found he(art).

photo by Peggy Dyer
peggydyer.com

Some things are intentionally left behind. The trash cans are overflowing on this side of the states and one wonders why we don’t twist more metal into deepened cups where all this refuse can go.

But one person’s remains is another’s shelter or supper or scraps for what will one day be a coffee table or bookshelf. On the corner of Utica and Carroll, notice the umbrella cemetery. They huddle like stretched out bodies but maybe they can be refurbished as waterproof leg warmers.

Alternate your pattern of looking. The sky offers many rewards, but so does this ground. Here in Brooklyn, garbage can woo you. Stop and notice the plastic muscle beating on the sidewalk. How beautiful is this litter and does it make you want to search out another human to give it to?

gratitude.

these clouds, a collision of applause

maple walnut peanut butter

my dad

moleskine notebooks and extra fine black ink pilot pens

sundays

modern love

crown street home

kazim ali’s poetry

rebel

my skin

sobriety

wrists without serration

u.s. postal service

august

those warriors of gender and the ones I am still searching for…

music MAkers

coffee

my soul sister

the moon!

the scent of campfire

my ability to poem

poetry teachers nyc

pancetta bruscetta rivera herman (I and II)

that fallen tree against the lake at prospect park

employment

the contagion of elephants

collaborative art forms

yann tiersen

hard-working lungs

a resilient mind

an appetite

when I am [able to be] present

moving on

white rice

eleanor

farmer’s markets

community gardens

NY Times

creative circle

C & Peggy

found he(art)s

semi-colons

magic

alligator wine.

clouds drip away from the sun/ crowd of branches like/ skinny shivers of/ summer’s left behind.
One does not need to travel six hours to arrive at an end, but there is something about this clean air that allows room to gasp away these ghosts in my luggage.

On a Saturday night, a human with hair hungry like mine, screams out the intoxicated wails of alligators, drunk on the lust of wine.

I sing about home, harmonizing with the experimental strums of ukeleles and guitar chords.

There is so much beauty in being alone. And this does not need to be about loneliness. In fact, I am surrounded by an audience of stimulants. That grass darting out from beneath layers of snow like green, spiky freckles. That sexy hippie at food co-op. The flavor of this farmer’s market feast. This laughter, contagious and marvelous. An unzipped secret from front pocket because the space is safe now and so are the ones beside me.

On a Monday, I gather inside a room full of queers and activists. I share a story from my past, no longer present but still a part of me. Suddenly, there is a dialogue. Embrace of collarbones and tears. This is why we speak. This is why we create. This is why we travel.

 

Stories. Telling. A Performance.

Tonight, an evening of Storytellers. Poets. Activists. Educators.

Join Persist Health Project and come to The Space at Tompkins @ 75 East 4th St. NYC     8-9:30pm

Featuring: Puma Perl, Dominick, Aimee Herman, Lily Fury, Chance Krempasky, Synn Stern and Crystal Hayes.

For more information, go to:  Our Stories. Our Lives. A Storytelling Event.

losing one’s religion.

Dear God,

Everytime I take my clothes off, I stop believing in you. How about we keep this transmission going.

…aimee.

dis/en/t/angle.

Call my chest a slow-motion tangle of inflation.

Walk backwards in order to remain longer.

Give up adjectives for a year and settle for verbs and pronouns. You swim. You gather. You kiss. You handle.

The moon will continue to gorge on sky. It will fluctuate in weight and one must ask themselves what all this has to do with them.

Imagine falling in love with a human, rather than what defines them as such. [to see/ love beyond gender of genitalia]

Gather yesterday’s history to remind you not to return.

Call all of this research.

Somewhere not too far, you will find someone who does not require an apology for your past. When this human is found, do not not not let them go.

an excerpt of introductions.

This is an excerpted piece entitled, “Dear Freud”, from a magical evening fusing various poets, musicians and artists together into one room to celebrate the magic of poetry and sound. It was at the Pomegranate Gallery in NYC, put together by Poetry Teachers NYC.

I am so proud to be a part of Poetry Teachers NYC, which is an organization interested in creating spaces for creative folks to perform, translate, and represent their own versions of language. We host poetry workshops and performance series all over NYC. Our next workshop will be through Bowery Arts & Sciences. Our workshops will consist of 3 Teachers: Dan Dissinger, Aimee Herman, and Megan DiBello. We will focus on a student Reviving old work, Reacting to other students work, as well as Reviewing what they have learned not only in the workshop, but from each other. Class is open to all levels of writing. The classes will consist of discussion, writing, reading, craft, critique, editing, and performance technique. Sundays from 12PM-2PM, 1.5hrs. (starting Dec. 1st) Tickets $99

 

in search of the ones who call themselves ‘other’

I am not looking to add anything [else] to my body. No. I’m just looking to take some things away.

