If you skip that damn track again
Hopping off the silvered rails
In a lipless catapult, I won’t follow.
You’re already outside smoking
Someone else’s cigarettes and
Not even your brand. You told me
What your brand was and it wasn’t
A woman with a one-syllable name
But you’re under moonlight,
Aching. I am supposed to understand
Just about everything. The lean comfort
And what I want and mist.
#Hopwood Awards. #poetry #writing #life #umich @umichwriters (at Rackham Auditorium)
End of semester portfolio. An unexpected title. :) Regions uncharted, unknown waters. #poetry #writing #life
Beyond seams is cellular collapse
I tell you, I am a tremorous lung,
A membrane past equilibrium, a turgid
Cactus you hoped might turn around.
This is as better as it gets. Whatever jeans we can fit
Into, whatever is on sale. Whatever is next in the queue (Prince, excellent
Decision.)
How long I watched you throw open ache
From a doorway. I tell you, semipermeable. I tell you,
I listened to every loving word.
8 of 30 for National Poetry Month / Napowrimo. Part of a series for my bestie.
Like we were in a scene once where we pinned
Each other flat to the curve of a hood
We lifted the skirt of some banquet for traction
twisting sand to push our hips edgewise
Long exposed to sun and sun’s consolation.
Hey. We have yet to have a conversation.
Hey. The music is too loud. Everything suddenly
Got quiet. I agree with every one of these choices.
You know more about music than me.
Dig your toes into the carpet fling your arms
Like saved. A pbr in the hand is worth two
In the mesh sleeved draped silk blouse over a
Frederick’s confection, you are talking to someone
With better glasses than me,
Who is probably not
Trying. Every every
That diverged from here meant one more space
On the couch and your thought maybe
Maybe
Maybe
Maybe
Maybe
Maybe
Maybe
On Wednesday our graduate Computers & Writing class collaboratively taught Petra Kuppers’ Indigenous Women’s Cross-Cultural Performance Practice undergraduates on the properties of “hypertext,” (readings included Angela M. Haas’ “Wampum as Hypertext”).
We started the class by working with individual terms from the article and our own readings—“born-digital,” “memory,” “associative/dissociative,” “writer/reader”—and then allowed students to create their own mediated narratives out of string, postcards and other objects. The results of their storytelling can be found here.
Finally we had the students toss around a big ball of Maize-and-Blue (GO BLUE!) colored string while discussing their conclusions, forming a kinetic and active web of information between the students, which branched and diverged like an embodiment of hypertext.
Welp.
Precordial Catch
Stick ripple—sharply—
caperberry rib gum, and soft
lung mesh inflating
in coppery, overzealous
pleats. /It comes and
goes, parietal pleura,/
the abrupt barrel
of a cold gun jutting
into the sweetness
under the arm or tightly
gripped by an angry lover,
slat-bruising from the
inside, star-visioned,
a gaping, stunned fish
in a waterless bucket,
collected for its eyes
and gills.
—-
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Day 5 of 30 for National Poetry Month / NaPoWriMo. Another in the series of “body” poems, this one about precordial catch, which I experience pretty regularly (including this afternoon). I’ll find the right epigraph for it later, these are all drafts anyway. Header photo is one of mine.
Sand Mountain I
The godfall welcomed sycamore bristles
up and down the spine of that cinder cone
once the last small fires had died away.
Take me back to those needle lit pathways
you had on some interior map, some Multnomah,
blessed grounds. Deer trails mirrored strawberry blooms through
their sideways path to the center. /Sidehill Gouger./
Tales you told me to warm the tent. /Vindow Viper.
Here to vipe your vidows. Wolf of heart mountain/
as coyotes hummed below, whines deeply winding
up toward that clarion of stars, bright for thick night,
where meteors became meridians, staying long in the sky.
Maybe you dreamed that hero-maker fire licking
the lip of the crater, dipping over its edge into
spruce and Jack pine, Douglas fir, unlocking their cones
before things became untenable. My brother tells me
they were airlifted out, without you, he and your first wife
and our sisters and the cat, Kipple, removed from all danger
though the lookout tower never burned, and you remained
til the water sacks rushed in from Sisters. Sometimes it’s hard
to get you to tell me the story. Even when we are alive
and walking the crater and you are pointing out the hardiest
silver firs that have not died away, or tentative hemlock ringing
the mountain in songs of rebirth, still you would like to forget
the roar in your ears, the way a fire can scream
like a broken ship.
—
-
Day 4 of 30 for National Poetry Month. Inspired by my dad, who was a fire lookout for the forest service the Oregon Cascades, and my time growing up on the Sand Mountain fire lookout. Header photo is one of my dad and his godmother on Bull of the Woods lookout when my dad was 18 years old. Please check out my brother’s work rebuilding old forest lookouts at Sand Mountain Society.
