to the father’s statement, that she spoke to “sources close to the investigation, sources that have spoken with this young boy and we are being told that he does speak English. So we want to make that clear.”

But the father’s concern is the concern that any parent would have about their children dealing with the legal system. His father isn’t saying he doesn’t speak English, he’s saying that the child feels lost, particularly since English is not his first language. This is the most basic argument against trying children as adults. They don’t understand their rights. They are impressionable and may be much more likely to yield even the rights they think they have to figures of authority.

How can you sentence someone with an adult sentence who cannot fairly represent themselves and has so little chance of understanding how to defend themselves against their charges? How is that legal?

I guess I have as many questions as I had revelations.

puddles (not for the queezy, please)

2009-06-04T14:17:00.000-07:00

a dude died on woodward yesterday.

his blood is still drying on the cement and toasting in the june sun. for the entire morning after he died, his blood was left to coagulate and thicken in globs. someone had tried to 'wash' the scene', which i guess simply amounted to throwing a bucket of water on the cement.

after that the wet cement died down to its basic whitegray and the thick ooze of blood lay dimpling as the sun rose and baked.

i don't know how he died. someone said he fell. which would explain the one puddle of head-sized blood that sat smeared and fat-faced on the flat plane of woodward.

but it doesn't explain the other puddle. the thick one. the one that looked like a bloody organ. the one that looked hacked up, chunky, cut out.

and it doesn't explain whatever horrible state he fell into, because of, during, or directly after. he died in front of comerica park and today there was a noon game, and yes - certainly i thought of all the tourists tracking back and forth through his cooked blood.

and yes, i found out, along with my coworkers, in the middle of the day. after we had gotten into the office. and because few people tend to watch the sidewalk they're walking on, and since we would have come across the path from the parking lot to the office, we all checked the bottoms of our shoes.

watcher

2009-05-25T23:56:00.000-07:00

the city is afraid of itself. it licks its own lights and smiles a bulletproof glass. the city hides its nipples underneath the suds of lamplight.

it's always looking for its own shot out star. its friends kiss with one eye open. its lovers take their hair down, back to the wall.

and women in their turned lips and skirts that hang down from the bar stool. they sway and keep an eye glued to the barback mirror.

the cooks are always wearing latex. the manager is in the back behind the mercury. hand on the cellphone. one foot out the door. and everyone knows the pimp walk is archaic, but we all keep leaning down into it. one hand tucked somewhere a knife might be.

the night is under a bushel of wind. the moon is overkill. must be something up. the busses slip through the night dodging the cops with nightvision windows of green glow.

the cops try not to smile. they try not to smile and they whip through red lights in the cold.

we go back to our old ways. the reason brothers used to clink their steins. we slosh our poison back and forth between glasses just to make sure. we taste each other's tears for salt. we check each other's sleeves for swords. we listen for the saliva we make when we take off our clothes.

that's how it is, here. the chain on the door is restless. the wind is in the walls.

reflection

2009-05-20T17:30:00.000-07:00

today i looked out the window and realized nobody is listening. by that i mean...

... there was a face looking back at me. a face - which looked unconnected to its body, through the leaves and the bbq grill grating and the porch fencing. a face that took on the look of kabuki. sat wafting and golden and removed from my room and my 60 watt bulbs and my bedding. i thought i might wave to the face and it might lift off and drift away into the settling blue afternoon and the summer night birds.

but the face stared back at me. and i looked away and looked back. and looked away and looked back. the face had large flat eyebrows and it did not smile and it did not laugh. and it did not look away.

and i looked away and looked back and lifted another fork of food while i stared at the face. then...

... she got up and went back into her apartment.

across the way. she lives in the apartment where the old man used to sit on his porch for hours and never look my way, it was like looking at a pond of leaves that coughed from time to time and the leaves scattered.

for months. i walked naked through my house and sat naked with the door open. he never looked this way once. cataonic coughing pond.

then he disappeared.

now, she sat there leaned into my window. nothing dividing us but screen and cat and leaves and the dropoff of stories between our porches. her face could be in my room.

unblinking.
unapologetic.
masked...

but unfettered.

good-bye again this year

2009-04-15T09:46:00.001-07:00

hey there old man.

here's to you and your synthetic brushes. and your oily cheeks. and your fedoras. and your overalls and painters' caps. here's to the old men i see at gas stations who ring a bell and who if i told them what was i thinkin' - bout who they remind me of ... well, we know how that would go down.

so here's to no other, then. that's how it should be anyway. there's wine in the ground for you. and water in my lungs, where i drown when i love you.

every time i love you.

bunny day

2009-04-12T18:04:00.000-07:00

today the wind was cold and the sun looked alot like a snowball and i wonder sometimes about the nature of alliance.

there are lots of people who sit together in the bar who won't sit together in the coming days. they'll get up under each other's skin. they'll lose interest. the sex will run out of new tricks. they'll move. one of them will die. another will become a heroin addict. they'll cheat. they'll find out the other one is gay. one of them will go broke. that's not really very interesting. the spectrum of reasons why people leave one another.

it's more interesting - why people stay. when they lose interest. when they annoy each other and fight until there are holes in the wall and plates broken and black eyes. when the sex gets tired and dull. when one of them moves to another city in another time zone. when one of them becomes a heroin addict. when they can no longer promise grandchildren. when there's no money left.

people stay. or they leave and come back. or they say everyday for the rest of their lives...

one day, i'm gonna' pack my shit and you're never gonna' see me again.

or they say.

i'm with you no matter what. i'm with you until the end.

and all the variations in between. there's really no wrong or right. no family formula. no definition for family. i've been thinking about it for months now. a definition...

for family. i thought for awhile it had something to do with whether or not you leave. or what you put up with. or blood. or what you're willing to do for someone. or if you can count on someone. or permanence...i mean.

can someone be your family one day...
and not the next?

i haven't figured it out yet. but, it's easter. and i've got a few people on my mind.

in here.

2009-03-15T04:10:00.001-07:00

from inside the windows, the city is safe. the walls shrink at a normal pace. the ceilings are comfortably within reach , but we don't ever touch. the voices all over the computer retain auricular anonymity.

the lights turn various shades, predictably. this is how the days ought to go out there. funny, how enclosure can order things. how the simple structure of walls can relieve disarray. can send chaos barreling off into its remote regions of curlicues and bendables. as if chaos, itself, relies on street lights and sirens and settling stars, itself diffused and scattered under the engine city light of downtowns.

so chaos is out there somewhere. everywhere. it doesn't listen to john lee hooker. it doesn't read children's poems. it can't think this clearly with wine. and it certainly doesn't go without sleep for days, this successfully.

chaos has a lot to learn about productivity. and clarity. and epiphany.

but not about poems. i don't care what anyone says. entropy and chaos have poems on lock.

