Sundae Girl: poetry

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.

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.