Thank you to the wonderful storyteller and poet, Phillip Giambri, for videotaping this performance celebrating the new anthology, “The Understanding Between Foxes And Light” published by the NYC press: great weather for Media.
It was a warm Sunday at the Parkside Lounge in New York City on August 28, 2013 and love was slung within the chords and poetics of dug-out memories.
Purchase this fantastic anthology now!
Dear Lidia.
It is dark here, but I sit at a bar gulping a happy hour pint of local ferment reading a book about gender. Human beside me is burning her retina on the superpower glow of handheld lover. Does anyone read off paper anymore? I just need to poem tonight. My body is engulfed in the flames of syllables itching their way off of me. I’ve got my ukelele, but that seems to be for fire escapes and benches; stages are too daunting to stroke and sing on. But just in case, I swallow final sip, and pinch my hips through narrow doorway toward evening open mic.
Lidia, one thing to mention is my lens. I notice certain things that others may not. We write stories as we live them and in this room, I felt overpowered by men. Perhaps I have been thinking a lot about this gender quite a bit lately. The scent of their limbs and the way this particular pack seemed overthrown with aggression. At one point in the night, one actually had a tantrum on stage.
Before it was my turn to perform, I decided to leave. My friend and I walked through the dark and dank, back into the evening which dripped sky through tiny petals of rain. I wanted to ask him what it was like to be a man. We need to ask this of each because no experience is the same. My gender is perforated and spotty. Far different than the one(s) beside me who may look similarly. Our experiences are our own.
When I arrive at my temporary home, I open up the bedroom window and climb out on the black-painted fire escape. Months ago, I would have been so fearful of this height. Now, I climb and sit, staring down at the life below me.
Lidia, there is revolution in our souls. We are revolving/evolving. I am not the same as I was yesterday or the week before. I am loving/I am in love/I am loved. I write to you because I need to feel read right now. I need to feel like these letters are being gathered. I am thinking about jumping. Not down, but toward.
Last night, I watched a black leather-drenched, badass poet sign her poetry book with red-soaked lips. No need for pens, ink, signature. The poems were enough and her mouth, scrunched at the corners, created a shape never studied in mathematics, but should have been.
Last night, a poet no longer needed the microphone. He pushed his arms away from his body like the ocean rejecting the earth. Like clouds in need of a time-out from the sky. He became a one-act play, feature film, ballad, bounty of images.
Last night, I gathered up the histories climbed inside me like invisible spider webs. A haunt. A congestion of tangles. Threw open memories on a flat stage in the east village in a bar, dark enough to hide my shakes, my roots, my cicatricial forearms.
Last night, a poet read his query letter, screamed out the human tabs of money owed. Walked around with tin can full of coins. Do you want to give or receive? Do you want to give or receive? Do you want to give or receive? Poets scooped fingers together for change, handed out dollars saved up for booze and words. Poems can be made from linked wallets, emptied out, used as floatation devices to sail us into another stanza.
Last night, I dug toes and heels against pavement. Walked briskly from one bar to another for poetry pub crawl hosted by a man who hides poems behind his hypothalamus like cryptic whispers. Screamed HAPPY BIRTHDAY to a stranger celebrating the number of rings in his barking flesh. Screamed POEMS like ripped off warning labels against trees, against trumpet player named Demetrius, against strangers on a break from beer-slugging, against the evening, against myself.
Last night, I felt a part of something. I felt parted by something. I felt like maybe I was something. Felt like personified graffiti: real loud and impressively bold. Felt like a ghost chopping up bloody language with the precision of a top chef. Felt like maybe Poe was out there listening as we gathered by one of his haunts. Felt like maybe even Bukowski was looking down on me, offering me a beer spiked with imagery from the sky.
It is Halloween…or the days before…and humans reconstruct costumes into categories ranging from ghoulish Statue of Liberty to Edgar Alan Ho.
You should have dressed up in a costume tonight.
I am, I said.
Oh…what are you?
A girl.
””’
What is it like to be a poet in New York City?
Like a stout infantfish, width of a pencil (.33 cm) swimming in the Pacific
Like a unidentified container of leftover supper that could be really delicious and surprisingly filling, but its lack of label is too curious and in turn, becomes neglected, untouched and therefore, moldy.
Like the trailer to a really good movie that everyone wants to see. (The movie not the trailer)
Like a rainbow in the sky after a brutal rainstorm. If noticed, it is exquisitely romantic and unexpectedly inspiring. However, a sky often goes unnoticed and cannot compete with cell phone screens…
Like there is no other place to be. To smooth out crumpled words into a microphone or into someone’s eardrum.
