With every cut of skin,
a circus of blood–
drops trapezing off veins
juggling moles, sun blisters
elephant trunk disconnected
from its rest– an arm
abandoned bodies may also be called
museums, the kind that are abandoned too
and underneath, dancers dancing death
a glow-in-the-dark complaint letter
The moon is my pepper spray
These mountains, they climb me
I am floating over prairie dogs
I am tangled up in trees.
I swing on the scratches–
red twigs splintering your back.
Two erasure poems
scar your chest.
You sweat glittery, uneven tattoos
mosh-pitting your thighs.
Your eyes, a car door slam
during traffic, hitchhiking off road.
When we kiss, I taste a dungeon
of scars– handcuffed and bleeding
a baptismal cut-up.
first published by great weather for MEDIA
When Brooklyn felt too heavy to hold onto, I moved to Boulder, Colorado. There, I continued my undergraduate degree (which by that time spanned seven years) and gave myself permission to slow down.
The mountains became my new lover; I strutted my nude to them every morning against large window overlooking their height and contours.
Being away from New York allowed me time to see other ways of living. I breathed in the smell of earth, minus the impressively potent stench of urine. Buildings were uninterrupted by graffiti. Bricks were just bricks. Bars and businesses closed earlier than I was used to, but this just gifted me more hours of sleep.
As the weeks and months fell at my feet, I found myself longing for the smells and sirens of New York. During the day, I was present in Colorado. At night, I fantasized about Brooklyn and the boroughs that suddenly seemed too far away.
I began romantic entanglements with woman, and as we’d knock our lips together, I thought about 4th Avenue where I had a panic attack outside a gay bar and had to get nine stitches in my chin. I made love to a hippie, while imagining West 4th Street serenading me, signing its Stonewall history into my skin. I had a brief affair with a slam poet, but all I could think about was Prospect Park during Autumn with the leaves straddling several shades of red and orange and the music of their crunch against green and brown ground.
One year plus some weeks and months into my Rocky Mountain relocation, and I am sitting in a waiting room, about fifteen minutes early for my therapy appointment. I peruse the coffee table full of well-read magazines and almost gasp when I notice a surprising old friend: Time Out New York. At the time, I thought it odd to be sitting there, a periodical tease, flaunting its lit readings and gallery openings.
I looked around me as though I was picking up a dirty magazine, flipping to the centerfold. I felt so guilty, knowing once I opened it, I’d be reminded of all I was missing. So, I frantically flipped, before anyone came out.
Now, I am not exaggerating when I confess that I was sweating. Triathlon sweat. Walking across country wearing wool socks and an overcoat in August sweat.
It felt just like sex often does: every vein being tangled with, coupled with guilt and remorse. I scanned the museums, angry that I was missing an exhibition with Marina Abramovic. I noted my favorite novelist was doing a book signing. A new restaurant had opened in my old neighborhood. All the photos of all the people taunted me with their big city happiness. I was reaching my orgasm and it was actually real this time. I threw the magazine across the room, just before my therapist opened her door and gestured for me to come in.
I spent just over three years in Colorado and in that time, I lived in five different apartments: a studio, two bedroom where I lived with a hoarder, another studio where the building became infiltrated with bed bugs, a one bedroom with my partner and dog, and then the bottom floor of a house with porch, backyard and nearby ice cream shop. New York never left me, even though I tried to lose its number. I distracted myself with quinoa and kale (two words I never uttered before moving to Colorado). I became a full-time hippie, with dreadlocks and body hair and bare feet and……I’m not sure how any of that correlates to being a bohemian, but I felt free. Free‘er.
And when no one was looking, I got out my Time Out New York, hidden beneath mattress, old Metro card, tiny bits of paper with directions to various city haunts, took off all my clothes and masturbated to the memory of my favorite city.
It’s been over six years that I’ve been back in Brooklyn and suddenly, I find myself daydreaming again of the city I disregarded. At night, when New York City finally sleeps, I reach underneath mattress and find atlas with dog-eared page for Colorado, fingering East Colfax Avenue and route 287, dreaming of the Rockies….
for the humans building levees in Boulder, Colorado and especially for the one driving around wearing rebel cape
Boulder is under sacrament; what was inwardly gathering is making its way through the street. A city submerged and there is something about Boulder every time, something about its cracks and crevices that make it animate, alive, being. Makes me sketch my own body over its terrain, to lie down in its topography, the curves down my side along its front range, my belly its basin, my veins and sinew down over its expanding creeks. When it was burning, I too, felt the burn off of other, dead, dried out selves and with this
with this
with this
I feel the washing away of man-made. I feel a baptismal flushing over every man-constructed roadway, we were not symbiotic with land so what amassed is releasing, christening concrete, carrying free radicals downstream, toxins of manbuilt frothing up a layer of foam, crashing against magnesium levees. This is a language we have yet to learn. Is it wrong to root for the river flowing? I am this bodycity, detoxifying. I am forgiven with its destruction, ashamed of the warming we cause
through this
through this
There are enough trees to build a boat around this earth and when we carve out the bark into planks of home, we can float ourselves out of here. Unravel the maps you’ve been hoarding beneath your tongue. Your spit is the lacquer that will lubricate the lacerations from this flood. Follow me out.
