LETTERS FROM FIRE ISLAND

2009-12-13T10:35:00.003-05:00

Sounds all register the interior structures of whatever it is that produces them. A violin filled with concrete will not sound like a normal violin. A saxophone sounds differently from a flute: it is structurally different inside. And above all, the human voice comes from inside the human organism which provides the voice's resonances.

-Walter Ong, Some Psychodynamics of Orality

Houses I Have Known II: Taking Stock

2009-12-12T10:00:00.002-05:00

My first home after
mom’s womb was
a matchbox apartment
on the beach in San Diego
there were lemon trees,
a bathroom skylight,
and the rushing ocean

the second place was the site
of my first dream
it was there that I crawled
through the clunking
insides of a clock,
all cogs and springs,
and I looked out across
a bulldozed horizon
a yellow machine
blasting piles of dirt
for no apparent reason

once my grandfather
and his wife visited

my mother said
I like your makeup
my grandfather's wife said,
thanks it’s pancake
and I’ve spent over
a decade trying to figure
if I heard correctly

after that we switched
country sides
it was a yellow duplex
near boston
where I think
there was a miserable Christmas

in the spring we
searched for easter eggs
in the early summer
my father found a rotten one
forgotten months before

I had the chicken pox
and scratched for days
examined my tongue
in the mirror
and tried to pass it on
to my brother

this is where the
circuits fail some

oh yes, we went a town
or two over
moved into a house
that smelled like paint
I put my nose
to the walls I loved it so much

my mother described it as
salmon colored

she exercised
on a Stairmaster
and prayed the rosary
at the same time
I’ll never forget those
heaving Hail Mary’s
the rhythmic Our Father’s
in time with
her flexed calves

My sister told me
what pot was,
my mother and father
screamed
I’m not sure
what was wrong
I remember rolling fruit,
apples and oranges

One day my father
got into his beat up Volkswagon bus
and drove away
to Oregon

there was another yellow house
near Boston on Six Park Avenue
my mother mentioned the address
to everyone
I wasn’t sure why it mattered

I read the Secret Garden
I listened to a 60’s box set
my father sent in the mail
my mother gave us a fish
and we had bunk beds

once she wouldn’t let
me sleep up top she said
if you fall off
we’ll be buying you a casket
and that’s that

Houses I Have Known (to be continued)

2009-12-11T10:12:00.000-05:00

a worn out farm
lodged on aged
horses’ backs

slow whither,
rainwater spewed
from gutters
choked on past
autumn leaves

shingles curl
at edges,
warp and weather

slick black
in the rain,
a tired cracked
grey beneath
high noon.

all the fallen
houses I have known,
gaping doors
and windows

always the roof
to bear down
on the rot,
witness to all
manner of decay

the estate
overgrown
settles beneath
thick leaves
moulding bound
in brush and vines

dandelions bloom
out of dark gramophones

flies impose on sepian figures
preserved under glass

2009-12-09T17:21:00.001-05:00

remembering our respiratory
dissonance, I am lying in bed
it is winter again

I harbored suspicions
that the last might never end
but then there was spring
and everything was dripping
or had dripped

snowdrifts melted
to stationary puddles,
a nice place to keep
one’s reflection

once we stretched
the wee hours and walked
in that eerie blue light
to that terrible part of town
where I lived, it was cast
in morning twilight
but that doesn’t have a name
so far as I know

I tried to screw the cap
back on an orange fire hydrant
and then there was grease
all over my hands

that was inexplicable

there were fake golden flowers
in the saddest planter
I’ve ever seen
I thought I might die at the sight of it

suddenly nothing grew

and we were in bed again
the light shifted upward some,
and rising.

Two in the Wilderness

2009-12-07T06:06:00.001-05:00

together  in waiting,
punctuated  
movements  (pause)

I am a valley, I
a river
here  we converge

the scene resists  landscape,
they wade in pages.

speaking is tongues
words words words

historical recitations
recitatated re-r-
esuscitated mouthof  mouthfulof
man  mouth ofaman

shakespeare’s throat
wheezes poetic
death rattle chest
dreams on the
death bed

thou doth pulse
soft,
mouth of a woman

tethered lips
to another’s
neuroses.

historical recitations,
addresses audience
exclamations
(pause)
devastated

here, converge
wading through
pages,  movements
punctuated,
space (pause)

I'm Picking Your Brain for Things You Forgot

2009-11-11T05:07:00.004-05:00

Scenes of My Father's Ghost

2009-11-09T12:24:00.003-05:00

I.
My father’s ghost lived behind my eyelids  between the hours of eight pm. and eight am.  from the time I was nine years old.

