Category: swoon

the after-sideyard:

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mostly just this

mixed in with this

(thanks kaz)

and frankie’s feeling it too

and misha sold four prints

and there are flowers all over the house, even by the sink and right here on the desk

and there are four dollars in “20,000 words” which means at least 2 people have my chapbooks

and maybe, maybe, some sort of art scene to remember is getting going in san diego, but even if not, even if we’re all just smartpeople in a yard for a party, it feels good to remember how many  good people there are in this city, and that with some wood and tacks and trashbins-turned-to-tables and the help of farmily, art can happen right next to where we live, and even though no one on the east has seen this thing we did and made, we will bring it wherever we bring our selves, sideyard or sideporch or sideacre of a plot of land…

Tuesday Update.

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Misha shaved all his hair off and we got a new chicken. Her name is Vicky. Vicky Christina Chicky-Wicky. V’Nilla and Vicky: the sideporch chicky-sissies. Is that a good name for a movie or for nothing at all?

In other news, I held two baby goats this week and they melted into my arms like butter. I also finished “Bossypants,” (by Tina Fet duh), sewed Misha’s robe, and watched the spectators of the pride parade like a granny, in a plastic chair on the corner of the sidewalk, with my other granny friends. (“Look at that lady! SO much purple! AND HER BUTT IS OUT! YEAH!!!”) Afterwards we made hot sauce. On Sunday, at the farmer’s market, I wore a mustache for three hours. I highly recommend this experience. So many jokes.

 

And last night I found this poem again. Swoon.

To the Harbormaster by Frank O’Hara

I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

Her name is V’Nilla…

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…and she is a little chicken. I call her the chicky-wicky. She was bullied by her siblings so she needs some TLC on the sideporch. Luckily Katie Conway was here for her arrival and took this hilarious photograph, which really captures how excited I was about getting a little chicken, because in very few circumstances would I walk down the street in a bikini.

 

And here she is a couple of days later, when she hopped into the kitchen looking for me like the precious little chicken that she is.

 

Little things are my favorite things.

Poem I have memorized (Terrance Hayes).

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New York Poem

In New York from a rooftop in Chinatown
one can see the sci-fi bridges and aisles
of buildings where there are more miles
of shortcuts and alternative takes than
there are Miles Davis alternative takes.
There is a white girl who looks hi-
jacked with feeling in her glittering jacket
and her boots that look made of dinosaur
skin and R is saying to her I love you
again and again. On a Chinatown rooftop
in New York anything can happen.
Someone says “abattoir” is such a pretty word
for “slaughterhouse.” Someone says
mermaids are just fish ladies. I am so
fucking vain I cannot believe anyone
is threatened by me. In New York
not everyone is forgiven. Dear New York,
dear girl with a bar code tattooed
on the side of your face, and everyone
writing poems about and inside and outside
the subways, dear people underground
in New York, on the sci-fi bridges and aisles
of New York, on the rooftops of Chinatown
where Miles Davis is pumping in,
and someone is telling me about the contranyms,
how “cleave” and “cleave” are the same word
looking in opposite directions. I now know
“bolt” is to lock and “bolt” is to run away.
That’s how I think of New York. Someone
jonesing for Grace Jones at the party,
and someone jonesing for grace.

photo taken headed uptown, disposable camera, December 2011

Dream Song 295 (John Berryman).

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You dear you, cleaning up Henry’s foreign affairs,
with your sword & armour heading for his bank,
a cable gone astray:
except for you he had hopped in the Liffey & sank.
Now what can he in return do: upstairs? downstairs?
You run your life every day

so well it’s hard to think    of anything you need
and I only supply needs, needs & ceremonies,
I’ll send you the last thirteen,
in all of which Henry is extremely dead
but talkative. To you with your peat moss & leaf-mould
& little soft wet holes

where you put ginger, bloodroot & blueheads
& pearly everlastings, —what can he say of worth?
In all his nine lives
he was seldom so pleased been to be on the same earth
with you, my dear. We get on better than
most husbands & wives.

 

 

she gets it right by me (sonia sanchez).

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Welcome Home, My Prince

welcome home, my prince
into my white season of no you
welcome home
iiiiiiiiiiiito my songs
that touch yo/head
iiiiiiiiiiiiand rain green laughter
iiiiiiiiiiiiin greeting
welcome home
to this monday
iiiiiiiiiiiithat has grown up
with the sound of yo/name,
for i have chanted to yesterday’s sun
to hurry back with
his belly full of morning
iiiiiiiiiiiiand you have come
and i cannot look up at you.
iiiiiiiiiiiimy body
trembles and i mumble things as you
stand tall and sacred
so easily in yo/self
iiiiiiiiiiiibut i am here
to love you
iiiiiiiiiiiito carry yo/name on my
ankles like bells
iiiiiiiiiiiito dance in
yo/arena of love.
you are tattooed on the round/soft/
parts of me.
iiiiiiiiiiiiand yo/smell is
always with me.

Poem fragment (James Schuyler).

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(From the 48-page poem “The Morning of the Poem,” a poem of epic chitchat, a poem of window-watching and beverages and plants and seasons, which I read on the airplane and adored noisily in my cramped airplane seat.)

So many lousy poets
So few good ones
What’s the problem?
No innate love for
Words, no sense of
How the thing said
Is in the words, how
The words are themselves
The thing said: love,
Mistake, promise, auto
Crack-up, color, petal,
The color in the petal
Is merely light
And that’s refraction:
A word, that’s the poem.
A blackish-red nasturtium.
Roses shed on
A kitchen floor, a
Cool and scented bed
To loll and roll on,
I wish I had a rose
Or butterfly tattoo:
But where? Here on
My arm or my inner
Thigh, small, where
Only the happy few
might see it? I’ll
never forget that
Moving man, naked to
The waist a prize-
Fight buckle on his
Belt (Panama) and
Flying high on each
Pectoral a bluebird
On tan sky skin. I
Wanted to eat him up:
No such luck. East
28th Street, 1950.
How the roses pass.