Goodbye Old Cold

2009-03-07T21:25:00.000-08:00

In my stride, I'll let go of the snow. Tuck it deep inside my collar and let it thump quiet below the sunny surface of the coming broily days. Like I say - it's only fair.

I've had my season. It's someone else's turn.

Quote of the Day

2009-02-27T08:48:00.001-08:00

"We did everything you

wanted to do, and you're still

not my friend."

- 5th grader, from a co-worker's class

latent tale-tales and other such gloomy freedoms...

2009-02-21T10:53:00.000-08:00

this is an accidental shot.

by that i mean, i took the shot of the typewriter at the silversmith hotel in chicago during AWP, because i love old typewriters and i wanted that picture.

i didn't notice the mag in the background with the cover dedicated to artists inspired by obama, his campaign, his presidency. which i think is a pretty hot mix of images and eras, so i'm in love with this photo this week.

but it reminds me - how we date and mark things unintentionally. how so often the latent element tells us more about the picture than anything we were aiming for. what for example would an expert have to say about that shabby old throw run under the table? probably that it's a piece of crap from the 70's but by far not an antique. what would a typewriter connoisseur say about the mix of old yellow keys and crooked replacements on the keyboard?

likewise. most often in conversation with people, it's not the things they are trying to say to me that give me the most information about that person. it's often the unintended things that shape my opinion about them. the way they hold the door for someone or don't, maybe. how they warm their hands in the cold, whether they blow into their hands or rub them together like sticks for a campfire. the way they speak to a waitress when the food is too cold. the way they purse their lips when a certain someone walks into the room. the way they carry a box.

we are nothing but a multitude of signals. we tell on ourselves constantly. alot of times, i feel like we're also a bundle of tools trying to fix our signals. watching how we eat and fold our legs, curbing (crafting, crafting) how we say our truths (and our lies) to make sure they sound ... just ... so.

i'm not arguing against etiquette. i appreciate protocol to a great extent.

but far from convincing ourselves we can control how we are viewed, it is worth bearing in mind that in how we live - how we carry ourselves, how we write, how we speak. however we go about our day to day lives, we are unintentionally telling on ourselves. telling the world all our private strenghts and our wretched neuroses.

i find this incredibly freeing. it means no matter what i try to do, or say, if someone is paying attention, they can tell where all my fuckups/assholes/egomaniacs live.

no use in trying to hide the fuckers. suffice to say. we all have an understanding. we tend to keep our sides of the fence. it doesn't mean they don't exist.

i think it's the best anyone can do.

at the tip of fingers

2009-01-26T19:46:00.000-08:00

who to call on among the smoke and the chatter. unless you pray a mouth of sulphur, tongue the particle in laced lung and kiss the corners around you. at every turn, you call it down with your lips. at every bead of smog, touch a piece of your body to the edge of corners and breathe in. breathe in and give it with both hands. give it until you can't chant any louder. give it until the standard oil lifts, melts and you strain your chin to the blackened sky. you forgive the streams of steam in the air. steam, you say out loud. that's what you tell yourself it is. you say it's just cold.

stuck

2009-01-25T08:47:00.000-08:00

if you stand in the middle of anything for too long, it becomes a vortex.

the middle of a crowd, or a lake. or the middle of your own room. the middle of a friend's face, or a fire escape. the middle of the street, the cars pick up circular speed. the middle of the space between you and the distant watchtower.

or yourself. i keep trying to shift away from the center of my own private boxes. i am trying to step outside myself and i keep winding up back in the same position. try to leave the area, and the air rides with me in the backseat. try to throw salt in the water, and it keeps sliding off into freshwater. it's never enough. never further enough outside my self to matter for anything. like in those movies you think, if you could just get out of the town, you'd be safe. the people you love would be safe.

but there's a blob of the monster on your tires. or the stalker is in your trunk. and the stalker is you. you take with you when you go.

i am standing still in one place where i've always been standing and i am wondering if everyone else is this dizzy.

snow again.

2009-01-11T04:14:00.000-08:00

i really get defensive about the snow. i don't like people talking bad about it. we live in the midwest, between oceans. i believe some of us have forgotten what that means about our seasons - and our planet.

remember the great lakes?

we are supposed to be the great basin where water swirls and culls and gathers. we are supposed to sit and funnel so the melt can go bleed out into the mass of water. this is where we amass. we are faceless flutter and we are supposed to sit here under little snowy hourglasses: and tick ticking. and the snow piling, like the rain slushing down, and this is how it should be. it's where we live.

the rain, the snow, the sleet, the hail. it's like the post office. delivers water, no matter the weather.

eventually, we leak out into the soil, into the seas. but for now, we just gather. and slush. and fill crevices, and gather. we are, if you like, a congregation of water.

amen.

and yes, i know it's hard to drive around through a funnel. all pushed up in the middle of the road, and bad gutters, and no salt. i know. and yes, i know it's too quiet in the middle of a gathering of mush, all cold, can't hang out at campus martius.

i know. i know.

but i believe there is something to what people verbalize in those castoff wishes. i think there is something to the things we speak out loud. "i wish it would stop snowing." "i wish it would go away". well....

it is going away. more and more every year. and that's not a good thing. we are supposed to have more snow than this. it's supposed to much worse. our lakes are supposed to be fuller. our soil is supposed to be wetter.

it's winter. so let's get zin about this shit.

it is time, my friends. to close your eyes and hold your breath. it's time to spend the morning drawing. make cocoa. and when you have to go out, support your lakes. pull on your boots and pull on a smile.

Take a wrong turn ...

2009-01-07T00:39:00.000-08:00

Getting lost in Detroit is never a bad idea. The wrong turn will lead you down a street that feels like an alley and an alley that feels like someone's back yard.

There is always someone alone walking. You wonder where they're walking off to. Sometimes you want to stop and ask them. Alot of times they don't have anything with them. They are not in a rush.

I wonder about people's stories. I tend to think I might be disappointed if I asked. That it they tell me they are headed off to their girl's house after I've concocted a sweet little tale about them getting off the Greyhound in the wrong city cause they overslept through Cleveland and figured since they were here they'd go to the Casino, that somehow that speaks poorly of their character. I know that's fucked up.

