For three plus years, maybe four, but less than seven, I have been sloooooowly working on a manuscript of short stories. One of these stories has recently been published by the online press, pigeon pages. Please Check them out and read my story!
Tag Archives: “aimee herman”
Rainbow of Crows
for Jules and Rebecca and Jessica (summoners of wisdom)
None of this was here before, yet I can’t remember what you looked like without. All the hair on your arms got burnt somehow by July or nocturnal angels. You can call that scar a footnote to the rest of you. It doesn’t have to be tragic or metaphorical. Like that time you swam over disconnected limbs and tried to imagine the shape they used to belong to.
None of this is because of you.
One of the hardest parts about leaving is the moon is never available for a one-on-one and when you try to dial its number, all you get are the sounds of birds’ wings crashing.
Like an applause. Like the milky rust of a stubborn teardrop. Like a heat rash on the part of your body billboards tell you to flatten. Like the horizon on a fingernail. Like what happens when you emerge from a corn maze and at the end, a rainbow of crows.
Tonight! Performance in Boulder, Colorado!!!
EAST MEETS WEST MEETS SOMEWHERE IN-BETWEEN POETRY READING
FEATURING :
j/j hastain & max wolf valerio
& rebecca diaz & aimee herman
THURSDAY, JUNE 21ST 7PM-9PM
Trident Book shop is located at 940 Pearl St. / Boulder, CO
Max Wolf Valerio is an iconoclastic poet and writer, and a long-transitioned man of transsexual history. A chapbook Animal Magnetism (eg press) appeared in 1984. Recent works include a collaboration with photographer Dana Smith, Mission Mile Trilogy +1; poems in the anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2013). His memoir, The Testosterone Files (Seal Press, 2006) was a Lambda Finalist for 2006, and a book of poems The Criminal: The Invisibility of Parallel Forces is forthcoming soon from EOAGH Books in NYC.
j/j hastain is a collaborator, writer and maker of things. j/j performs ceremonial gore. Chasing and courting the animate and potentially enlivening decay that exists between seer and singer, j/j simply hopes to make the God/dess of stone moan and nod deeply through the waxing and waning cycles of the moon. j/j hastain is the inventor of The Mystical Sentence Projects and is author of several cross-genre books including the trans-genre book libertine monk (Scrambler Press), Apophallation Sketches (MadHat Press), Luci: a Forbidden Soteriology (Black Radish Books), The Non-Novels (Spuyten Duyvil) The Xyr Trilogy: a Metaphysical Romance of Experimental Realisms, and Priest/ess. j/j’s writing has recently appeared in Caketrain, Trickhouse, The Collagist, Apasiology, Lunamopolis, Aufgabe, and Tarpaulin Sky.
Rebecca Diaz graduated from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She grew up in rural Minnesota beside the Red Lake River (in the ugliest county in America) and it taught her almost everything she knows about life and writing. She is a poet and fiction writer whose work examines the tributaries of language, healing, and spiritual practice. She has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Loft Literary Literary Center in Minneapolis, Intermedia Arts Program for Emerging Writers, and has received support from the Jerome Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board.
Aimee Herman is a queer performance artist, writer and teacher currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. Aimee has two full-length books of poems, meant to wake up feeling (great weather for MEDIA) and to go without blinking (BlazeVOX books), and has work featured in a range of journals and anthologies including Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics (Nightboat Books) Aimee is also a singer/ukulele player in the poemusic band Hydrogen Junkbox.
In celebration of MUSIC!
My band, Hydrogen Junkbox, also featuring David Lawton, Zita Zenda, and Starchilde, is now part of the 21st century!
What I mean is…….we have a BLOG!
Please visit. Please send us comments. Please ask us to play our music for you. I am learning that all the band-aids I ever put on my skin meant nothing.
What I mean is, music has become my salve. Also so have these humans who make beautiful music with me.
(click here): HYDROGEN JUNKBOX
How to be Uncomfortable
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.
Upcoming Performance in Boulder, Colorado!!!
