When I walk into a space of writers (which–if you are paying close enough attention–is really every space), I tell them: write down your story. Your stories. Get it down…even if you feel like others are telling similar tales.
I remind myself this as well. My memories are still climbing their way out after being pushed down. But I am working on digging them out. As we all need to do, sometimes.
Thank you to South Broadway Press for accepting my poems and reminding me to keep writing.
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.
Dear Cindy from First Literary Review-East,
So often we write, never knowing if our poems will inflate.
So often, we gather up language like secrets, like love letters we never send, like recipes, like receipts, like wishes
but even if our poems never make it to computer screens or inside books or spray painted on walls for others to capture, they still exist
they always exist,
waiting to be
swallowed.
Thank you to Cindy Hochman, beautiful poet and editor who encouraged me to submit some poems to First Literary Review-East.
Check out my poem, walking toward cemetery mountain.
walking toward cemetery mountain
while sleeping,
maybe a bone or two
removed
the next morning,
I fell
enough blood to fill a carved-out dictionary
all that red
my hands, grated shivers
what if this elevation has softened me somehow
or interrupted
my understanding of movement
I found two joints beneath my pillow which I swallowed, hoping to reconnect the parts of me stolen in the night
Support independent presses, journals, and literary mags!!
https://www.filthlitmag.com/home/notes-from-a-former-sex-worker-by-aimee-herman
Sometimes, foxes pose for photographs beneath banners that spell out Happy Birthday.
Sometimes, it doesn’t even need to be your birthday to receive a relic from a corn goddess with hair made from coiled coconuts.
Sometimes, trees plant prayers inside their branches so if you sit beneath one long enough, you may start to understand the meaning of life.
Sometimes, you need to stop apologizing and just sing (even with eyes closed). It will feel like every single letter, misdirected or never written, suddenly arriving in your mailbox. And you will feel loved and listened and raw and cut-up and cut into and kissed all at once.
Sometimes, you need to confront. Tell a stranger that secret of what you did years 26 to 34. Dispose of your body behind a dumpster where you found that blue chair. Present a barely understandable presentation on the dissertation of your trauma. Call it something unpronounceable. See who remains.
Sometimes, you need to walk until enough blisters form to replicate the mountains you gaze up at. And you will trip over at least thirteen prairie dogs and leave half your hair in a bathroom no one uses just to see how closely people are paying attention.
On the back of a poem, there is a recipe called Red Potato.
Sometimes you wonder if life is a recipe and all of this (the tragic, the repent, the lies, the leftovers) are its ingredients. And the more you breathe, the better it tastes.
You used to be newspaper. Linear and predictable. A few verb tense issues but barely any spelling errors.
When you were living near the mountains, you grew fond of a poet with windy hair and red, red lipstick. Her voice was smoky and intellectual. You started carrying around a dictionary to look up the words decorating her sentences. It’s like she spoke a different version of English, one with linen napkins and foie gras. You both shared a love for Bukowski and chai tea. She always had scrapes on her knees and her fingernails were chewed.
When you shared one of your poems with her, she said, “It’d be better in Garamond.”
When she left, you looked up this word because you’d never heard it before and you weren’t sure if it was a color or perhaps a type of sonnet.
Once, she let you kiss her because it was a Tuesday, or because it was raining and you let her use your umbrella or maybe because she like you. But probably because of the rain.
Her lips tasted of Henry Miller and peppermint.
You never told her that you started writing everything in Garamond, which you learned was not a color but a font. A shape of lines and curves. You never told her that you started to forget all about her red, red lips and instead, daydreamed about Garamond, named after a Frenchman. Spent your paychecks on ink for your printer to pronounce Garamond’s figure. You became monogamous with this font, unable to notice beauty outside of its letters and punctuation.
She started to notice. She started to notice that you stopped noticing her. She started to notice that your eyes no longer cared about the various shades of red bled into her lips and instead, just stared down. At your paper. And Garamond.
She had never been jealous of a font before; she wished she had never introduced you two.
You used to be newspaper. Black-and-white monotonous.
Now you are 16th century, Parisian engraved.
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.
I made love to myself
in the mirror, kissing my own lips,
saying, “I love myself,
I love you more than anybody.”
……Allen Ginsberg
WARNING: This post may cause abdominal pain. And it may increase digestion. And those who read this may develop bed sores on their bed side. Side effects may also include: increase of oxygen to most parts of the brain, teeth whitening, freckle recognition, harmonized memories and unambiguous thoughts.
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Resting against my face is not a smile. I used to take pills to push one into my skin like the imprint a foot makes in the sand. But there were all those side-effects and suddenly a smile just wasn’t worth all the small print tumbling me into nightmares, dry mouth, loss of sexual appetite and on and on.
I walk on Utica Avenue in Brooklyn from home to subway and three different humans (all male-bodied) stop me and say, “Smile!” as though I had forgotten how.
On the train, I study the commuters who travel like I do and try to decipher the language of their faces. I realize that my lips are turned downward. I lift one side, not quite into a smile but less than a frown. Then, I stop myself. Who am I manipulating my lips for?
I enter a room and collect a bouquet of “How are you’s”. I answer wisely: “Well” or “Good, thank you.” But what I want to utter is: “Troubled, at times” or “Feeling stifled by language which I cannot connect to myself” or “Traumatized by my trip here” or “Okay, but I’d really like to be better.”
My father reads my blog. Tells me my posts have grown sad. I want to tell him that my words are all from the same seed. That the soil they live inside is sometimes colder and sometimes rotten and sometimes neglected but always feeling. I want to tell him that I am a writer and words cannot all be yellow with three dimensional, rotating suns singing in unison. Sometimes syllables shake and have to sit down.
I just don’t want to fake it anymore because in that fake there is tragedy. I want to frown in plain sight; how terrible it feels to be in hiding.
At night, our faces can rest. No one needs clarity when the lights are turned down and we travel into REM. We can wince and we can furrow and we can twist our flesh into sorrowful sighs. And how beautiful and how real all that is. To just rest in a face you really feel without having to make someone else more comfortable.
It’s okay……really…..please…..don’t smile…..just be.
Dear Richard,
I was not expecting this. I gave up men even before I began, but there is something in the simplicity and omission of your words that causes me to feel as though I should remain. So, I guess I will for now.
I write four letters to you in a book that your daughter wrote, which was all about you. But also about her. And also about loss. And searching. And the hesitance to find.
Did I ever tell you about the time I scratched my name into someone else’s womb just to see how far my fingers could stretch. Or the time I got lost on a railroad track in massachusetts and the only thing that brought me back was the trembling of metal beneath my wrists.
None of this is simple, Richard.
You set fire to telephones and I set fire to memories. But I have gathered up all the ash and resin of months and dates in order to understand. In order to be in my body. In order to keep reading you.
Aimee Herman 