and over
and over
Over there, a bearded human of glowing heart proportions steers a metal animal with rubber limbs and engine steam. Calls out to the ones who cannot swim to jump in jump in jump in. Listens to blue lips, lies down on blue shag of alone, takes time to heal. Another sits wide open, familyless, exposed in his empty room. The sky may be one giant cape to cover up what we’ve done but even the clouds cannot help but weep when reminded of this devastation.
so weep
so weep
so weep your creeks further, wider, over more than man-made, across aroma of Nebraskshit, 1800 miles to curly stoop made of crowned sediment and rooted in I-am-here I-am-here I-am-here (for you). Your water is biblical so wash away indents of childhood, remind us, we are the sacristy, the rooms which hold sacred vessels. Remind man-made of heart-made, of lying down in floods of reflection and loving it; remind us that these are the moments we should never forget
When I moved back to Brooklyn a few years ago, I had some hopes of what I wanted to do. Become a student again and work toward/complete my MFA in Creative Writing. Read books by people whose names I have never pronounced. Wear poems on my body because clothes never quite fit me right. Meet other poets and performance artists who would challenge me and inspire my thoughts. Learn. Love. Locate.
Some things we can control, some things we must create.
After a magical journey to Boulder, Colorado several years earlier, I attended Naropa University, home of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. I found stages, ACTivists, music makers, gender warriors and….my fire. I lost sleep– in exchange for beautiful love affairs with patchouli-smoked skin and marathon poetry evenings.
My arrival back to NYC was emotional, but as I shifted my body into overpriced desks, I soaked in Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Frank O’Hara and others.
This led me to completing a book, which later got published.
This led me to finding the most supportive group of performance poets and writers, who led me to their stages and spaces and into their lives.
And…
this surprisingly led me back to some of the magical folks from Boulder, Colorado.
I learned of an extremely innovative project by the Quens poet Megan DiBello, who was poem’ing in Boulder at the same time as I all those years ago.
Megan wanted to create a space…an experimental school…where people of all backgrounds could take affordable creative workshops from artists teaching poetry, song/music writing, photography, fiction and the business of writing.
She pressed her thoughts and dreams into an action, which led to Poetry Teachers NYC.
I am so proud to be a part of this collective, which hosts monthly open mics at Milk & Roses in Brooklyn, creatively diverse workshops and various performance events.
But like many dreams, there needs to be some more movement. And through movement, we must:
KICK!!!!!!!!!!
We have officially launched our KICKSTARTER.
In a time where many of us are trying to live out our dreams, there is no time better than NOW to support each other. Even if it’s the amount you set aside for your cups of coffee for the week, this money will lead to artists working and teaching and creating.
Watch our video. Learn more about who/what we are. Support. Because as humans, we need to give back sometimes to recognize the beauty and inspiration from collaboration.
Sometimes you need to fall against concrete and feel a little blood eek out of a knuckle to let the audience know you are about to say something.
Sometimes you need to speak out a word one hundred times, articulating its rhythm differently with each exhale, pace as though that step is erasing the one before it to let the audience know something is about to happen.
First, a memory.
*
I am audience in a sea of audience. Human with shaved skin from scalp to toes, pushes out an operatic gasp of moments, which ends in the auctioning off of this Human’s blood. Body sits in upholstered chair with a needle lunged beneath skin. Audience watches as blood gathers into a syringe. There is silence. Cough. Cell phone heart beat. Cough. Sneeze. Silence still. Fidget. Cough. Whisper. When enough blood exits and gathers, Human walks closer to the audience and breaks the wall between us all. For over an hour this Human talks through us. Now, at us. The bidding begins at $5.
But be aware, blurted Hairless Blood-lost Human. In Europe, someone paid two hundred dollars for this plasma.
Americans have less or they want more for less or or or but someone left that night with forty dollars missing from his pocket and a vial of blood.
*
Last night, Poets gathered. Many who first met in a small mountain town in Colorado where meditation is encouraged and flags wave and bowing replaces hand shakes and the chai is like liquid crack and and and
Last night, a man handed out index cards. Tasks for each Poet. And one by one, these Poets performed without performing.
Microphones are really just skinny radios playing out the songs and scratched up sonnets from our heads, leaked out of lipsticked mouths and chapped mouths and scholarly mouths. Repeat a word and see what happens when you remove a syllable or chant out its antonym. Cover body with lost poems, left by another, wallpapering the ground. Nudity is not always necessary to reveal the bare. Look closely at the furrows of a forehead; they reveal far more than tits can.