... and for the record: yes, in case you're wondering, if I imagined he was headed off to his girlfriend's house after a long day at work, and didn't have a car, so walked all the way from downtown, I'd be intensely disappointed if he told me he just off a Greyhound in the wrong town.
I took the wrong train to Bloomington a few months ago. I thought I could visit Indiana University in Bloomington, IL apparently. Fortunately, the cute redhead sitting next to me let me know I on the wrong train before it took off. Unfortunately, he did not invite me to stay on the train and keep going wherever he was going, since I suppose he thought that would have been in bad form, even though we were having great chemistry.

I have wound up staying in the wrong train stop, or the last bus stop, or the only stop at that time of night outta' somewhere else. That's how I moved to Chicago. It was a bad layover that lasted. and lasted.

Anyway, got lost in Detroit tonight, looking for my boss' house. Turned around in bank parking lots, and empty storefront byways. Watched the snow swirl and pile up like little white blowflies. Made it home just in time to catch the rain on my tongue.

Here's a mildly, remotely related interview my friend did. Notice the awe over the patch of black in the middle of the street, like it really looks like anything:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzUEim3nwnk

New Year's ... Resolve...n such

2009-01-01T20:07:00.000-08:00

first, the ephemeral:

may this year give me courage. again. it seems i have to start some things all over. sometimes you forget what you have taught yourself. you forget the simple. you forget that desire is nothing more than passing water like rain and that it always falls. and you forget what it means to be brave. that bravery carries with it all the weight of a body clad in armor.

and it is lonely. most often. there is no one else to sit with you for very long, there inside your head. mostly bravey is about battling the edges of your own sharp convictions. all the things you tell yourself you're up against. so may this year come with some new found tools. some resoureces you didn't know you were working with, or have simply forgotten were in your shed.

and now. the specific.

1. i have been watching the door for a knocker. not a person, but a ghost. i have been listening to the air to see if someone was gonna' come fix my spine, but that hasn't happened. and it may not. i need to stretch more.

2. sometimes i want to pick up the phone and call my mother. usually, when i think of something like how she used to like plain potato chips. now i crave chips with no frills. the thing about chips is they're supposed to be comfort food. they're not supposed to turn your mouth into a pillar of salt or set it on fire or remind you of pizza or the great blue sea.

they're just supposed to crunch. that's their only job. to crunch.

3. my number one resolution this year is to get my book published. that's really it. everything else is negotiable. i think i did a pretty good job with my 13 number long list last year, even though i don't remember what was on the list for the most part. i think controlling my anger was one of them, practice some ol' zen type shit. pretty sure. i think i did alright. everyone is still standing.

4. alright i just thought of some more. i need to read more history. particularly, local history.

5. i resolve to look at the Polish language. i need to see what the hell i'm getting myself into here.

6. my father was a good man. a good father. and i love him. and i miss him.

Happy New Year.

looking for things

2008-12-14T23:54:00.000-08:00

"if you go looking for something, you may not find anything, but if you go looking for anything, you'll definitely find something". - darryl zero - the zero effect

i found a cemetary today. this isn't it. but it reminds me of it.

there is something to be said for privacy. i'm thinking if i put up the name of the cemetary, then it gets to be a thing. it might become a thing. and i don't want a thing... then, of course, i think...
who cares, francine? no one reads this crap anyway. then i think...

is there such a thing as public privacy, that isn't malintended? should i put a hook in here and say - maybe i'll say the name of the place i bumped on ... eventually?

anyway, i liked the place. the way you like a boy. or like an old guy sitting at the busstop. the way you find some ugly little restaurant and want to cry, how it makes you feel. i wanted to sit down and stay for a long time. and then, i wanted to leave right away, so i could come back later. oh, and apparently, it's haunted. i didn't know that at the time.

but that's fine. so i looked up haunted cemetaries in michigan. apparently, there are a bunch. my mother's is one of them i guess, which for some reason i find comforting.

there's a cemetary in alaska i want to visit. they grow plants out of the graves and make huge craft sculptures on the headstones. i think they hold parades for funerals.

i like cemetaries with fetish. where you can decorate the place. like a living room. this cemetary today ... there was a headstone propped against a tree. there were benches. and a mud puddle that damn near swallowed my car.

anyway as for haunted cemetaries: if you want to go find a cemetary where you can have your very own personal ghost, here's a link:

http://www.hauntedamericatours.com/hauntedcemeteries/toptenhauntedcemeteries/

have fun!

Any given Saturday

2008-11-15T12:39:00.000-08:00

Today is full of rain and I just woke up at 3:00 in the afternoon. I had a dream me and three friends got pulled over by the cops and even the cop was a little freaked out when swarms of mice cut their path from the sky across the roof of the car.

It's raining and there are vegetables to be had. Which means heading out to Eastern Market. Read Greg Purcell's latest poems in Fence. He's the guy that hosts the St. Mark's Reading in New York. He spends alot of time in these poems thinking about the comparison of Chicago to New York, having lived in both places.

I spend alot of time thinking about the comparison of Detroit to Chicago, to New York, to Phoenix, to Seattle. The differences are vast. We live in a hub. Our little junk shop town. It sits at the back of the machine shop hanging on a tool board swinging in the metal breeze when the garage door opens.

It knows no other town but itself. Ratchet town. Monkey wrench with a glob of grease town. The kids here go down south for their summers. Down south is just not that different than here. We're a down south up north in the midwest town. Landlocked vacant lots. No rolling tumbleweed. No coast.

They need to get out this town. We need to get out of this town. Maybe not forever. But for awhile. It's hard to live here. And know that I just meant to type: It's hard to leave here. Most livable city. Comfortable glass in the alley. Cozy drunkards. Friendly parking lot attendants and charming allergists. My favorite meter maid lives here. My childhood drug dealer.

And what a hypocrit I am. I'm talking about we need to get out of and I'm afraid to apply to grad school 'cause I don't want to leave Detroit. It's hard to leave Detroit.

Here's an older poem by Greg Purcell. The new poems in Fence are more language intensive, and wilder. But I like this poem alot. It's closer to my current headspace:

http://www.gumballpoetry.com/poetry0001/purcell1.html

6 hours to go: Last Minute Plea to the Hard Core Left

2008-11-04T10:36:00.000-08:00

Ok, look. We're all left leaning here.

We know that. So if you're considering not voting for Obama because he's just another mainstreamer who will head up the economic monster called America, and you're really tempted to grind that pen into the Indie/Green party vote...either to prove a point, or because that's what your conscious tells you to do...consider this...Obama is the best shot radical activists have at pushing agendas closer to the White House. Obama is a capatalist, but he's also an emphathizer, and sympathetic to any cause for humanity.

