A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman

For whom no subject is taboo,

oh child of nurture, you spared none

the vigor of your blossoming.

Back to Earth, changing woman

visible echo of the season,

zero bra, natural lip and hair

You forged your name in the ashes

of a forgotten roach, somewhere

in the apartments of Maryland.

No wonder girls like you used to

be locked in iron chastity!

Every gesture opens a valve

wherefrom the stuff oozes sexy,

void of self-consciousness, free

and arousing, if not embarrassing.

Your poems were all: I feel sex,

all around and it’s all good babe,

I see sex like Shakespeare must have,

I hear sex above and next door—

only makes me want to fuck more!

Who’re you to tell me I can’t??

I’ll have even more sex!

And I’ll write snarky sex stories,

to read out loud and hear you cringe!

Never thinking once that it sent

a weird message, acting confused

when professors asked you for dates,

when boyfriends became jealous—

the innocence one must have

to claim innocence at all!

I remember it well, and yet

not at all. It was startling

sometimes how little it took

to make something unintended

happen much too quickly. One learns

not everyone has your best

interests in mind. And that the joke

on your lips always comes out wrong,

innuendos, ambiguous

turns of phrase, suggestive banter,

though a true mark of exposure

to Mel Brooks humor, Zappa,

cheeky sixties sex romps, come off

like you have plans or at least thoughts,

realizing too late your conversant.

Hearing the joke, escaping the mouth,

Putting the brakes on just a second

Too slow.

Ah, the folly of youth is none

so damning as that of the girl

who was too eager to learn

that everyone else does it too,

and that some even like it,

but know you catch too many flies

when you got that much honey. Girl,

if you got it you best flaunt it,

only know that like your night cream,

one chocolate sandwich cookie,

and use of the term “Lolita,”

a little bit goes a long way.

 

From the Smartphone

I just realized I have a ton of notes on my phone that I haven't culled for anything yet. But reading over them has a curious aesthetic quality to it. Its apparent non sequiturishness. We might call it the portrait of creative lineage. Much of the notes are recommendations for literature or films from friends. Some are travel poems or remembered dreams, punched in rapidly in a state of transit. All of it, remembered consciously or not, can be said to have already entered the brainpan and therefore joined and formed aggregates of more surface connections. One common characteristic pervades all the entries, that is their raw formlessness.

(Also to note that in many cases the date indicates the time and day of the first note, while subsequent lines may have been added at a later time.)


August 27, 2013, 8:23 pm

Humidity so high like everything in
the cities a little bit closer than you think
And everyone's breath starts to mingle
in the cloud that hangs above
everyone's heads. Indistinguishable
from one another. It's an uncomfortable feeling
in a country where the individuals value nothing
more than their individuality.

August 27, 2013, 8:25 pm

She likes all the things that others find distasteful, the things that were a little too filthy for everyone else a little too violent perhaps. Everything she had she had tied to a string tucked in her pocket like she was afraid she would lose everything she ever touched.

September 23, 2013, 5:35 pm

Celina and Julie go boating 1974

I'm not crazy, she said, puckering the cigarette away from her lips, "I just got a ghost inside, all locked up and staying mum mostly, but when he's mad, he shakes them chains and rattles em bars. That's why I gotta stay inside," she said, "'Cause ghosts."


December 6, 2013, 5:04 pm

Gorges Perec void

January 31, 2014, 12:50 pm

On the last day of a particularly bitter January, I can smell the grass, scent of vegetation and life soaked for weeks with imperfect sky water. The students kick around a soccer ball in between patches of snow. Slipping and falling in mud, laughing deliciously.

