Working at the farmers’ market is FUNS!

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vegetables are so awesome! some people love fennel and some people spit it out because it tastes like licorice–i agree with both camps! squash season is over but hardcore farmers still have three acorns and a butternut sitting in a bowl or on a dark shelf! once in costa rica it was my job for a whole week to pick fat gluttonous worms out of corn leaves with a stick and squash them but i didn’t squash them! i put them in a happy squirmy pile together underneath some big leaves! and sometimes when there is a big ole snail in a box of lettuce that i’m unloading that is hilarious! that snail is my friend! he is so slow but with a big house! if you ever see an artichoke growing out of the ground you will think, holy shoot it’s a green pineapple! and if you try to make potato leek soup and it turns out all your leeks are actually fresh garlic, that is also delicious and works! garlic and leeks look so much alike it’s like they’re best friends who both have green mohawk heads! don’t feed me radiccio because my mouth hates it but also the color of it is beautiful! like the dress that i hope to find and wear to lilah’s wedding! lilah who loves tiny versions of vegetables and her mother who loves absurdly big ones that resemble penises! vegetables are hilarious and some of them are purple! and i love purple almost as much as i love vegetables! ok let’s dance!

 

blogs from not-america have awesome stuff like the above gif!

 

 

“We sleep like wine in the conches” (poem) (Paul Celan).

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Corona

 

Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.

From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:

then time returns to the shell.

 

In the mirror it’s Sunday,

in dreams there is room for sleeping,

our mouths speak the truth.

 

My eye moves down to the sex of my loved one:

we look at each other,

we exchange dark words,

we love each other like poppy and recollection,

we sleep like wine in the conches,

like the sea in the moon’s blood ray.

 

We stand by the window embracing, and people look up from the street:

it is time they knew!

It is time the stone made an effort to flower,

time unrest had a beating heart.

It is time it were time.

 

It is time.

 

 

Short-lined poem (mine).

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I do declare

 

Life’s not rich

from items—

thin futon, donated

chairs, dirty fake

-tiled floor. Used

books, used rags

& the sink’s not

silver anymore.

But the toilet’s

always clean. &

there are hooks

for keys and towels.

& signs that lean

on ledges, painted

wood, wood with

words burned

in. We’ve had

these sheets since

we were twenty.

They’re so poor,

people think, so

planless. But with

our altars & our

bottles & our bowls

of stones, we’re

healthy. With

a little liquor

& earplugs,

we sleep.

 


Some facet of my Saturday is in this photograph (Sally Mann).

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It’s something about the stance, about looking perfect but wrong with a cigarette; something about that dress, about having a sister nearby with hands on hips and a kid on stilts in the background, about that knotty sideswiped hair and the frills on the side of her stark white dress and her watch

that reminds me of today with Elspeth, buying fabric in National City to make a dress and seeing little kids dance in a Subway where we bought a Sprite and used the bathroom, receiving flowers and wrapping stones in gold wire, drinking coffee with milk and sugar from my tea set, staring at the pinks in paintings, some or all of that is in this photograph, titled “Candy Cigarette” by Sally Mann. (More Sally Mann here, on Artsy.)

(photo via art-folio by michèle laird)

Valentine’s day (photo)!

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as it turns out, i love valentine’s day. misha  & i give each other little presents a lot (little things, just poems or a small round rock), but today we give each other a little present on the same day, and i like that. it feels nice to know that loving is emphasized today, even if it’s all hallmark-ized and hollywood-ized–still, people are remembering to act in the name of love today. i believe in that. i love so many people, my mom & dad & sister, & my grandpa with his broken shoulder & the rest of my family, & my friends in the east & some people out west & various chickens & cats around america. loving people is what i like to do. valentine’s day has gotten dumbed down a little–bad chocolates are dumb & so are teddy bears with hearts in their bellies, but a loaf of bread with a heart in it is not dumb it all. in fact, it is very savory & beautiful. & it slices like heaven.

(bread & photography by misha j.)

happy day to everyone i love. happy happy day.

xoxo

Ack! Hurt back (mine).

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I’m mostly okay today, but yesterday I was lifting and twisting in the truck at the farmer’s market and my back went ping!  on the lower left side. Being hurt makes me very slow and aware of every motion, which I try to appreciate. I feel like Marguerite Duras in this photo–booted and fabulous, but with a scrunched up neck and rickety on the stairs. Also, I believe she has a little beard in this photo, which is most elegant.

 

 

photo by the amazing portraitist, richard avedon, taken in 1993. photo via FANTOMATIK, where you can find artistic photography of famous artists. (swoon.)

“Straight up gangster celery” (poem) (Nick Demske).

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…From Otis Henry

 

Otis Henry is a straight up gangster.
Everything Otis Henry does, he does gangsterized
Because he is such a straight up gangster.
When Otis Henry walks, he walks gangster.
Look at Otis Henry’s walk—
Oh Lord, it is too gangster!
When Otis Henry is hungry, he gangster eats.
Eating hard!
Ripping the celery from its stalk.
For that is what true gangsters eat.
Straight up gangster celery.
When Otis Henry drives a car—you guessed it:
Gangster.
How do gangsters drive cars, you ask?
Answer: just like Otis Henry.
Superduper gangster.
After washing his hands, Otis Henry straight up gangster dries his hands.
He dries his hands like a straight up gangster
On a gangster hand towel
Monogrammed with a G.
Cause everybody needs to know that this is a straight up gangster hand drying party
And Otis Henry
Is the original
Straight up gangster.
And when I say gangster
I mean gangster gangster ass gangster.
And when I say gangster gangster ass gangster.

I mean poet.

***
(via pank, where you can find more of Nick Demske’s Otis Henry poems.)

Thankful for the colors of paint (Matisse).

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Sometimes one must buy one’s self a book of Matisse paintings after a day that is humdrum and low after the letdown of good friends leaving town, the bright, juiced visits over and the schedule back intact, the same old bus ride and no time to ever finish a novel, the sky clouding early and the promise of paperwork, because a Monday is a Monday is a Monday, and so to cure it a little, Matisse.

 

 

“Still Life with Lemons”

 

“You’re a Genius all the time” (list) (Kerouac).

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Here’s a list that Jack Kerouac titled “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose.” He enclosed it in a letter to Don Allen, written in 1958. Here are his essentials, each of them so very Kerouac, each of them reminding me to be just as wild as I want to.

 

  1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
  2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
  3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
  4. Be in love with yr life
  5. Something that you feel will find its own form
  6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
  7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
  8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
  9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
  10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
  11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
  12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
  13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
  14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
  15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
  16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
  17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
  18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
  19. Accept loss forever
  20. Believe in the holy contour of life
  21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
  22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
  23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
  24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
  25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
  26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
  27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
  28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
  29. You’re a Genius all the time
  30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

 

(list via a great new site I just began loving, lists of note. photo of jack kerouac, lucien carr, and allen ginsberg, in the middle of being geniuses all the time, via tumbling dice.)