Once the sun rose,  his ghost preferred  to reside in the crawlspace  at the corner of my room.

He came about in dreams,  relentless in his accusations  with unkind words  that cut into the dark air  of my imaginings.

“Why”, I asked, “did you die?”

A doctor enters, interjects:
“Well you see, he could have lived.  We have the technology. But  we didn’t know that then. We’ve worked  with many cases like your father’s.  They’re all fine now.  Sorry.”

My father reappears:
 “Well, I didn’t die. I faked my death.”

Then I would wake.  The sun was up, my father’s ghost  would slink to the far end of the room,  not to be seen until  the following night.

After some time, this all became  less frequent. The doctors disappeared and I would not set foot in a hospital  for at least seven years.

Once he came to my sister  as she slept on a trampoline  in my aunt’s backyard,  the indian summer  warm in her hair.
He extended an apology,  told her everything would  be fine, then dissipated  once again.

II.

My father’s ghost  is a blooming wildflower  off the crags  of a lonely mountain.

My father’s ghost  slipped in through  the floorboards  of a creaking cottage  to watch an old man  dream on his deathbed.

My father’s ghost  is separate from the body.  In fact, it has never once  been to Virginia,  nor is it interested  in visiting.

My father’s ghost  remembers the fall , sleeps through winter,  and often  forgets the spring.  

My father’s ghost aches  in the hot months,  recalling its first  lonely summer  after life.

My father’s ghost  never inhabited a cat,  but watched  with moderate pleasure  as my mother and sister  once called to a stray where they thought  he may reside.

seasons

2009-11-05T14:25:00.002-05:00

the headlines read today
someone caught a fugitive line
that was something like:
"but the sea is too far to swim"

it crawled out of the slop
in a world war trench
slinked up the ditch
like an amoeba sprouted legs
to up and leave the ocean
through and through
like the development
of skeletal structure
calcification of the first bone
a ring in the marrow
the tone of dispossession
which resides between keys
somewhere before your voice
meets mine

today my tears roll on
like the back hills of pennsylvania
that time we tricked sunday
and our eyes glazed sedate
off the sounds of synthesized
billboard hits and brown gravy
a hole in our brains
bigger than a bread box
torn off the residual effects
of engineered epiphanies
and i asked in twenty questions
if it was magic

we piled stones and whispered
in the waterfall's shadow

Overcast, and a heavy sack of groceries.

2009-05-11T12:24:00.003-04:00

Dentalium

2009-10-29T10:51:00.001-04:00

Clung to a shifting vernacular,
speech unclear, gnawing the soft
inside of the cheek
in nervousness.

I am sure that my inflection
is not quite right.

So it rings like pre-dream
sounds, conversations wove from
ceiling fans and knocking
radiators.

The wisdom teeth
are suspended
evolutionary echoes,
mine puncture the gums
crowd the mouth—
attempt a chance
at gnashing some tough thing,
but these days I hardly
chew meat, and molars
are best fit for sinew.

I thought how romantic
to bury a milk-tooth
under a Banyan tree.

So for some hours
I played witch,
decided fertility would be
the aim, precipitation
the result.

Thus ensued
a continuation of longing,

the rain washed
earth from the spade.

Portraits of My Father at Sea

2009-10-29T09:43:00.001-04:00

I.

His memory
drifted--

no, adrift
it went
forth in knots

labyrinthine
longitudes,
tidal shifts

spatial subtleties,
cardinal directions
imperceptible

particular fibers,
particles awash
filtered fast
spineless
shelled

his spirit
transient,
extant, yet
unclassifiable

separation in simple
terms, suggested
categorizations
for the discorporate

we must strictly
stick to stone--
stamp initials
dates, final
remarks

cremation an option
associations strong,
largely undesirable

so, his body  was casked--
no, casketed
embalmed, emboxed

interred.

defined as  
one:
to place
(a dead body)
in a grave or
tomb; bury

or  
two:
Obsolete.
To put
into the earth.

II.

His memory
adrift, went

sank beneath
the turning
surface
swirling pools
oceanic passage

an image,
the vasty deep
perhaps where
horizon
meets
sea

slight curvature,
shape theories concerned with
shifting horizons

astronomical
assertions of
spherical
orientations

his body, stationary then
carried east
on engines, wings

those steely
pallbearers

Smithfield, Virginia
directly
beneath the sun

genealogical proximity,
insights into
relations/personal  tragedies,
beliefs.

