On Saturday, January 21st, join me and several other storytellers for an evening exploring the theme: NEW.
WHERE? JUNKYARD SOCIAL CLUB 2525 Frontier Ave in Boulder, CO
WHEN? Doors: 7pm Show: 8pm
HOW MUCH? $20 in advance
FOR TICKETS, GO TO: https://junkyardsocialclub.org/events/#storycollective
Sometimes we chase books, hoping to climb our way inside the chapters, wanting to exist within the worlds created by the writers writing them.
Sometimes we find electronic versions, hoping our words can find their way within the glowing screen.
So we write. And sometimes, we send out our words into the air hoping they will find a home inside a book, a screen, a microphone.
Thank you to rough cut press, for allowing my words to land inside your illuminated page, for supporting my poem (part of a much longer piece) and encouraging me to keep writing.
Find my poem, procedure in three parts in their latest issue 43.
NEURONAUTIC INSTITUTE PRESENTS…….
Poetry in Zoomland…..April 22nd at 7pm EST
featuring:
Aimee Herman
Nicca Ray
Mike Topp
Hosting and curated by Matthew Hupert
I am looking forward to reading poems I haven’t written yet. I hope you join me. There is also an open mic!
This is a great monthly reading series that used to be housed at KGB bar in NYC. Due to the pandemic KGB and so many other venues that have supported and encouraged poetry over the years is really struggling. Below is a link to donate (if you are able):
https://fundly.com/literary-landmark-kgb-bar-nyc-aid
This reading will be streaming live on FB LIVE the NeuroNautic Institute / NeuroNautic Press page
(https://www.facebook.com/NeuroNautic-Institute-Neuronautic-Press-109548260772346/)
Thank you to Kendra Allen and The Boiler for choosing my poetic essay for runner-up for The Boiler Prize. The Boiler is a great, online journal that celebrates creative work that “turns up the heat, whistles, and stands up to pressure.”
A little about this poem. I keep going back to a moment in a classroom with a teacher who told me to move on from writing about the body. Clearly I must have other things to write about, no? What I tell my students is that sometimes we have to keep writing about the same thing until it feels like it has said all it needs to say. We never tell people to stop writing about love. I mean, aren’t there enough love poems to last us another few centuries? Love takes on all sorts of shapes, smells, attitudes, textures, after-tastes. There is no ONE WAY of love.
So here is my body. It is over forty years old and I barely know it. I know I have mistreated it. I know I forget to ask it what it needs, wants. I have difficulty forgiving it. That is to say, I have difficulty forgiving myself. My body and I are strangers, therefore, the writing of it continues. By writing about my body, I am learning it as it is forgiving me.
There are stories inside my body I am afraid of. They are impolite and not exactly appropriate as conversational interludes. Sometimes I think about cutting up the years off my body, but I’ve got enough potholes, and even what haunts me makes me me. No?
So as my therapist has been suggesting and encouraging me: let go of metaphors and just say it. But I’ve still got retraining to do.
For instance, I am sad most days. This pandemic has given me an excuse to play hide n-go seek with myself. Wait. That looks like a metaphor. Let me try again. This pandemic has given me an excuse to be alone, to isolate. Most days, I wait for the clock to tell me the day is over.
I digress. If you are still reading, what I am trying to say is: there is no story inside the body that doesn’t deserve a voice, a notebook to scream into, a place to exhale all its blood and shiver. I am still forming. I am still deciding who I am. I am still removing myself from this body, sometimes. I am still learning how to survive being in it.
Read more here: THE BOILER
great weather for MEDIA is celebrating their newest anthology and I get to join them tonight, as I read my short story published in their anthology, Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea.
It’s been a loooong time since I’ve done any sort of performance art, but I dug into my musty suitcase of handmade costumes and I am excited to perform a movement, Burlesque’y, drag, political, (what other words can I use to describe this so you will come), funny, silly, sexy piece at:
MUFFINS IN THE WINDOW, NYC’s longest-running variety show.
When? Thursday, June 20th at 7:30pm sharp!
Where? Dixon Place located at 161 Chrystie St in NYC
Also featuring: Trae Durica (swoon), Lambie, Ethan Cohen, and Wae Messed.
Looking forward to being a guest at St Francis de Sales Catholic Church on Thursday, June 6th to read from “Everything Grows“. The event begins at 7pm.
St Francis de Sales Catholic Church
135 East 96th Street
New York, NY 10128
Books available for sale at event. Light refreshments will be served.
Suggested donation – $10 cash only (proceeds benefit Ali Forney Center)
You are in your body. The simplest sentence with the most complicated meaning. You are never in your body.
The room is packed full of spandex and sweat, prayer flags and meaningful art, tattoos and body hair. You kindly ask your muscles to wake, knowing they’ve been in a slumber for months (maybe years).
The teacher begins with Mary Oliver and you realize you are in the right place at the right time for the first time in over four years.
Oliver wrote, “When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder/if I have made of my life something/particular, and real./I don’t want to find myself sighing and/frightened,/or full of argument./I don’t want to end up simply having visited/this world.”
Whenever you do yoga, it’s like you are on a first date with your body. You are tentative, yet bold. You want to push, you want to run away with this body that is suddenly impressing you, you want to hide.
The teacher reminds you to breathe. You wonder how long it has been since you’ve let your lungs free.
You contemplate the particularities of your life. Are you just visiting? What is the shape of it? How involved are you, really? Are you just visiting?
So you empty your pockets. Words fall out and you decide to create a cut-up of your meandering thoughts. Your brain is like a puzzle and you’ve been wondering for years if one piece is missing.
You think about that young person you saw yesterday, her arms covered in travel stamps. You feel dizzy trying to conjure up where you are actually from, where home is, the antonym of visitor.
When the class is over, your eyes are blurry. Your entire being feels wrung out. You run into someone you used to know when you used to be someone else. She tells you she has absolutely nothing to complain about. You want to ask her what it feels like to feel this way.
Maybe you are just visiting. Maybe you have never left. Maybe you have never remained.
Later, you walk into the rain and feel the drench of mountain juice on your skin, as the sky turns fourteen shades of blue and green and it feels like a song you used to sing or one you’ve been thinking about writing.
If you want to be uncomfortable, try on a brassiere at a store where the lighting in the dressing room reminds you every mistake you ever made.
Sew every inch of muscle and taste bud you castrated off your tongue because (at the time, you thought) biting it was better than making someone else uncomfortable or mad. Sometimes it is necessary to lose all your friends in order to stand up for the most important person in your life: you.
Break up with your therapist because you are finally learning how to take care of Because you want to. Because it is not working out. Because unfortunately your bank account is on a juice cleanse and even $10 a week feels like Because you are learning how to comfort your soul through meditation and contemplation and sometimes you just need to take a break from psychotherapy.
Share your art with strangers.
Share a meal with strangers.
Tell the truth. Recognize how often you don’t.
Travel to a land you used to know and relearn it as the person you are now.
Aimee Herman 