You will stand a far better chance at raising funds for all your humanitarian / vegetarian / petatarian causes with a man in office who actually gives a fuck.

Here's the reality: NO PRESIDENT OF THIS COUNTRY WILL BE ABLE TO HEAD THE COUNTRY WITHOUT MAINTAINING ISRAELI ALLIANCE. It's not possible.

What is possible is shaping that alliance toward good and not throwing away a vote on extreme parties that can't make it happen for us...

Come on people. This is hope we're talking about. Real HOPE!

13 Facts About Bob Hicok

2008-10-24T22:41:00.000-07:00

1. Bob Hicok doesn't submit to literary journals. Literary journals submit to Bob Hicok.
2. Bob Hicok is a robot who can transform into a giant mechanical pencil full of poetry.
3. Bob Hicok heard that you should write what you know, so he wrote everything.
4. After a Bob Hicok reading, all the audience members are pregnant, including the men.
5. Bob Hicok rhymes with orange. And orange likes it.
6. Bob Hicok publishes children's novels under his pen name, J. K. Rowling.
7. You may have noticed Bob Hicok's poems turning up in the same journals where you publish. That's because Bob Hicok is stalking you.
8. Bob Hicok has earned the little-known but lucrative Wile E. Coyote Super Genius grant.
9. Bob Hicok isn't an unacknowledged legislator of the world because everyone realizes he's in charge.
10. When Bob Hicok flies into town for a reading, he actually flies himself.
11. Bob Hicok doesn't refer to himself in the third person. He refers to himself in the infinitieth person.
12. Bob Hicok travelled back in time and shot Wild Bill Hickok for spelling his last name differently.
13. Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of Bob Hicok.

Please share your fun Bob Hicok facts in the comments or your blog!

My Buddy Barack

2008-09-28T21:13:00.000-07:00

Obama came to Detroit today and the heat punched down on my head while I watched the video monitor since I was too far from the stage to see.

I am beginning to realize that his campaign is just a bright spot in my every day. Sometimes when the rest of everything is getting too heavy - the house on the east side still isn't packed up, i'm broke and can't afford good ice cream, the car goes bumpy-grumpy, I don't know, Obama just makes my day.

I think about him like an old friend. Which is silly I guess, considering I don't even know what kind of beer he drinks, if he's even a beer kinda' guy. I never had to tell him he had popcorn stuck in his front tooth. Never had to pretend I wasn't mad because he didn't show up for the Saturday matinee, and I wound up going by myself (and then never had to hide the fact that I kind of preferred it that way, because *to be honest* well, he slurps his coke and it's annoying) . And, of course, I've never had to hound him for the book he borrowed, or hide from him cause I still owed him fifty bucks.

But the way your week gets all funny acting, and you remember your friends - well hell, at least so n so is my ace, at least so n so is on my side, Yeah, I admit I think about Obama like that.

How is that possible. What the hell is wrong with me.

I imagine, though, I'm not the only one. Thanks, Barack, old buddy, old pal, for being motivated and motivating. And thanks for stopping by Detroit. It was good to see you.

quote of the day

2008-09-18T15:23:00.000-07:00

... This is somebody who has been in Congress for 26 years, who put seven of the most powerful Washington lobbyists in charge of his campaign. And now he tells us that he is the one who is going to take on the old boys network. The old boys network, in the McCain campaign, that's called a staff meeting ...

- Senator Barack Obama

september

2008-09-16T01:14:00.000-07:00

is close to october. is a pigeon in a headlock. september has a bad cold. a sore throat.

september can't decide whether or not to keep the windows open. is all drafty, bare wood. september arrests millipedes in cans of kitchen grease. september has no etiquette, sneezes in your neck. breaks the lock to get in.

september is a flood of glass under your balding tires. backed up gutter. the throat of tar around manholes covers, can't dry out.

september and its spare change. september and its murderous crows. september, and construction on the highway.

september is a reindeer on cold cereal. bloated cans of progresso. mulch. bloody mouthed month, hold your fanfare. cold, matriculating savant. in and out monster. what a door man.

by the way, i'm keeping your leaves. you can have them back at the end of the semester.

you're pretty bold, for such a hot cough.

i don't love you at all. but we're neighbors. and this is a community of rodents.

quote of the day

2008-09-02T15:13:00.000-07:00

I just heard Geraldine Ferraro talk about how she's not saying who she's voting for now. She'll decide on election day. How hard is the decision for a "feminist". Vote for a man who'll select judges that believe in womens' rights or go for a man who may be dead in two years and leave the white house to a woman who is a gun toting anti-abortionist? I mean really!

- Toni Asante Lightfoot, CC Fellow

forgive us these trespasses...

2008-08-31T17:39:00.000-07:00

forgive cornel west. for he is but a scholar, master of words. please endow him with multiple uses of martin luther king's name, so that he may not be so punchdrunk ready to criticize obama for not using it. midnight book toker. it is not that he knows not what he does. he knows not the big picture. he is a race man. race men (and women) will often betray their people.

forgive george bush. he's almost done anyway.

forgive john mccain. his wife is not a cunt.

forgive sarah palin. she has to get where she needs to get anyway possible, even if it means running under a cunt.

forgive tavis smiley. he makes a good point. we should hear more talk about poverty from the man who will be our president. but forgive him for being so punchdrunk ready to host an entire show with a panel of black scholars criticizing our coming president, when the best thing a panel who purports to support a candidate can do is support him.

forgive the extreme sides of our political spectrum. they are too tied to their inner fascists to understand that obama is the best thing this country has had going for it, since any of us can remember. they prefer to keep their heads in cans of insular rules and demands for every imaginable tenet, rather than understand that the leader of the country must be representative of cooperation of the people. he cannot represent every point of view, and by definition of his role, must be moderate. let them see how they can promote their agendas best through a leader of the country who is truly willing to listen to any argument that will benefit the people. let them also understand the considerations of our country's reach beyond our own border and recognize that a man like obama will best empower the rest of us to broaden and expand our concerns for the rest of the planet.

forgive the hurricanes. they are nothing but energy, spitting out all that we consume. pet their manes. kiss their eyes. let them kill less.

forgive those who will not vote in november. while it's certainly true the two party system is a dinosaur and the electoral college is nothing short of capitalist vanguard, it is actually more damaging to not vote, than to vote inside our broken system.

forgive our broken system, we are all chewing after scraps.

hear our prayers. pray with us.

from the allnight diner at logan airport - boston

2008-08-15T20:12:00.000-07:00

The installation on the main floor of Terminal E helped me calm my nerves. It's this incredible concoction of a music box, made of giant chutes and balls, resembling a "lifesized" wire maze bubblegum machine, only the balls hit musical instruments on their way down the sloping paths. Very Japanese. Very calming. And I needed that...