The whole time we were together, I wanted to ask what caused her voice to twist like that. Some might call it an accent; the poet in me calls it curvature of vocal chords. She sat across from me with hair that reminded me of winter: dry and long. Mine was pulled up and I said, “All this red is really a ghost of what I used to be and never was.” I watched her stare her way through me. “This is the last of my feminine.”

And when she asked me how I see my breasts and what I could compare them to, I said, “They are too overt. And although I like them to be touched sometimes, I’d much prefer them paved.”

Tears arrive the moment one admits that there are so many lies laying on skin that movement has become an illness.

I belong to no group because all the things I call myself look (and feel) like nothing that exists. Where are the ones who search for the gender neutral bathrooms because those stick figures are difficult to connect to.

She said, “So, you don’t want to be a man and you are hesitant to be woman. Where would you like to rest?” 

And I think about the human who rejected me because I bind my breasts sometimes and if gender is a celebration, then why must I choose a side? Will I ever find a lover who understands that bodies are like books because they are bound and they are indexed and the ones who do not plagiarize will cite their sources and these bodies transgress. And these bodies question. And these bodies mark up rooms with their footnotes.

She called me brave and I watched her eyes turn into paused oceans. I’d describe my own corneas as shell-shocked. And when she asked me if I had hope, I said: each day remains its own entity, its own gathering of endurance.

These bones and skin…..smoke. Fumes of language and [mis]understandings. As I figure this self out, I will find others finding their way out and in as well. There are so many of us out there. Floating. Fondling our question marks.

a different kind of fondle.

“I was never insane except upon occasion when my heart was touched”–Edgar Allan Poe

Everyday, a disrobe so different than the night or day before that you wonder how many bones really entertain themselves in you. I mean, how do these wrists still endure. You ask about that tattoo, misspelled and crooked. It is more about the ink that has remained all these years. There are imprints from the shackles and that time where padded room forced you indoors. There is that invisible stain on throat from when belt wrapped itself around and around and you realized that ceilings are not as strong as they need to be. Just don’t let go. Try to look past fear of abandonment and cracked ribcage from all those break-ins. Persist. Carry on. Hang on to the ledge of paper with your name at the top. All that room has been left for you to transcribe your worry and reasons. Poetry is not jut a genre; it is a prescription. It is a remedy. It is the love affair you have been searching for.

a grim arithmetic

“It is not a matter of words for things. Rather it is a matter of distance between the word and the thing” (Nathalie Stephens).

It is not a matter of the limbs of speech, rather the foliage growing from it. 

1. Pasts are like bones. They grow and rip shards of internal bruising from within. When is the right time to disrobe. When is the right time to tell a new lover about the time you _______ or _________ and how about when you used to ____________ and almost ________ because of  ____________. My baggage is mismatched and crumbled. It has been stolen and lost, but always finds its way back to me with pieces missing.

2. Sole mate < or = to soul mate. There is so much fear in learning how to kiss a new mouth. Some lips are dressed in whale fat and others are waxed and peppermint’d. I can love beyond the parts. What I search for now is to find another who sees beyond mine.

3. Stop asking what she is. It is not always one answer; it is not always a word that has been assigned sound.

4. I desperately held onto love as though it could just exist through and with one person. And then, I met another. And then another after that one. When we think love is gone, there is (always) another human breathing up earth…on their way to you. Just inhale and be ready.

5. Pass (verb) 1 move or cause to move in a specified direction:/ change from one state or condition to another: . / die (used euphemistically):/ go past or across; leave behind or on one side in proceeding: / go beyond the limits of; surpass; exceed:/ come to an end……../ / / It does not always have to be this or that. There is so much empowerment in the “other” and in the “in between” exploration of all sides. When I bind [some of my] parts, I am just trying to allow room for silence. Beyond the masculine, there are syllables that have no gender.  [I’ve spent over three decades trying to pass and I am just now figuring out that none of it made sense for a reason.]

6. Everything that came before today is a rorshach’d survival stain. That is, memories are like lovers; they never really leave us.

7. How to love or lust away from what hides behind zippers and skin.

8. Do not wait for death to remember them.

9. Before supper, burn fragments of what must be left behind and what needs to remain.

10. Gorge on the kindled harassment of stanzas that question every entity on [your] skin; this is what happens when the only thing left to distract are pronunciated infernos.