February 24, 2014, 12:03 pm

Pickles pub 520 Washington blvd

April 3, 2014, 12:21 pm

Wedding has a really big house and the family is Indian and one boom a third inches that as being flirtatious of the bride the bride's brothers carry her off for her purity sake and then standing on the balcony watching two lions chasing each other male and female and they're beautiful I really excited. It keeps looking like the man is going to attack the female she runs away and then she turns around and breathes on him which gives him a rash that makes him vibrate with red vibrating lines and he runs away him and I keep drinking a sloshy drink that you were Thurmon made that the family keeps trying to get rid of bc alcohol. And I keep going down the floor too low and there is a weird bar there and there is slick sex noises coming from it and there's a waitress standing there is part of the wedding but she keeps going down there and there's lots of sex noises someone always keeps busting us and once on the bride actually went down there with us her brothers came and snatched her away and took her back upstairs. It's Christmas Eve also and the food that Thurmon brought we never really get to eat instead the family tells us all to bundle it all up and take it to the homeless shelter to feed people and then it turns out that the backyard looks out onto Amish Wonderland there's a big windmill ride.

April 22, 2014, 10:27 pm

Le comarro secca
The conformist
badlands
Posession
Atonement

The monks

Vikingswam

May 3, 2014, 3:52 pm

Georges bataille story of the eye

May 8, 2014, 2:47 pm

The last picture show colors
leachman

June 21, 2014, 12:22 am

Jewish quarter thrift stores and falafel!!

July 7, 2014, 3:57 am

Album name: everything's inflatable!

Philip Meyer American west

July 9, 2014, 2:04 pm

Apply for job, include creative work! Editorial assistant, copywriter. Rules are fluid, especially now. LEARN WEB, connect with small presses Black Balloon the Common people are willing to take chances. Try writing standup routines or jokes. Don't pre-reject yourself. Let the committee do their job. Look back as if it's new. Have an idea of where you would belong. Don't just go through poets market. You may think you're one kind of writer or want to be but you may not be that. If someone writes back a full rejection, SEND IN SOMETHING AGAIN. The bounce back effect, especially for women!! ONE STORY: Apply!! glimmer train. Keep after it. Cover letter: smaller is better. Establish that you are not crazy. Be nice. Graywolf press. You can be an intern for a writer. Cover letter to agent: all content about what's on the page. Look at the thank you pages in books of writers you like. Go to parties. Don't think of it as networking, just have fun.

July 12, 2014, 3:20 pm

If the tabloids are true what are you?
Mattea Harvey, poems about mermaids

Crows flutter through empty factories

Albert breton Surrealist Manifesto

"Yeah, but what does it mean?"
-Charles Simic

"I'm confused everyday, and new."
Olena Davis
IMPACT

SURREALUST
The punkslut crawling along the floor reaching for Madonna. Apple in mouth (suckling pig) flashes to apple shared between her and man, apple as breast in mouth, Madonna and punkslut making out between bars of cage, silk and leather whip, tongue in conch shell, bridal lingerie with black veil led down aisle by old man or image of antiquity

Cut up thrift wedding dress, foofier the better

Oceanside waves washing up on thighs

Dancing behind glass, behind bars

delicate private moment. Brushing hair? Applying lipstick

Dropping menstrual blood into wedding cake batter--food dye or jelly or just show squeeze jelly going in

Guests eating

The Mother/The Assassin/The Bride

2 men: predator and prey

Knucks-Mary mama awesome music from Montpelier!!

July 14, 2014, 12:04 pm

14 towards st lazare to Chatalet
4 towards Marie montrouge to odeon
10 towards gare austerlitz to maubert

VIP PARIS BOAT ESCALE HENRY VI NEAR POMBIDOU/rue shomberg

Emergency vehicle sirens like a waltz

L'Columbe demain boombox

Le petite meleur
An old man listening to radio to my Sweet Lord by George Harrison

Amsterdam trip reference: TJAXFZ transaction 998380

Take RER A from gare de Lyon to chatalet, then RER B to gare du nord

July 24, 2014, 10:55 am

Row home lit

Eponymous Clutch

Relay shop at airport, Le barra SIM card

Line D to gare du nord
City train RER B to cdg
Conf # 62AQCE

to St. Michel-Notre Dame

9.75 Euro

Maurice dssay to sevre then take 10 towards gare get off cluny Sorbonne

August 30, 2014, 12:26 am

Some people choose to be lonely.

