Kind of Like High School

first published by great weather for MEDIA

 

It is similar to when you are in high school. You are in the cafeteria and the smells of imposter pizza and imitation chicken nuggets lead you to almost forget about your deafening hunger. You’ve got your lunch and your over-stuffed backpack and your quintessential post-pubescent pimples and you’re ready to search out a table to sit at.

Usually, you’d be sitting with _______, but you are no longer speaking because of _________ or __________, but probably because ___________ said ______________.

So, you sit elsewhere and pretend that person who you used to call your best friend simply no longer exists. This friend who knows that you used to pick your nose and then eat your findings. Who knows that you had a crush on Judith Light from “Who’s the Boss”. Who knows that you sometimes forget to brush your teeth and hair. Who knows simply all of you (thus far).

You pretend to easily digest your lunch even though you ache. Even though this friend who was like part of you is like a stranger now.

It is like that.

Except this isn’t high school and the friend who held the other half of your BFF charm is your body. Yeah, it’s like that.

But here is the twist.

Cut to twelve years later or fifteen or twenty and you see this friend and you don’t know how to act. Can you just say hello after all this time? Do you pretend you didn’t spread rumors about each other and that most (if not all) were true?

Somewhere in my twenties I had a massive fight with my body and banned it from sitting at my lunch table. What I mean to say is: I ignored IT. Gave IT away to strangers. Handed IT over to people who didn’t even care enough to learn how many vowels are in my name. Dressed IT up, even though the lace was itchy and the push-up was too pushy.

It doesn’t matter why (that’s another month/another poem/another story), but what matters is I let go of IT. I stopped addressing IT, asking IT questions: Does this feel ok? Am I mispronouncing you? What is off limits?

After years of the silent treatment, I started to call my body QUEER. It felt slanted, but not exactly toward anything specific, just away from WOMAN. Away from GIRL. Away from SHE.

I covered up the parts I gave away. I ripped off my pronoun. I cut my hair. I grew out my hair. I asked my breasts to stop addressing me. I grew attracted to those who slanted too. I liked the ones who understood what it was like to be engaged in bouts of silence with their bodies. I liked not having to explain why I cried every time I was touched.

For me, I just wanted to erase everything I had done to IT. Hide the parts that had been broken into (by others and myself).

And then. One day—it happened to be a Saturday—I saw IT. We sort of made eye contact, but both immediately turned away. I almost didn’t recognize it; it had been so long.

*

When I was old enough to get a tattoo (18), my friend and I (who shared the same birthday) went to a small shop on route 9 in a strip mall in New Jersey, and got inked. She got a fairy on her lower back. I got the WOMAN sign.

I was not yet OUT (lesbian) but a FEMINIST and excited by my breasts which were finally growing on me. I wanted to look like her and all the other girls in my school.

Eighteen years later, I added to that woman sign because it didn’t quite speak the truth of how I saw myself. So, I added a MALE to the FEMALE and suddenly I felt a little better.

On this Saturday, where my body and I began to slowly break the silent treatment, I wasn’t quite sure what to say. So many years of reticence. I had forgotten how to approach it.

 

ME: It’s you, isn’t it?

MY BODY: Yeah.

ME: I…I’m not sure if an apology is—

MY BODY: There’s nothing to be sorry about.

ME: But I stopped talking to you.

MY BODY: And I stopped listening.

ME: Is it too late?

MY BODY: Why don’t we go for a walk?

ME: Can I…can I hold your hand?

MY BODY: As long as you don’t let go this time.

Excited to announce my new chapbook of poems

Thank you so much to Essay Press for publishing my chapbook of poems, carpus.

Carpus is a gutting of body, all the kicked up grit of gender and love and (mis)understandings of self

Thank you to the incredible editors who were patient and encouraging: Aimee Harrison (brilliant reader/editor), Travis Sharp (created the cover), and Emily Pifer (video embedder).

READ CARPUS HERE

Let me know what you think! Email me at: aimeeherman@gmail.com

Check out this video of one of the poems featured in the book:

 

how to fall in love with you

I didn’t always hate you, pink. I liked your jellybeans. Your Rainbow Bright hair. Your participatory hue after a summer sunset. I collected cavities from all your bubblegum. Cancelled my mistakes with your erasers. You sugared my lips with your cotton candy. I even liked my meat to look like you in the middle. I may have even pressed your synthetic pink threads against my young pink body, playfully rummaging my hands over all your pinkness.

But now it’s your voice which I cannot seem to get out of my head: high-pitched ponytail and knee socks. You tell me all your rules, pink. Who can wear you. Who can kiss you. And I just can’t eat your jellybeans anymore.