*
So I am learning a new instrument called tambourine purchased for three dollars at Brooklyn stoop sale. And I allow it to gather up the shake in my body. And there is no such thing as a stage when audience gathers from every direction and sometimes schedules and silences need to be interrupted by the musical accompaniment of a typewriter or holiday-themed harmony.
What do you mean you are a performance artist? How do you perform art?
To perform without performing is to connect with the blur/ the unsketch’d/ the disarray of ideas in your head. Sometimes poems can be silent and all you need to do is act out the chaos that hid in each stanza. So this time I did not need my paper. And this time I followed the trance of emotions inside me. And this time I felt even further that this is what it means to be alive.
28,251 steps. I hitched a ride on my body and chose toes over wheels to guide me from beautiful house on tree-lined street toward downtown Denver.
Men sleep on rocks, which outline the Platte River. I chew on Brooklyn farmer’s market fuji apple as I whisper a poem into the air, in hopes the wind pushes it toward them. I have not seen a pigeon in twenty-four hours and the air smells of grapefruit-suckled roses and freshly cut grass.
A woman stops me on 16th street in the financial district.
“Sister,” she says. “Sister, I’m eight months pregnant.”
And she shows me a belly that could be distended from housed human or intense starvation.
“Sister, do you have anything? Can you give me something, sugar?”
I nod. Apologize. Then, I offer her a granola bar, which she aggressively declines.
The homeless are picky here, I think.
I am wearing black high top converse sneakers. Tall rainbow striped socks reaching just above my knees. Jeans cut into shorts, cuffed. A loose, white t-shirt with various shades of blue and faded lettering. And a black vest. Throughout this walk, I am whistled at and I wonder: Is it the knots of frizz in my hair that turn these men on? The stench of menstruation emitting from inside my purple underwear? The undeclared pattern of scarred incisions on my forearms?
I keep walking. 17th street and Race. St Marks Cafe, home of the best peanut butter and chocolate chip cookie that is like eating a prayer. I opt for a cafe au lait with soy milk and a square shaped raspberry scone. Outside, I sit with first coffee of the day. Notebook gathers words. When all the caffeine has moved from clear mug to pale body, I continue walking.
I head toward Colfax for Tattered Cover bookshop. I search through poetry books, feel disappointed by the lackluster erotica section and move toward gay/lesbian/women studies shelves. Excitement puffs up my body when I recognize names from NYC writers in various anthologies. When we write, we don’t always know where we may be shelved.
A visit to past home on York Street led me to feel sick with sadness. Our garden was replaced with wood chips and impersonal ceramic planters. There was a wreath on our front door. No wind chime.
I used to think: If I turn off the radio, all the music and voices will stop talking. The music will pause until I rotate the dial back on.
Life, unfortunately, doesn’t wait for us to return.
I cross streets I used to cross with black-haired pup by my side; I am alone this time. I am occasionally interrupted by my shadow or a drip of sweat traveling from neck to collarbone. Cars don’t really honk here. Homeowners water their lawns. Garbage remain in cans and off sidewalks. The wind is a meditation, rather than a disruption.
At Cheeseman Park, I search for a bench in the shade. I grab a handful of nuts from the trail mix in my backpack. Suddenly, I am no longer alone. Two squirrels are close enough to pet and I decide to share my almonds. One squirrel turns into two, then three, and suddenly I’m surrounded. I fear being hijacked for my snacks as they hop onto hind paws and move closer.
“You’ve had enough,” I say, in the high-pitched voice I often use with dogs.
They are poor listeners or they speak limited English or they abhor rules and authority. So, I decide to switch benches. The soundtrack here is so subtly peaceful and I never want to leave; sometimes, I wish I never had in the first place.
Dear Colorado,
Remember when we first met?
My hair was not so red and not so long and not so knotty.
I arrived early in the morning with my sister after a long car ride from Brooklyn on Interstate 80 where meals were devoured with the speed of miles on green Honda Civic.
I had no idea how wide you were.
I heard all about those mountains, but didn’t expect to climb them or picnic against your grooves or kiss at the top of one on a day that I watched turn into night.
Your dirt is cleaner than the dirt I grew accustomed to.
And although you are land-locked, I took naps and carved poems into my notebook by Boulder’s creek.
I lived in five homes: two studios, two apartments and the bottom level of a home.
I fell in love. I earned a degree. I hosted an open mic. I became a freelance writer. I performed. I learned how to knit. I learned what kale is. I learned what quinoa is. I found community. I found activism. I found music. I found my self.
Denver, I’m aware of your parks (over 200).
Boulder, I’m aware of your bike lanes and poetic lineage.
But…..
Will you remember me?
Will you recognize me?
When I shake off the dirt of Brooklyn from my body/ I will ask you if I have changed/ And I might inquire if I’ve grown/ And I may want to know if it’s OK that I’ve returned.
Sometimes, we just need to leave in order to know what has been left behind…….
Aimee Herman 