Calves of steel ankles of diamonds

September 20, 2014, 8:32 pm

Call dentist next week if still sensitive

Save the date movie

The curse of lono

The feelies

Story of the I

November 27, 2014, 5:28 pm

Sista mannen pa jorden

February 17, 2015, 4:43 pm

8 villa Stendhal
Building code 1985
1st floor door on right then right
Gambetta line 3

Take RER B

People like us the only people...
Darren Strauss memoir
Tobias Wolfe shot in the head
Andy boles
Falconers
Ivy writers, Jenny
Sybilla Barthes
Bus 16 trains N
Group Alice

NEUROROTICA
Dendrite porn

Paris is the loneliest city.

April 6, 2015, 1:06 am

See you in paradise
Colin barett
When I dare to try to look the world square in the eye
Midtown mt vernon smells like
Dollhouse turquoise stiletto boot
Klimpton
Silicon teens

Fernando Pessoa writer--the book of disquiet
Gum scars on the sidewalk, paddy wagons cruising.

Exquisite Corpse by Exquisite Tutors

Two sonnets written by the tutors and staff at the MICA Writing Studio and Learning Resource Center last week.

For those not in the know, Exquisite Corpse is a parlor game for writers, wherein someone writes a line and folds the paper down before passing it to the next person to add a line and so on. Our group wrote two, the first in this fashion, each person folding down their line before passing it to the next person, and in the second one we could see only what the person before us had written. Like literary mad libs, and just as strange and then suddenly profound.

Sonnet 1

Forêt de Monet

if it storms, the broccoli can come in.

To the extent of nose-laughing

someone’s in a pig sty murmuring of painted salamanders

that nurse, she shot me

oh, the twinkle in the eyes of an Irishman!

The sun is like tourmaline

break

a churchy girl told me the bee that hit my eye was Satan

it’s all a bunch of baloney!

I cleared the corner of all the spider babies, so scary.

Crashes like schizoid sheep against the holding gate.

Now I’m feathering about in a sandbox in Cape Cod next to broken red Tonkas

because really sometimes that’s just where you are.

Sonnet 2

I’ve developed cross-species feelings

without knowledge, consent, or any thought why

she picked rotten oranges from the ground and placed them on the dining room table

as an art installation watching the various stages of mold and decomposition set in.

I gotta get outta this room. I’m done being a patient.

I’m done arranging roses into the speakeasy anatomy of epics, dead or alive

my fingers crack like plaster, skin falls like suede petals

with seams stitched with dry grass.

Sow then

dragged the traffic cone down North Ave

I did think of the exploration trip to the blue hills

our communal coke cans have started to rust

oh, the rusty limbs of coke cans!

are delicious to lick…

A Girl and her Kitties

Okay for some reason today I really want to celebrate my life and friendship with my two kitties, ZigZag and Saffron. They are beautiful and we've taken some amazing photos together--too many. Let's dig into my PhotoBooth from long ago and take this in order, from Blonde to Red.

ZigZag is a proud prince.

So fierce.

So snuggly.

Blondies

Pooped Princess

Christmas cat!!

My guy.

We are fond of each other.

Behold our beauty.

On the lookout.

Heart-to-heart.

Concerned perplexity.

Summer babes.

A stray kitten I rescued! I named her Cookie Pants.

Crazy eyes Mcgee!!

Lookitthisfuckingkitty.

Loungin' ladies! <3 td="">

Look at this fucking kitty.

After all, a girl's best friend is her cat!