EAST MEETS WEST MEETS SOMEWHERE IN-BETWEEN POETRY READING
FEATURING :
j/j hastain & max wolf valerio
& rebecca diaz & aimee herman
THURSDAY, JUNE 21ST 7PM-9PM
Trident Book shop is located at 940 Pearl St. / Boulder, CO
Max Wolf Valerio is an iconoclastic poet and writer, and a long-transitioned man of transsexual history. A chapbook Animal Magnetism (eg press) appeared in 1984. Recent works include a collaboration with photographer Dana Smith, Mission Mile Trilogy +1; poems in the anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2013). His memoir, The Testosterone Files (Seal Press, 2006) was a Lambda Finalist for 2006, and a book of poems The Criminal: The Invisibility of Parallel Forces is forthcoming soon from EOAGH Books in NYC.
j/j hastain is a collaborator, writer and maker of things. j/j performs ceremonial gore. Chasing and courting the animate and potentially enlivening decay that exists between seer and singer, j/j simply hopes to make the God/dess of stone moan and nod deeply through the waxing and waning cycles of the moon. j/j hastain is the inventor of The Mystical Sentence Projects and is author of several cross-genre books including the trans-genre book libertine monk (Scrambler Press), Apophallation Sketches (MadHat Press), Luci: a Forbidden Soteriology (Black Radish Books), The Non-Novels (Spuyten Duyvil) The Xyr Trilogy: a Metaphysical Romance of Experimental Realisms, and Priest/ess. j/j’s writing has recently appeared in Caketrain, Trickhouse, The Collagist, Apasiology, Lunamopolis, Aufgabe, and Tarpaulin Sky.
Rebecca Diaz graduated from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She grew up in rural Minnesota beside the Red Lake River (in the ugliest county in America) and it taught her almost everything she knows about life and writing. She is a poet and fiction writer whose work examines the tributaries of language, healing, and spiritual practice. She has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Loft Literary Literary Center in Minneapolis, Intermedia Arts Program for Emerging Writers, and has received support from the Jerome Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board.
Aimee Herman is a queer performance artist, writer and teacher currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. Aimee has two full-length books of poems, meant to wake up feeling (great weather for MEDIA) and to go without blinking (BlazeVOX books), and has work featured in a range of journals and anthologies including Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics (Nightboat Books) Aimee is also a singer/ukulele player in the poemusic band Hydrogen Junkbox.
How to Combat Insomnia
His bones are powder; at night, she gathers them like a dandelion corsage and rubs them into her aches; he snores angular love affairs; due to jealousy and prior commitments to mania, she scratches hate crimes into his skin in retaliation; his aging hair a snowdrift; she parts her thighs and climbs onto his Winter because someone once told her midnight orgasms are like warm milk; his veins are paralyzed caterpillars; she plucks them out like bloated guitar strings, flosses between each tooth and finally falls asleep inside the river of his blood.
Purple
Each time you try to understand how it got there, it changes shape. This eggplant. This deep winter storm sky on your left thigh. Color of your childhood bedroom before everything in you grew too dark to see. Maybe you fell in your sleep, emerged, all without remembering. The impact of dreams. Maybe your bones grew angry at your skin. A fight toward bruising. It would be beautiful if it wasn’t about a frozen blood clot. It could be an art exhibition. Ink blot or Rorschach investigation into mind. It could be a message from your knees. Your palms try to rub it away. This curious stain. This morse code of suffer. And in the morning when you wake, with ache on your fingertips, you look toward the bruise and it is gone.
Fossil Fueled
Everyone else rubbed UV protectant onto skin, flirted shoulders with oncoming traffic and the wind while he walked to Prospect Park with suicide note and kerosene, giving himself back to the earth. There are days I think about setting my scars on fire to see what new shape I might melt into. There are days I grow numb trying to understand how far down the trees' roots go or why letters in an alphabet like LGBTQ make people so angry. Just yesterday, I breathed in eight million skin cells and the secret messages of squirrels. Everyone seems to be on a diet of hate these days; I just want to get through a day where tongues tie us into love letters not tombstones.
Upcoming Performance: Saturday, March 24th
NIGHT IN THE NAKED CITY 6: Celebrating New York Poets @ Cornelia Street Cafe / 29 Cornelia St/ NYC 6pm-8pm $10 (which includes a drink)
I’m looking forward to reading a new poem and performing a new song about that time I met Lou Reed (what a dream) and he fondled my thumb. What a great line-up of poets: Eric Alter, Jane LeCroy, Steve Dalachinsky, Thomas Fucaloro, Obsidian, Puma Perl, George Wallace and Matthew Hupert (host, curator, and poet extraordinaire)
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Aimee Herman 