III.

His memory
drifts,

drifting
the sea at
eighteen
for months

left home,
to breathe salty air
to chew boiled meat,  soft vegetables
in the mess

forks and knives
scraping
in time
a bell rings  the hours

years later,
a tale about a man with no teeth
but cafeterial
status

navigation principles
charted clusters
deceased, persistent
then rising  landmasses off the abyss’
edge

boy of eighteen--
maybe nineteen,
no matter, awash
out about
the mighty ocean
tying knots,
raising sails
hardening skin
on upturned palms.

A Momentous Rediscovery

2009-10-23T11:25:00.001-04:00

the summer swept us by 
sweat on the brow, sun
on the brim
shine in the eyes, and once
on a vast expanse of field
I looked to you and dared  
to seek my own reflection
in your fluctuating pupils

The Slovenian Bell Ringer

2009-10-23T11:22:00.001-04:00

We rang the bells near dawn  to cue the sunrise,
and the women wept
wailed, donned black for thinking
someone had died. The sun came, haloed its light 
on the sounds, and echoes admired themselves
reflecting off the wet grass and distant
crags. Men kept the children
from the belfries, so they pounded sheet metal,
grenade shrapnel, measured out water in
glass bottles to make
various sounds, beat the earth
with scythes and pickaxes
to keep time. It was then
we knew it would crumble, as the bricks
loosened and bells cracked with the hammers’
relentless strikes. We, embracing, fled to the hills
to watch at a distance. From there we saw it,
like giant shining flower bulbs,
like magnificent beasts shot down:
hundreds of bells wheeled away
to toss in the furnace then
flatten, their melted remains
fashioned to bronze cannons.

2009-10-08T05:20:00.004-04:00

Apparitions

2009-09-13T20:08:00.001-04:00

would you if you could
would you pull my voice
from your own throat
would you throw it
to the air, to hear
it echo like it did
when the season
was warm?

would you if you could
would you pull my body
from indentations left,
depressions in your mattress?
would you if you could
would you talk and answer
yourself with my sound
to feel less alone?

if i could I might
I would perhaps
to feel less alone,
to break the quiet,
take your voice from
my mouth, throw it
to these empty walls
to answer the sadness
in my own sound

A Lull in the Season, Afterlife Musings, and Universe Leftovers

2009-05-27T10:04:00.002-04:00

On the Here and Hereafter

Limbo in sainthood,
a translucence
splits wings
out either side
where a spine
marks the median

Exhale

I am a million words breathed back in the troubling reverse of a screaming decade.
I am reconciliation of a black hole sat in the center of a spiral armed galaxy.
I am a single made molecule in the square footage of a stadium, alone in shattering
laws of physics with stunning accuracy.
I devour all I perceive, consume each owned conception.
When reality relies on the distance and depth of sight, it is made and thusly altered.

PLEASE SUPPORT IN OTHER WORDS, ATTEND THIS READING!

2009-04-10T16:16:00.002-04:00

In Other Words Reading

Moonstone Art Center,

110 South 13th Street, 2nd floor (above the old Robin's bookstore)
Hear Temple students and faculty from In Other Words magazine
for World Languages read their poetry, stories, and translations. Readings will be in English.

Stephen Benscoter, Prof. Hanoch Guy,

Thomas Riese, Lauren Spahr, Juan Vila, Thomas Viola,

Prof. Justin Vitiello, and others!

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
For more information, please write us at
inotherwords.temple@gmail.com

www.temple.edu/inotherwords

Circulation/Reserve

2009-04-10T11:21:00.002-04:00

Temple University has been slowly disposing of the card catalog, placing the cards out on the circulation and help desks to be used as scratch paper to write down call numbers. I have collected a number of them and use them for bookmarks, birthday cards,typewriter feed, and poems, incidentally.If you are ever near a stack of catalog cards, I highly encourage you to take them, examine them, build things, eat them, etc. There's a lot of interesting stuff on those little rectangles.

Circulation/ Reserve
Straight Ahead

I am separating cosmic/coincidence. I am associations always. Now that the card catalogue/all is electronic, the scratch paper is old rectangles of information with a single hole punched through, begging to be rewritten.

FLOOD INSURANCE STUDY:
… Borough of Carlisle, Pennsylvania
Cumberland County

In Cumberland MD., a small town made of mostly wood paneling and church steeples, my sister was incarcerated. My mother went to bail her out, and fell in love with her public defender. He was much shorter than her usual “type.” When the planes hit in September that year, we up and moved to the mountains, northening the center of terror/fire/danger as we drove south.