It’s not that I need to love you; I just don’t want to hate you so much.

So I locate your address and travel the distance to find you at home. Pepto Bismol shutters and walkway and door and I know it’s yours.

I search out the music in your pink, pink voice. Try to remember you coat my tongue and wear my lips and there are bits of my body all salmon-colored too.

Pink, I could love you if you weren’t painted on that tool kit, marketed specifically for you-know-who. And pink, I could love you if you weren’t so political. So militant. So girl.

Pink, maybe we could share a meal and eat greens and yellow squash and red, red beets and remember that a color can just be a color. Without wardrobe. Without gender. Without a rule book for who may approach you. I could love you, pink, if you stopped being so pink all the time and mingled with the rest of the far more open-minded rainbow.

the other side of things

I’m trying to understand my inability to sign my name to things.

Recently, I was asked to list all of my scars, every side-effect from every human I’ve ever let inside me. I had to name two references who could locate my left ovary. I went back on medication because I missed having night sweats and hallucinations of solidarity.

I decided to cut all my hair off.

I removed all my clothes, including four of my moles and part of a vein that never seemed useful. I like that my scalp reminds me of a mountain.

Several days ago, I was yelled at by a man who hates white people. Or queer people. Or former Jews. Or drug addicts. Or teachers. I’m not really sure. My lung just couldn’t stay inside me anymore, so it jumped out, crossed the street and I’ve had difficulty breathing ever since.

I kissed a beautiful woman wearing lipstick on her toes, missing one-third of her wrist. I had forgotten how to take off bras, so we just did it wearing straps and confusion.

After the sun had clocked out, I watched a silent movie in the sky starring Anne Bancroft and Gene Wilder. I ran out of popcorn, so I started stealing nasturtiums from the garden I keep inside my pocket. Nothing is ever salty enough.

Maybe I will be approached with a piece of paper in the shape of the Brooklyn Bridge or a fence and I will signature my name in black ink or blueberry preserves and I will not hesitate because when I look out the window every sunflower will be looking straight at the one who most resembles the sun. And we will kiss as though we have invented something no one has ever heard of and our tongues will cure buildings.

Or something like that.

SATURDAY: Cleaning out our closets (a performance about all the ways we come out)

JULY 23rd……Stories and Songs about Coming Out

Cleaning Out Our Closets is featured in the HOT! Festival at Dixon Place, so come and celebrate all the ways we reveal ourselves to others (and ourselves). FEATURING: Aimee Herman and Trae Durica

WHERE? Dixon Place 161 Chrystie St./NYC

WHEN? Door @ 7pm Show 7:30 This is a short show, so please be on time, as it has a running time of 45 minutes.

*There will be poetry books and Keith Haring inspired patches for sale!!!****

 

 

Aimee Herman is a performance artist, poet and teacher, widely published in journals and anthologies. Aimee has two-full length books of poems and is currently writer-in-residence for Big Words, Etc. reading series.

Trae Durica is a poet and artist, whose work has been published by NYSAI and great weather for MEDIA. He will be featured in the BOOG poetry festival in August.

dial tone

I play a furiously combative game of phone tag with my body.

When my body finally picks up, call waiting beeps me out of line.

My body informs me that I am too elusive and not committed enough to my internal infrastructure.

 

There is an uncomfortably long [estimated 437 minutes] bout of silence between my body and I on the telephone.

My body is clearly housing a collection of disgruntlement.

 

I call up 1-800 Flowers and order a bouquet of 

just because with peonies and alstroemeria.

My body sends it back without hesitation.

 

I try again, knowing I have over three decades to make up to my body.

I paste letters to its skin. Create melodies for poems celebrating its bones, even the broken ones.

 

I make my body a meal of coq au vin; it reminds me its a vegetarian.

I bake my body cookies; it tells me it no longer ingests sugar.

 

I pay $4,700 for an apology in the sky. But it was windy that day and by the time my body looked up,

my words had swiped themselves away.

 

Your Reflection: A Coda

first published by great weather for MEDIA

 

You have a difficult time committing to your reflection.

On a Friday, you notice the posture of your neck and you want to file a restraining order against the skin which has begun to rebel in a grilled-cheese-melting-out-of-the-bread sort of way.

Eight months ago, you gave away your full-length mirror to the woman around the corner who said it had “been awhile since she had taken notice of her bottom parts.” Now, sometimes you miss knowing the exact pattern of your cellulite behind your thighs.