Flight cancelled. LaGuardia would rather think about having a tornado than get me home quickly, apparently. No U.S. Airways love on putting me up for the night. Flight doesn't leave until 7 a.m. it's only 8:00.

sooo...

Well the Dunkin Donuts stays open all night. And Hudson News. And I can watch the cleaning crew dump the trash cans the reservation agents put up on the check-in baggage scale at the end of their shifts.

So I guess I'll follow up to my post about Provincetown. Lovingly referred to, I've realized since then - as P-town.

First I should say the workshop was incredible. The week with Ross Gay as an instructor is undoubtedly the best workshop experience I've ever had. It was exactly what i wanted (a better than traditional approach to poetry workshop), and exactly what i needed. I wrote some good stuff and more importantly, I feel a bit transformed.

The folks in the workshop comprised of three CC'ers and five other pretty dope poets. It was nicely mixed - a whole lot of different perspectives, but similar artistic objectives. I want to say more ... about some of the breakthroughs we made, but I'd like to get a bit better about allowing what happens in the workshop to stay in the workshop. It should be that kind of space.

The work center was mostly very relaxing. The residency is low maintenance and pretty laid back. Lots of time to write and hang out and see stuff. The schedule is not hectic and so I had all kinds of time to do what I went there to do. Wind down and focus.

Getting there was a bit of a nightmare. And getting back ... well, hell I'm spending the night in a chair at an airport in Boston. Transportation that goes into P-town quickly is expensive (an 8 passenger craft that flies over the ocean is $90) and everything else takes awhile. I hear the ferry is amazing. The bus up there takes 4 hours from Boston. I actually wound up taking the plane back, thanks to some love from my class who thought it was important I not miss the last class to take that 4 hour bus ride I originally thought was 2 hours. (Here's my cyber-wineglass cheer to all of you!). The plane didn't terrify me nearly as much as most ground covering planes. Something about the immediacy of it all was comforting. Drop out of the sky into the ocean and you're fucked. That's it, done for. I hear drowning sucks, but I'll take it over being splattered across a corn field.

Eating there turned out to be pretty fun. Communal dinners with the couple other broke people made for long evenings of lots of laughing. The couple times we did eat out really felt like a treat and I guess that's as it should be. Particularly since even the burger joints were delicious.

As for the town itself: Well. It was interesting. I think I have a low threshhold for being the outsider and not really being able to escape into any kind of safe haven. There really are no black folks on the cape, that I could tell, save a few vacationers and a few West Indian workers. I didn't get to talk to any of them really, but i got the impression that they don't really live around there. I have to say I found the vibe there troublesome. Lots of rich folks. And people seemed more impatient with me than any New Yorker I've encountered, even in people's stereotype of them. Maybe it was just that kind of week, but I felt like simple courtesies, like saying excuse me if you need to get past me, seemed to pain alot of folks. I lost count of how many times someone gestured at me, stared at me, spent alot of words saying everything but excuse me ("Ya' know, if I could just get to that cart right there..." or "If you could just take one or two steps over..." note the unfinished sentences here), or just flat out told me to move in some weird way...

That was difficult. When I lived in Arizona I got used to people staring at me like I was an alien, but that took some years ... I only had a week in P-town and it got old to me pretty quick. And just generally, there is that air of and what are you doing here?. But in all fairness, no one else seemed to feel it quite as strong. So maybe I was just being insecure.

The ocean made up for alot. One day I walked from Provincetown to Race Point beach. I didn't mean to. I thought it was closer. It took close to an hour and a half. But my toes touched ocean and my belly white sand, even though I couldn't stay terribly long, I was happy. I actually hitchhiked back. Caught a ride from a nice couple from Quebec who'd been nude bathing on the sand. They wouldn't take gas money from me.

The readings at the work center rocked. I really like the idea of having a reading mixed with poets and fiction writers and scriptwriters. It was a real nice variation and everyone was hella' talented.

Great library. With an incredible sculpture garden (see photo) across from it with twenty foot tall demagogues staring in through the library window.

The place was insanely peopled. I told someone it felt like a little italy turned boystown. I guess that's about my report.

I have a feeling the trip meant something to me I can't quite put my finger on yet. When I figure it out, that might be a new post. I know I met some good people who already seem to care about me in a way that means a whole lot, for a smalltown girl from Detroit.

Poor Folks on Cape Cod

2008-08-06T15:40:00.000-07:00

So today I looked up Bertha Walker. As in the Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Foundation, who have generously funded my residency at Provincetown next week, under the toot-elage of Ross Gay.

I am highly excited. Don't get me wrong. But here's my confession to the land of blog.

I'm nervous.

Today, I just found out (or to be fair, I just realized) that the residency doesn't include food. Which means I am at the mercy of the restaurants and various dining options along the shore of one of the prime vacation spots in the country. I mean ...

... just look at it...

There's nothing there but beach. I think this explains why my initial impression is that the Fine Arts Work Center is probably not used to broke ass poets from Detroit - like me - landing in their vicinity.

I've always viewed writing residencies as something reserved for the luxurious, the leisurely. Mother fuckers with nice vocab and a lot of time and money on their hands. Until Cave Canem, they didn't seem accessible to me. There was no one to talk to about them. No one who was really willing to talk about it, beyond the passing: Oh yes and I'll be on the coast of Oregon this year for Carving Stone or ...in Vermont in August for Butter and Tea. (Yes, I'm making up the names). They never necessarily reported on it. They didn't tell me what they'd learned. They didn't tell me about any of the kids they had to get adopted for 2 weeks, or the job they had to quit to get there. It just seemed remote. Something rich people did, whether they really gave a fuck about poetry or not.

After Cave Canem, however, I guess I got excited. And apparently, a little spoiled. CC feeds you, gives you pillows and a blanket, sends you a packet of materials with a map, offers to shuttle you in from the airport, gives you other fellows' phone numbers, just in case you want to call someone you don't know and be like: "Hey, I know you don't know me yet, but are you freaking out like I am?"

Yeah. This one: None of that. A letter came in the mail from a very pleasant, but busy director. It contained the address, the website, and a note: "Don't come early. We can't accommodate you."

I get it. It's not that I don't get it. CC held my hand. Now I'm in the larger world of residencies, which is probably akin to the small town girl transferring from the little liberal arts college to a public university. It's all an experience. It just takes adapting.