…Township of Fayette, Pennsylvania,
Juniata County.

On Fayette St., my mother and the lawyer were married on the front porch of an old Victorian house we rented by the month. Her fifth, his first. One of his friends/coworkers took photos with the Polaroid camera they used at the office for domestic abuse cases. I thought of all the ugly things that it had captured and then spat into the light. They sent me to private school. I wore my skirt long and froze all winter.

KEEP LATEST ONLY

Circulation/Reserve
Straight Ahead

EP 1.17 Transcript, Public Meeting on the Resource
Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976;
Subtitle C, Hazardous Waste Management.

17090 EHX 07/71 Waste Treatment Lagoons- State of the
Art
In an undisclosed location, we have a population of mermaids/men living happily and willingly in our State of the Art Waste Treatment Lagoon, where there is a healthy abundance of Coleoptera, Asellidae, Astacidae, and Gammaridae for their consumption. As these creatures are (roughly) half-human, 50% of U.S. labor laws apply and they are compensated on a biweekly basis, contingent upon quality of waste treatment/quantity of waste treated.

17090 FJW 02/72 A Mathematical Model of A Final
Clarifier

Our mathematicians are currently calculating in upside-down leather chairs, anchored with bricks and cinderblocks somewhere beneath the Navigable Waters of Boston Harbor and its Tributaries- Massachusetts.

17090 FQJ 09/71 Biological Concepts For Design and
Operation of The Activated
Sludge Process

To understand fully The Activated Sludge Process, one must understand the composition of Activated Sludge as well as the salvage industry what it is, how it works. Generally brown-greenish or blackish-brown in color Activated Sludge may be found in above ground gutters and underground sewage systems, occasionally on subways trains and platforms.

A Continuous and Exhaustive Celebration of the Shift in Seasons, Amen

2009-04-05T23:51:00.005-04:00

Working on a final project for poetry class. Poems about... places and things, mostly. These two here await a third, as yet unwritten.

Post Meridian

a bride is blown
by the wind
in the park
tree branches
creak
the sun
beams

a breeze
lifts the veil
gathers cloth
at the knees,
pulling up
a cloud of
soft, heavy hem

a gust of pigeons
ascends,
a flapping sheet
of molding grey
hovers low,
then a rush of air
beneath wings

splits the seams,
beams burst through,
birds on the hem
the wind carries

Eventide

Shots did not ring out, but sank
did not sing, but ate holes

in the talk on the street,
emptied voices into a second’s

static. The roar of the ear
cupped in a seashell of air

gasped out the barrel
so quickly, the house went

slant with red and blue flashing,
the block squared with yellow

tape to echo the sound.
Ground triangled and circled

in chalk, lines of salt about
where the slugs stuck on falling.

Big Yellow

2009-04-01T02:12:00.001-04:00

tonight i call the moon
big yellow
a clipped toe nail
hung slant

the city brights
glow upward
and the clouds are
dense steam

tonight two cats howl
two cats claw
and i hear fur
tearing from flesh

someone punches
a pillow backwards
handfuls of cotton
whisper to the ground

perhaps tomorrow i'll harvest
tomorrow i'll collect
aluminum cans, gather them up
with the clatter of dull bells

tomorrow i'll comb the streets
catch plastic bags in plastic bags
to watch them rattle and flutter
in the city's great heaving lung

Eau

2009-03-22T23:24:00.002-04:00

Our ladies of skin
dance in themselves
our ladies of flesh
wove and kindred
our ladies of the selves
of the selvas
of vegetation
of green where
shining jungle flowers
fall a sleep at night

steam rises from
brush and streams
tiny capillaries of water
roll off glossed
vert leaves

and the rumbling of frogs
and the hissing fogs
and the birds rustling
plumage and foliage
rubbing branches and
backs, bird backs
branches brush brush
brush—bakaw,
baakaawww
and the rose and
falled calling

Moon-logging and Dreams of Solar Luminosity

2009-03-22T12:15:00.002-04:00

Some while it's been so welcome back if you were away or went away because I went away but now the coldest part is over so we can all sweat and melt a little and become real people again, rather than dimmer versions of ourselves.