You wish your hair was shorter. Straighter, yet more queer. You imagine it darker. Lighter. Streaked like the young ones do. When you walk, before all the passing windows remind you otherwise, you imagine yourself more boyish, younger, less crumpled. 

You are eighteen, when you fall in love for what you think is the first time and decide to add another hole to your body. You pierce your eyebrow to match hers. She wears thick rings, several at a time. You are still figuring out the blur of your identity, so you do the same. Your skin is not strong enough to handle the weight, so the skin flap covering the jewelry gets thinner and thinner. Then, one day after a fight with her or yourself (who remembers), you rip the rings out. You don’t remember blood; you barely remember her now.

You often forget to clip your toenails. You have a difficult time remembering your body that far down.

If this were a movie, your love match would look at all your scars and ask for the stories. While Arcade Fire played in the background. Or Devotchka. Or Boy George. You’d point and lift and reveal as though this were a moment of foreplay. As though your scars are sexy. As though each pale slur is a love letter or romantic elegy.

Your teeth remind you of your adolescent rebellion. You wish you had an addiction to floss, and not to late night jelly beans. You told a lover once that you used to wear braces. They were convinced you meant on your legs.

“What do you mean you’re an atheist? Clearly you’re a Jew. I mean, your nose.” This was spoken by a co-worker. Or lover. It might have been a student. Or a cashier at the corner bodega. You never let anyone touch it. For years, you feared it was unstable and could collapse at any time. I mean, the drugs. I mean, the smells of trauma you collected in there. 

The truth is, you like your nipples, even though they are over-dramatic and highly caffeinated. You just wish they lived on top of a mole hill, rather than a mountain.

You can’t really remember much about the state of your vagina. (See stanza three). You feel the hair, when you’re in the mood to touch yourself. You know it’s appropriately sized. You know about its unconfirmed mood and anxiety disorder. You still don’t know how to approach it.

You are eleven. Or twelve. Maybe ten. Your orthodontist, who had a fetish for onions and rubber, yells at your small lips. “I need you to open wider,” he growls. You tell him you are making the largest circle you can and that if he is insistent on mouth-shaming, he should speak to your mother who gave them to you.

A magazine tells you that those who are most symmetrical are considered beautiful. All you can think of are butterflies. You learn from several lovers that your breasts are not the same. And that one thigh seems fatter than the other. And your hair grows longer on one side. And even your nostrils are not proportionate. You want to know why balance is so desired. Even uniforms have flaws. You grow tired trying to figure out ways to even yourself out.

On a Saturday, you are laying naked against a woman who asks you what your favorite body part on yourself is. You remain silent for what feels like three and a half days, but she is patient. She alphabetizes her list and you start to panic that you cannot even think of a bone on your body you don’t feel infuriated toward. Finally, you say, “my back” because you’ve forgotten what it looks like. Because your mirror is too tall to even see it. Because you’ve stopped turning around. She smiles, pleased that you had decided on something. Some part of you which you could call beautiful or at least preferred.

Your internet is down, so there is nothing left to do but count all the moles on your body. You give them names like Pre-cancerous and Harold. You connect them, creating shapes on your flesh. Your forearm looks like a heart monitor, rising and falling. Your thighs have flat-lined. You find three-quarters of the alphabet on your face. Some people call them beauty marks, but they just look like potholes to you. Punctuation marks. Reminders of how little you protect yourself.

It is evening and the air is roasted dark. You know it’s still there, but you cannot see it. You lay on your hands, so you cannot feel around. You can hear the nearby hissing of your mirror, two rooms away. You feel words on your tongue, keeping you up. You try to swallow them, but they are dry and thick. Gristle. When you sleep, you dream of symmetry. Of calendars. Of paved roads. Here, in the night, is when you get to leave your reflection behind. Here, is when you are everything else and nothing, before you become what you always were in the morning, when the sun wakes.

sharps: notes from a dormant cutter

previously published by great weather for MEDIA

 

I spent much of my teen years in a romantic entanglement with sharp objects. I hoarded staples–stretched away out of magazines, paper clips, safety clips, razor blades. I practiced various forms of mutiny on my skin. I felt in control, even though the only thing I was in was a dark cavern of sadness. 

When I was sixteen, I met a girl called J with short, yellow hair like bristles of wheat and criss-crosses of sorrow all over her face. She’d scratch her cheeks and forehead with her fingernails, trying to invisible her pretty away. We met at mental hospital number three and although we both starting ‘dating’ two crazy dudes also in the psych ward (mine, a hallucinogenic boy who took too much acid and couldn’t trip his way out), I was really just in love with her.