Anyway, I'm posting these fears in case anyone else has them. There's no shuttle. The bus alone into Provincetown is 60 bucks, never mind the ferry. There is no mention of local grocery stores in the blurb on Provincetown's "fine restaurants". No invitation to cook communal dinners. I have to bring my own sheets. No map.

So I'm posting one.

Oh, and all I could find on Bertha Walker was that she and her husband had a gallery in Minnesota. The foundation funds "against white racism and alcoholism" which sounds like a story worth being investigated. I think I also found a death record, if she was 33 when she died in Tennessee. Far cry from Minnesota, but then again so is Cape Cod ...

... a far cry from Detroit. I suppose I'm also afraid that someone's gonna' ask me about this scholarship while I'm there. I'm afraid someone's gonna' say something wack ... like

Isn't she the one that discovered the pressing comb?

I did buy a bathing suit. A two piece. Which is also a far cry from shit I'm normally not afraid of.

If anyone has any more info on Bertha (I like her name) or any other stuff you think I might want to know about, I'm all ears.

Friend Feature - August - Tommye Blount

2008-07-31T21:01:00.000-07:00

Since I will not be able to make it to Tommye Blount's reading on August 12th at Beans 'n Bytes on Woodward in Detroit at 8:30 p.m. sharp, let me tell you a little bit about Tommye.

The first time I met Tommye, his hair was working on some wild allusion to Cornel West. He was doing a reading at the Scarab Club in the Cass Corridor, back when I was convinced that poetry in this town just wasn't for me. The poets here all seemed to be in committed incestuous poem-ships, and I was on the periphery, drooling. New York had dumped me and Detroit was flirting, but was doing so with someone else's name on its corset, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, Tommye scared the fuck out of me. That night, he just looked fucking smart. He talked about his poems in a way that made me wish I knew how to talk about anything I cared about. He talked about his influences in a way that made me want to read more and come back when I was a big girl. I don't now remember most of those influences. But I remember that he mentioned Carl Phillips. And back then, that scared me. I had read Carl Phillips. I would even tell people I liked Carl Phillips. But I never said I got it. I just figured I wasn't grown up enough for him yet.

After his few moments of opening, however, I just plain wasn't ready. I wasn't ready for Tommye Blount to read. Wasn't ready for the world of Tommye Blount to crash into mine. I wasn't ready to hear about his family the way Tommye talks about family. Because it's that way, that way you need to hear about family. The sore, sour taste from the trees we lick at in the woods behind our back screen doors. The screens with the holes in them. The screens the spiders get through. The backdoors our neighbors can wave to us through, across the alley, but the ones that we really wish we could figure out how to hide, or saw off, or bury. If only we could live without a back door. Tommye's family was my family.

I knew we would be friends.

I also knew it would take awhile. I wasn't sure then why.

It turns out, that it would take awhile because Tommye is quiet. His days in the world of labor are pretty monotonous and he savors the venom the way the rest of us should take note on. He drives home to Novi and burns his lamp lights on figuring out what familiar hell has to do with poems.

Tommye is one of the keenest poets in Detroit. He can do anything in a poem. He can clean out a chicken coop as it turns into a parent. He can kick the ground with Pinocchio's wooden flailing bones. He can wrestle a swarm of bees into the stomach of desire and yield a nectar that'll turn a man into meat.

Plus, he's a great friend. The one I can make noises with. The one I can switch subjects on. The one who has to call me back if So You Think You Can Dance is on. The one I can ask about Italian poets and he can help me spell it. The one whose movie recommendations I know might be gory, but well worth the blood. And yeah, the one I can do my arbitrary, random crying thing in front of at Border's. I don't know what I'd do without him. Frankly, I wonder how the average joe gets by.

And don't let him swap a poem with you. You'll never be the same.

the people i see. and don't see. from high school

2008-07-30T17:28:00.000-07:00

there's this girl i see at lunch when i'm at work. we went to high school together. i'm not sure i knew her name then. and i don't know it now. she doesn't recognize me. which makes sense.

i just don't look the same. i was a nerd in high school and pretty painfully - not shy, exactly, more like - traumatized. people teased me about the slump in my shoulders. that and my lack of the 'ass-out, shoulders back' thing the pretty girls knew how to do.

we called it switch. pretty girls switched.

i kinda' always looked like i was carrying something too heavy for me.

this has very little to do with the girl i'm talking about that i see at the same day-in/day-out lunch spot i go to. back then, she looked like a smart girl, but she wasn't on the honor roll. she wasn't terribly popular and she didn't have much in the way of eye contact. she always looked kinda' past you. on to something more, something else.

i should have figured it for what it's pretty easy to recognize now. she was a church girl. now she's a church woman. she has that slim cross draped down into the modest v-fold of her printed dress. she wears comfortable flats. and she has the same glasses she had in high school. she still doesn't have any eye contact. she's pretty -- like a pastor's wife.

sometimes i wonder how it is, in a town that nobody leaves, i don't see more of the kids i went to high school with. what ever happened to the tall, pretty boy with the s-curl, and the soft face that everyone in high school claimed for gorgeous. he had a wheatfield way about him. he could have just as easily moved to new york as montana. he was easy to be around. he was one of the few people there in that hellhole that didn't need to be mean to get around.

whatever happened to the girl who played saxophone so badass that the music teacher put her in his band. or the boy who i named a stuffed dog after and walked the halls on his birthday looking for and never found. what happened to the boy with the silver patch in his hair. years later, when i found albert ayler i thought of him. him and his silver patch. i wonder if the boy in high school liked the sun.

whatever happened to the only teacher in the whole school who knew anything about poems. the one who let me read her endless pages of crap that rhymed and was too afraid to say what it really meant.

the truth is: i've heard what's happened to some of these folks. they still teach there. they have salons on the west side. they moved to new york. and then moved back.

but i never see any of them.

one day, i'd just like to run into a face that melts some years. a face i forgot ever made that much sense. in this town of church goers and nine-to-fivers and everyone wanting so privately to get out, that they just kinda' stop talking about it - it'd be nice to find an old piece of home.

heat

2008-07-15T21:52:00.000-07:00

sometimes the best wine is the last one. the way that detroit sits inside a glass. a martini. a perfect subtlety. you can't underestimate the influence of music and the way it bottoms out in the stomach.

if you have your best foot forward, know that your toenails ought to be painted. this is where i fail. this is the music that is suspect. that is unbraziered.

so, if you can't tell. it's a night of wine. i'll add pictures later. i tell the bartender it would be best for everyone if she were in an open marriage. because i'm not terribly fond of bartenders, but the ones who are willing to entertain the cyber world of swinging are sufficient for moments like this.