Parallax

I.
In the beginning
god created
all things

the egg came
before the chicken
and he hung

the sliming yellow
yolk in the sky
called it day,

then splattered the whites
across a vast blackness.
dripping moon
and stars made night.

globular clusters,
a dipper-full of
dark matter.

black holes devour,
vacuum light

II.

morning approaches,
the geocentrics stir.
a pale slice of stale

smelling light,
the refrigerator door’s
ajar.

night again,
a twilight weak
and momentary

the helicopter
searchlight hovers
like day is trying ,
peeking through shifting
pinholes in the sky.

the moon wants,
the stars choke dimly,
tall steel reaches
upward to smother them.

evening traffic
honks and hums.

Elegy, Manuscript, Trying:

2009-01-25T20:09:00.001-05:00

This has resisted organization. This has come together and fallen apart numerous times— there are pages and pages of poetry begging to fit to one another. Some argue that when writing elegy, the poet’s thoughts break down because grief shatters the mind and contraries coherence. My memory has broken down, fragmented. Pieces halved and quartered to other pieces. I have a pile of memories translated to poetry. Scrapped, folded, and stained on my bedroom floor in a wooden crate. I placed too much meaning into objects, put too much stock in location. I treated my dreams too much like reality. I tried to fit a story together that is too vast and tangled a web to be navigated. I aspired to understand everything. I expected every realization to be the realization. I prayed to some non-god for epiphanies. I prayed to the universe to reveal itself, for the multiverse to map itself, for the stars to constellate in some way that might lend the sky to a meaning that I could record in the pages of my notebook. My handwriting has deteriorated tremendously. There is a story for that too. Everything I see and touch I can bring back around to my father, to death, to mortality, to the eye in the sky that we feel staring or blinking when two giant circles become concentric and arrive us at meant-to-be moments. There are things I will tell. There are things I will not tell. There are realities I have run from for many months now. I never confronted fully the story I wished to tell because I considered it rather as a condition. Now I see that the two are part of some hybridized one. Our condition is that we are our story and our story is the story of others. When a person takes on the responsibility of documenting truth, or truth as he or she might understand it, that person takes on more than the truth of one story. The truth of one story is the truth of hundreds or millions of others. We drift and overlap like autumn leaves, we carry and fall off the wind like dandelion fuzz. Some of us are swept into the same pile and left for the season. Some of us push up from the wet spring earth with the same stories to tell about someone we knew so long ago that the name sounds foreign on the tongue. In the fragmentation there is a great connectivity that cannot be restructured. Pieces fall across state lines, they drift to sea.

Sightings and Signs

2009-01-16T16:03:00.001-05:00

The summer after my father died, my mother took me to the optometrist to get a new pair of glasses. They dilated my pupils during the examination and I felt as if my eyes were bulging out of their sockets. When we left the office, the afternoon blinded me and I spent the rest of the day squinting and shielding my eyes from the sun. In the months following, I regarded my poor eyesight as an advantage rather than a disability. In supermarkets or in crowds, I would take off my glasses and let the world recede into blurred imbalance. Without the detail in faces, every tall dark haired man could be my father, perusing the frozen foods section or buying a movie theater ticket.

The fall after my father died, my mother was jogging through the park near our house in New Jersey. When she came home there was an orange cat following her. She told me that it started following her while she was running and when it looked at her she felt as if it was my father. I thought it ran like a lion, my sister started calling it by my father’s name, Seth. It stayed on our porch for a few days. I rejected the possibility that it was my father, because I was sure there was no way he could have been reincarnated into a cat that had certainly been alive longer than the four or five months since his death. The cat eventually disappeared to stray on somewhere else and we never saw it again.

During my first year of school after my father died, I had a collection of tiny vases that I kept on my windowsill. Whenever I was completely alone, I would arrange them in a circle on the middle of my floor and try to summon ghosts in our house. For me, everything was a sign or omen and so I regarded any creak or draft as a reason to attempt a meeting with the spirits. I never asked for my father specifically for fear that he would come, and for fear that he would not. After many failed attempts, one of my séances resulted in a mysterious knock that I swore came from inside the wall of my room opposite the windowsill. I decided it was my father that had knocked, and that I would never again use my vases in such a way.

2009-01-04T22:11:00.000-05:00

I substituted a part of something for the whole, but the effort was foiled when I realized that every stapler was broken. So I was forced to fasten this with string and I wove it together sloppily, albeit gently and with love and I pretended I was a Cherokee woman tying a rock to a stick and creating a sacred and beautiful weapon for battle. How I long for some kind of antiquity. How I wish that I could trace my ancestors back to their huddled masses and then before that to the warm country side of Italy eating olives or maybe Austria, wearing heavy coats.