At seventeen, in the back of math class, I took stretched out paper clip to the palms of my hands, because I was desperate to feel anything but numb. I counted the shapes my blood made, dripping out of my skin like morse code.

I loved my blood because it reminded me I had something alive inside of me. These sharps were like cat-calls to my skin: Hey, baby….follow me home. How about I show you a really good time?

There were days, weeks, even months, I tried walking away from sharps, from the bellows of scars which had begun to howl off my skin. But any addict knows wanting to stop and actually quitting are two very different movements.

One may reference the state of my forearms, where sharps and I dated on-and-off for fifteen years. We had a tryst two years ago, but the whole time I was thinking about someone else. Someone I hadn’t quite met yet.

They diagnosed me: cutter. Called me manic depressive, though I never reached those highs. My mom locked up the knives and suddenly sharps and I were like Romeo & Juliet, sneakily searching for ways to tangle in the night. I became very good at picking locks.

Razor blades were my mistress, disrupting relationships. We made love in numerous positions, invited in other toxins called pills and cocaine and called it an orgy. It was thrilling, but I was dying.

Now, it seems New Yorkers are hoarding box cutters, altering people’s faces and (false) sense of safety.

I will always be a cutter, just like I’ll always be a drug addict. But I’m not active. These tendencies are dormant and though I’m hopeful that they’ll remain asleep inside me, I work hard to keep away from the taunt and flirt of their haunt. I never thought I’d be frightened of something I was once so in love with. But I am. Immensely.

Sometimes, I envision it. Sitting, sandwiched between two other commuters, on the 4 train back to Brooklyn, with chalk dust on my fingertips and pant legs. Some human brandishing a box cutter, corroded in anger. Why are so many of us so angry these days? Some take it out on others with knives, just like I used to do on myself.

In this imagining, I can feel the unzip of my flesh, parting, making room for the rush of my blood. The panic. The true pain.

I asked my creative writing students to channel Baudelaire and Virginia Woolf in “A Street Haunting” and become flaneurs. Their experiment was to go to The Strand for a pencil. But if they never made it there, it didn’t matter. The emphasis was on wandering. Getting lost. Viewing life not from the glare of a cell phone, but from the unencumbered gaze of their eyes. Most of them had never been to this epic book shop before, so I was excited for their adventure.

At the end of class, a student came up to me and said, “I don’t think I can do this assignment.” I asked why. They explained that due to the slashings, their dad didn’t permit any trips outside of school and work.

On the train ride home, I traveled with fear curdling my veins. I became hyper-aware of the humans around me, particularly jumpy each time someone dipped their hands into their pockets.

I broke up with panic years ago; I’d rather not revisit its sensations of terror. I don’t want these slashings to stop me from existing. From traveling underground with strangers. From being a flaneur. I spent far too long trying to carve my way out of this world. I will not allow someone else to try to do the same.

anniversary of breathing

Did I ever tell you of that memory, seeing “F” beside my name and thinking it stood for Friday. Thinking: this must have been the day I was born. To be defined by a day of the week, rather than smudged genitalia. Wouldn’t that have been something.

* * * *

(conversation between two)

I thought about labeling myself as a couch. Slipping that into my gender marker. 

Why?

Well, I’ve been sat on. My springs are loose. I’ve had overnight guests drape themselves all over me. Notice all these stains. Crumbs of lost meals. 

I guess that sounds like you.

Right? I had a partner call me wishbone once. Maybe I’ll just refer to myself as bone scraps.

* * * *

Today could be referred to as some sort of anniversary:

The day I ripped open my mom’s body.

Or the moment I breathed in the fumes of new jersey for the very first time.

& an accumulation of stretch marks and toiletries.

Or reminder of all the friends I’ve lost track of.

Just another reason to eat cake.

* * * *

An ode to me:

Everyday, before coffee 
& kiss-climb limbs against my other,
I 
inventory my parts to make sure they still remain:
all my teeth, or the ones which matter
gather up bouquet of knots left behind 
on pillow case
feel around for leftover meals 
clinging to my cheek
swallow all the yesterdays that 
have a difficult time being left

today,
i try not to batter my hips with
too much judgmental
too much writer's block
too much emphasis on the 
black hole of bank account

today,
i eat cake
because i am supposed to
because i want to
because i can call myself a couch
or a loaf of bread
or i can call myself door number three
and even if no one else notices, 
i see the evolution of breaths 
on my soul

what it is to be a loser

Last month, I got the incredible opportunity to perform in the Phillip Giambri’s excellently curated show, “The Loser Project”. Below is a video from the performance at Cornelia Street Cafe in NYC.