i am not awfully good at competition. so here's to all the girls who are unsure of how to be vamps. vamping is the best blood medicine. the best power. the most significant common denominator. i guarantee (and this is my pinky swear) there will be men out there who find it necessary to be mean to you in order not to love you. they will say as much.

they will pull out the stops. and you will still have to deal with lonely. and it will still bring you back to poems. and men next to you, with their apple martinis, they'll still resort to their journals to work out whatever incandescent flame is burning for you with all their unbridled desire. who doesn't want more than they have?

who doesn't .

we all do. want whatever is the closest to this feeling of wine in our guts. to that feeling of elation. we don't want to be drunk.

we want to be alive.

forgive us, for how we come to attain this. for how we swing our bodies into such elation. and how heated our taste buds are over it.

how indescriminant.

after Cave Canem

2008-06-30T20:28:00.000-07:00

The drive back from Cave Canem was much easier than the drive in. For those of you who don't know about CC, it's a 3 year fellowship award with a slew (slew: total of 54 every year from across the black diaspora) of poets who gather annually in Greensburg, Pennsylvania to workshop, network, and hang out for a whole week.

Anyway, you know us loners. People are like ... well ... like those ladybugs i was talking about. Pretty when there's one or two, but you throw too many in the mix ...

Funny that was my last post.

It was my third year with CC'ers. I went in prepared. Earplugs. Laptop. Good pillows. A dark curtain for the window. Nausea pills.

This year, I hardly needed any of it. I hardly stayed in my room. I preferred to write my poems at the "poem factory" where an assembly line of laptops lined the tables in Village Hall. I sat for hours on the stoop with the smokers. I drank out of poet's cups. I got in the pictures. I shared my poems. I asked questions.

I asked alot of questions.

Before I left for CC, I was starting to think my blog felt lonely. Maybe that's why I stopped posting for awhile. Overall, I dig this space where I can throw out my rambles and it doesn't even matter if anyone's reading them or not.

But that big gaping thing in my chest is a little less running, just now. So maybe my blog will feel a little more peopled in the coming days.

Thanks, CC. I've got you all crowded in.

technically, lady bugs do not scream.

2008-05-29T08:39:00.000-07:00

but they do flit. they crawl, climb, gather. they invade lakefronts, like one year in chicago - became a horrid ugly thing. you realize any pretty thing can get to be too much. crawling all red

and dottish and smooth over your shins and in your hair. you're picking fucking

ladybugs out of your soup at lunch, they're catching a wind and dying in between your book pages. red bloody dots smeared tomato wash across crime and punishment.

this has turned dark. it was not the asian lady beetle. they were ladybugs.

i used to like them.

i keep wanting to write about traverse city, but it keeps coming out boy crazy. so so be it.

2008-05-22T12:08:00.000-07:00

he liked my glitter.

we talked at a cafe and i didn't pursue it. he was tall and terribly marine like. his eyes were for fireplaces and his skin was for snow.

i am learning the art of leaving things to the imagination.

so in my traverse city diaries (which i write psychically once a week or so), we skin something by an ice fire in lake effect snow. he shows me a picture of a childhood friend he has tucked into a hooded coat. he says her name like he says his own and beyond that we don't talk much.

just the crack of the fire. the fish

salty.

after flower day

2008-05-19T08:23:00.000-07:00

the mania of sifting through the market is easier at 4:45. you go when everyone is done. the vendors are packing up and giving stuff away.

if it starts raining the grumpy arguments turn into soggy surrender.

no one really gets upset if you only want one orange. they're happy about whatever you buy.

yesterday was flower day at eastern market. hundreds of vats of begonias, marigolds, lilac, wildflower got hoisted off. dozens of ivy and vinca vines. tons of ferns.

they all left in the trunks of people's cars, or wet up the backseats.

me and stray flowers were left. in the spitting down rain. at the end of a melancholy weekend filled with unavoidable fussing with people i love. incurable distance.

sometimes i wish i could just shut up and turn into monkeyflower

strewing the asphalt

notes on pepto bismol...

2008-05-14T12:18:00.001-07:00

i asked a friend of mine to give me prompts for my blog. today she gave me pepto bismol. i remember once i drank rat poison from an orange juice container.
not a lot, because my mother caught me with the container before i got too many good swigs down. it was one of those moments i got to see how my parents loved me.

i was very young. it was all very calm.

when they realized i'd drunk the poison, there was a sudden air of tranquility. they kept looking at me, looking at each other, and starting talking in hushed tones.

maybe they didn't want to scare me.

hushed tones - were not their specialty. but this day, they mumbled reprimands to themselves for their own parental stupidity. how dumb it was to put rat poison in an orange juice container, even though they thought it was out of arm's reach for me ...

and they never blamed each other. one would say you couldn't have known. the other would say look at her. she's gonna' be ok. this was also an anomaly amidst my parental unit.

i don't know what this has to do with pepto bismol. maybe cause i didn't have to get my stomach pumped. i didn't even throw up. guess i had a rock hard gut even then.

anyway. it's the first thing that came to mind.

a note on lake towns

2008-05-13T14:00:00.000-07:00

i want my compadres to seriously consider - invasion.

i am going to live in a laketown. i am going to have a farm (however small). there will be a bed and breakfast nearby, which i may or may not operate. it will be on the water.

i will scare the white people. and

i am encouraging you to consider scaring them with me. not in a bad way - in a ...

... poet kind of way.

i want you to consider this.

i am quite serious.

dr. phil talks to the mirror

2008-05-12T10:56:00.000-07:00

The following article is a note to myself and to all the rest of us in this bitter ass town who are trying to control our inner control-freak and our closet bitch/assholes.

1) start small. work from light to dark. if you ever took a drawing class, remember what your teachers told you. lighter can go darker, but darker can't go back. i think of this like discussing behaviors instead of slinging libel. if you say "it's hard for me to plan my day when you're more than 15 minutes late to our meetings", it's easier to build from that conversation, than to say "i just don't think you respect my time." and then have to prove your case with (notice...) alot of examples to justify the character slander.

2) ask questions and don't make assumptions. as you continue to dig the hole you are burying yourself in - this little tactic will give you and your shovel some wiggle room to piledrive your way out. it is important that we stop saying "If I was soandso, I would NEVER do that." The point is you aren't soandso, they probably function differently than you do. So if you feel disrespected, is it possible that your lines of respect are totally different than someone else's?