But It Won’t Tell You Everything
Let’s re-articulate a person. They come to you
in cardboard, which you carry as carefully
as you would your grandmother
(as you have been told to do), but still,
everything fits in the box and has room
to rattle. Some materials
(you are to call them materials)
are wrapped in bubble wrap but
what remains is jumbled as though
garage-sale swag—this box: as is,
best offer.
Things are missing.
Place every bone where it might occur
in a perfect decomposition (as though undisturbed
and whole) on a long, collapsible, table, having traced
the outline of a classmate’s body
on brown paper. Some things are lost to us.
Take inventory. There’s a chart.
Left humerus. Right. Metatarsals,
blank lines on the diagram of a figure.
Left clavicle. Right. (Missing.) Left ulna.
Right ulna not recovered. (Missing.)
We can infer basics. Other measurements
will reveal the individual (/remember, individual/)
to be right-handed, in data interpolated
from absences.
Craft a story
about her raided tomb, her curved forearm
so prized and snatched from the cemetery
years before cardboard existed.
Every time a toe falls off the table, you’ll know
how others were lost. Stick to checkmarks. Weights
and diameters. There’s only so much left
in the box. Take breaks from time to time.
Have someone else check your work.
——
-
Day 3 of 30 for National Poetry Month. Inspired by previous work in forensic anthropology. Header photo is also mine.
(Eh.)
Repatriation
REPATRIATION OF NATIVE AMERICAN HUMAN REMAINS AND OBJECTS POSSESSED OR CONTROLLED BY FEDERAL AGENCIES AND MUSEUMS.— (1) If, pursuant to section 5, the cultural affiliation of Native American human remains and associated funerary objects with a particular Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization is established, then the Federal agency or museum, upon the request of a known lineal descendant of the Native American or of the tribe or organization and pursuant to subsections (b) and (e) of this section, shall expeditiously return such remains and associated funerary objects.
A bundle of sun-bleached bone
and sticks wrapped with skins
in which we loved them. Or nestled
at the charred hearth,
clutching the wing of a swan
to ward spirits. Or
worm-wood, beech-wood,
cherry oak, pine
slatted and nailed
neatly under six feet
or in hard times
even stacked
above one another
so that the bodies collapse
like floors of ruined buildings, sighing
into the coffins below. Or
piled, piled,
piled, piled, piled, piled,
nameless, done in,
piled, piled, piled,
piled, buried over quickly
in the night.
Or in personal collections,
in trophy cases, or in pieces, piled,
cataloged and inked with the smallest
numbers along the cranial spline. Or
packed amid boxes in the basement
of the Longhouse Museum,
until proper funding can be acquired
for a proper display. Red-taped and returned,
gathering dust, far from the longhouses you knew.
-
—-
Day 2 of 30 for National Poetry Month. Inspired by previous work in forensic anthropology. For more information on the repatriation of human remains in North America, see NAGPRA. Header photo is also mine.
Determination of Racial Affinity
Often times, a skeleton exhibits characteristics of more than one racial group and does not fit neatly into the three-race model.
A slender, shapely nasal spine, rounded maxilla,
and that flick of a scalloped incisor,
this one is Asian (in all likelihood). We can’t pin accuracy
in the way of spread-eagled butter moths
when dealing with bones alone, but compare
ulnar length, mandibular jut, and we might approach
some origin. Mongoloid, Caucasoid, Negroid, alternate morphs
for sun-soak, for overcast, sweet tilt of the sockets
the way Draw Girls Around The World explained
ethnic realism. Make her lips large and full,
give her beautiful hips and tiny shoulders
define her muscle thus. They don’t say
it starts in the skeleton, in fragments of fragments
and the .002 gram that could be user error
or could mean your ancestors sent you down the river
in a basket, nothing mentions variability
and how every time you look at that skull of hers
it changes, how you can’t pull off your skin
and ask your body questions it won’t answer.
-
—-
Day 1 of 30 for National Poetry Month. Inspired by previous work in forensic anthropology. Header photo is also mine.
Still figuring out how to make this not show up in all italics (thus without its original italics) on my main layout.
NaPoWriMo starts tomorrow!!! New poetry prompts daily.
OMG. Happening. (A Poem-A-Day for National Poetry Month)
(Will post excerpts / work-in-progress drafts of mine.)
GPOYW - western enthusiast edition - howdy!
-
So, NaPoWriMo is coming up. Didn’t make it through the month last year, but some of those poems ended up successful so I’ll be slogging through as much as I can of a poem a day. Most of my prompts involve a body/mind project inspired by forensic anthropology. :)
My weekend. ;)