Heartmend Pt. 2

Scorpio Horoscope for week of March 12, 2015

"This is the wild dream: you with your chameleon’s soul being anchored always in no matter what storm, sensing you are at home wherever you are. You asserting yourself, getting the rich varied life you desire; and the more you assert yourself, the more you love going deeper, thicker, fuller. Resurrection after resurrection: that's your gift, your promise. The insatiable delight of constant change." -Henry Miller in a letter to Anaïs Nin
http://www.freewillastrology.com/horoscopes/scorpio.html

Love is so confusing there's no peace of mind

Remember in a world of mortals, you are WONDER WOMAN!

Sad Girl/Heartmend Mixtape

I hurt inside-out

Paree Ennui

I'd like this to be a photo essay, but there were some things I could not, alas, hold a camera to. Most notably was the vision of the first sunrise of 2015 over the suburbs entering Paris from Charles de Gaulle airport. I'd planned it just so, wishing to strike an auspicious entry into the year by way of the city now designated as my writing sabbatical.

Likewise, I couldn't capture any part of my visit to the Museé d'Orsay on Sunday, January 11th, the day when most Parisians, expats, and dignitaries were convening at République to march in support of the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre the previous Wednesday, January 7th, which happened while I was on the metro from the 20th arrondissement where I was staying to Rue Saint Germaine-de-prés, at the NYU Paris building. It was after our fiction group, led by Aleksandar Hemon, discussed a new short story of mine when Deborah Landau delivered the terrible news of the shootings. Shortly thereafter, Hemon gave his planned lecture on empathy, and how we are all wired to read works searching for our opportunity to exercise empathy, and how that is often not enough, or that our desire to feel empathy often clouds what is present before us. Or something. As he spoke, I made connections of my own, thinking mostly of my story and how I had effectively bullied the reader into feeling empathy rather than inviting it. Mostly, I thought of how the shootings could trigger a right-wing response of Islamaphobia within France and the rest of the world. How the shooters themselves could be considered empathetic when, in the process of carjacking, allowed an old man to reach back in for his beloved dog.

I watched the inspiring march on a T.V. in a near-empty cafe on the empty street of L'Université near the Md'O, deciding to absorb the art and enjoy my free access to it, rather than join a mob, an entity I tend to distrust on principle. I then took the train up to Bastille for a soireé at a classmates' apartment and captured some photos and footage of residual celebration. There were smiles, song, art, and passion. The French know how to protest.

Once my residency ended, I went to Prague and had adventures, many of which were not captured on camera.

Of what I did document, the sense of place, temperature, and inextricably my own emotional turmoil, I reveal here:

20th Arrondissement

Notre Dame

A beautiful Parisienne who caught me.

Looking for a drink in the Latin Quarter

Travel foibles

Turbulence and turmoil

Homesick 

This woman collected bread from bakeries at the end of the night and brought it to this squat for hungry people to come by and grab.

Une femme faim

Tough to see the artwork, an animated pen drawing of characters performing various antics in an urban labyrinth of rooftops and stairways. You grasped the joystick to move the binocular view around the image, pushing different buttons to produce noise or a blood splatter pattern across the screen.

 

An active trainset circling live plants.

French sexploitation comic book

C-C performing at HyperWar

Lonely selfie series

The night hours pass...

Allow my love to be your curse.

Bonne nuit, Paris.

Taking the metro to CDG en route to Prague!

A beautiful place

Where I spent much time with my suitcases waiting for the keys to my apartment. Free WiFi!

Solo walking adventures in Wenceslas Square

Where I saw a quartet from the symphony play "the hits."

Fancyfancy

I like clocks.

Prague is so cool!!!

Fred and Ginger house

My future home?

Romancing myself

Bought myself a new dress to go to the symphony.

Had a super fancy dinner with champagne in my new dress before the concert.

Prostitute's shoes

Open wide--the Sex Machines Museum

Artwork in Blah Blah 

Colored pencil chevron



The "discretion" paper on the OUTSIDE of the sex toy shop.

Someone look at me.

I played this for a while waiting for my plane back to Paris.