3) give up the last word. this shit is hard for us in d-town. the last word is everything. we need it. we suck on its mammoth ego tit. if you can get in the last word, whatever it is - that means you've graduated to bow-down status. mothafuckas that bet had recognized - recognize. this is why negroes all over the metro area peacock strut off from random ass conflicts and say:

have a blessed day!

i mean - what are you supposed to say to that. of course they get the last word. (that is pronounced, by the way, blest - in case you hadn't heard.) sometimes i want to say "don't say bless you when you mean fuck you." but here, i digress.

4) don't pretend you hate the motherfucker now. oh my god, the most childish shit you can do is when you get mad at someone, all of a sudden not be able to stand anything about them. that's why your ass is a humpback isn't something you would say to your broke-back friend on a good day when you love them. an argument is not the place to "let it all out". love their humpback (or their low i.q. or whorish ways) as much when they piss you off, as you did when it served you in your friendship!

5) admit when shit hurts. i've figured out, moreso working with the kids, that we really are about being hardcore - it's another detroit jones to kick. it's really hard for us, in the d especially, to admit that we can be vulnerable to someone else. that they affect us. but not only is it crucial to our interactions, i think it actually helps us get through our arguments more honestly.

6) watch your tone. sometimes if you can keep your tone level, and stay calm, the person you're talking to may not even realize you've just had an argument.

7) take a nigga to get a drink after you've lodged your complaints. nothing like some brew and music to put you in a better light.

not all landscapes suck ass

2008-05-10T18:20:00.000-07:00

it's mostly about mental health. all those cherry blossoms in ansel-adams-ripoffs. i get it now. i think it has something to do with getting older.

or maybe it's living in the city - for more than like 3 years.

anyway. it's not about the viewer. well not really anyway. it's more like saying, hey guess what. i know i'm a morbid motherfucker (by the way, i found out today motherfucker is only one word)... i know i'm a morbid motherfucker, but the truth is ...

i like pretty colors, too. apple blossoms (which make for a pretty wicked white) and hawkberry and orchid in color. and not every pink lily has to resemble a long tongue in order for me to appreciate it. i'm as organic as the next one.

so the good word from the corridor is - all the trees aren't dead yet. and they're blooming like swollen cheekfat from kissing someone you really dig.

to remember what walking will bring up

2008-05-07T08:12:00.000-07:00

sunshine. of course, obstructed by clouds.

freeway overpass cement. and the concave cage you may

wrap your knuckles around and whisper at passing semis, hoping they'll honk anyway.

glass in the street.

parking lot signs, with low low prices.
that old man smiling with a shopping cart.

here comes the bridge, dark under there. not so tall, think you might
bump your head.

some kind of goo on the curb. gravel, makes you remember your smaller toes.

and the building you're headed for - the way it comes into view. over the dexter bus. over the under/overpass. over the heads of yellow headwraps.

quiet and the dirt you're willing to put up with.

2008-05-05T16:24:00.000-07:00

i've been sleeping.

the bathroom sink has something in it that i am afraid to touch. the kitchen is uncookable and yes, there are a few strange -- bugs. not cockroaches, or ants, nothing that nameable. a couple silverfish, and some sort of red winged thing.

i sort of think of them as dream bugs. the kind you dream are in some new place you've moved and you're not sure how to get rid of them, so you just go to sleep.

the thing is...they are not in nests, or colonies, or infestations, they are just

bugs. and that's kind of how the noise is: incidental. which in a city

full of surround sound, pimped out rides, cellphones, hollering last-word having motherfuckers, you know...

i'll take it. i'll take it. i'll take it.

because i can sleep. yeah, it's a little mildewy and reminds me of many a dive bar that i like - and look for.

but the light is good and it makes me want to read. and jack likes it, and last night i slept. this morning...

i fucking overslept.

i'm a city girl, always jonesing for a little quiet.

referral

2008-03-28T14:36:00.000-07:00

more or less, if you take off the snow, the cement streets have a sheen to them. that's especially true after the general practitioner has advised you to jot down whatever you're feeling on her notepad. of course she'd like to read it. and of course if you feel like an idiot showing it to her, it's probably best you did.

everything feels rehearsed anyway. everything is a mopey adventure in whining. you can't seem to say out loud whatever it is that has taken the wrestle out of the sunshine and turned it into this gorgeous mole just under her eye.

her name is hyphenated. you imagine this is because she was a wizard and her husband, a king of sorts. you imagine that they turned over their small country to the little people when they left, palms cupped into a royal wave, and she brought it with her - that star mole under her bottom eyelash. you imagine she didn't have it before.

she knew you needed counseling before she walked in the room. she wanted to say well, you're not hear about your back at all. but she knew that would be condescending.

it's the wizard thing. she asks about girlfriends. brothers and sisters.

you see seas.

she sees seas. she hands you exercises for your back. she shakes your hand - twice. she knows she couldn't have hugged you - professionally. and besides,

she can tell you're just not that type.

she recommends a masseuse. preferably not an old lover. preferably a professional.

someone like her.

these cement streets would make a good bed. if you could bring out your comforter and your three floppy pillows. just for a night. just you and the stars - dreaming about a homemade masseuse, and the wizardess of small countries whose hands would probably have been warm on your cheek - were you, of course,

the sort to allow such mothering.

the lunar eclipse - life afterward

2008-03-27T14:21:00.000-07:00

i've decided the last moon was wretched. it has destroyed potential sex. the continuity of friendships. the chance to live unsuicidally. thinness. skin. semitrucks. the smell of underarms. the cat's favorite scratching area. clean wood floors. the taste of licorice. certain baristas' ability to make a good americano. certain computer interfacing. various websites. a rose quartz necklace. travel. corneas. distance. potential direction. milk before the expiration date. moving vans that were not designed to move with. relationships. horoscopes. salt supplies. mothers' and fathers' health. memories as they were intended to be preserved. the smell of neighbors. the smell of liquor. the taste of anything french. sustained enemies. directions from televisions are coming. sunglasses. atlanta. san francisco. the mystery behind franks. the taste of urn ashes. potential train rides. hairballs. the image of my breasts. the memory of catfish. a healthy disinterest in former weddings. the allusion to vows. allegories. all kinds of poems. garbage cans position in parking lots. available parking spaces. the smell of peaches. salads on fastfood menus. drunks in parking lots.

wretched. wretched moon.

feel free to add more.

certainly, dark.

2008-03-19T14:17:00.001-07:00

for all that has disappeared in the winter months, you would think a sun-sensitive sun box would be offered to the choking thing in our eyes.

a sort of salve. a womb of sorts.

my cat, jack, likes to have his head tucked into the palm of my hand.

i'm thinking of something like that. what do you do when the sun demands its time of season to begin (as a friend of mine says) opressing you.

i think it's unfair.