Like telling the truth amidst a lifetime of lying.
Uptown, there is a church.
It is curvy like a woman should be, wrapping around a corner avenue.
This church is made of stone and wood carvings and stained glass and I spoke to God, even though we aren’t always on speaking terms.
You don’t have to answer me back, I whispered.
Elevated, with stage in front of me, and a jump contemplated and a staircase leading nowhere, I sat on a theatre seat. I tried to ignore the smell of mildew and judgement.
There was a ledge, which looked down on the pews and pulpit. It was protected by a criss-cross see-through fence, that I wanted to sew myself into. Or, peek into each diamond eye and notice the restricted images.
I am preparing for a performance. Of movement. Sexuality. A body. Some revelations. Singing, perhaps. Condoms, because I have always wanted to tear one with my teeth in the house of God and nudity because….well….ditto.
We will make sure to clean the stage, said one of the curators, earlier.
No, I said. I like that it’s dirty.
Prayer dust.
Flakes of skin of mourners, sinners, absolutionists.
I scribbled in my notebook:
body as stained glass
three-dimensional rainbow magnifications of angels and prophets
a shatter
grit
a tutorial of how
sex as performance
the nudity of church or religion or belief
I think I want to believe in something strong enough to get me through all my death thoughts.
I think I want to ask God what s/he thinks about gender and push-up bras and botox and welfare and homelessness and anxiety attacks and fat free everything and student loan debt and the rise in gluten allergies and if it’s OK that I used to be a sex worker.
Forgive me [?]
Friday, June 1st, I press my sexual politics onto a stage in a church in NYC at the Movement Research Festival. And I’m thinking about what it means to talk about sex in a building where God lives or Bibles rest or hands clasp and tongues pray.
Will they let me in?
This Summer
All Out Arts: Fresh Fruit Festival
New York City
July 20th
What happens when you put gender on a grid and transcribe the body’s stories through first love, masturbatory fantasies, delineations of beauty and the intricacies of trying to fit in to the queer world?
Ejaculating Beauty is a coming-of-age exploration of queer language and the search for where one is on the spectrum of media-inspired/socially-influenced beauty. This is Aimee Herman’s autobiographical dissection of love, gender, sexuality, hair-gentrification, and body translation. Through movement and storytelling, this piece gets to the heart of what happens when we finally put sound to the various dialects of gender within the brain.
Bluestockings Bookstore
172 Allen St. NYC
Tuesday, April 10th @ 7PM –FREE
An experimental reading from to go without blinking (BlazeVOX books)
With Puma Perl and Jackie Sheeler
Tonight, queer performance poet Aimee Herman celebrates the release of her full length book of poetry, “to go without blinking.” Join Herman and dynamos Puma Pearl and Jackie Sheeler for a night of ferocious renegades and poetic erotica.
172 Allen St. NYC
Aimee Herman during performance: ejaculating beauty
(excerpt from unbound s/he: ejaculating beauty)
I am thinking of a word for this.
Or maybe I can congest it into a sound.
Or a dance move.
Or interlude of intricate gestures.
Beyond gender.
Beyond categorical configurations.
Maybe I just don’t want to be figured out.
On Monday, I stick my whole fist into my vagina and feel around for what may be hidden up there.
I search for the SLASH.
On Tuesday, I dress my cunt up in streamers and lace like cotton-shaped birthday cake.
Clit like a candle, I blow out several times until it’s sore enough to grow lungs and demand a nap.
On Wednesday, I am boy or boy parts or masculine or uncertain.
On Thursday, I am Monday.
On Friday, I am Wednesday.
On Saturday and Sunday, I take turns, as the hours change, revelling in my inconsistencies.
My. Body. Weeps.
I gather the skin on my body like magical four leaf clovers found only from hours or weeks or decades of patient searching.
My closet is a schizophrenic approach to wardrobe.
I am mortar and pestle ground up nerves and identities and genders and sounds and needs and clarifications and blurs and words and poems.
I am queer, this word, this music, this distance between its beginnings—a past—to where it stands now—its present-led future.
I understand this.
* * *
What is left behind.
What is necessary to gather, stick in pockets, or throw away.
What can be should be needs to be celebrated?
…the memorization of inconsistencies…to be both or three quarters of one and a sprinkling of the other…to be unafraid of asking what pronoun is most necessary…to understand the importance and need to ask…a widening of this spectrum…of queerness…of experimental language and representation…the poetics of homo…the song of body reclaiming itself…a celebration of contrast, incongruent gender, and unstuck designations through…
the ejaculation of queer BEAUTY
Aimee Herman 