Mama Moose

Am reading James Baldwin's, Tell Me How Long the Trains Been Gone. Am shy. Am tyrannical. Am humiliated. Am silent.

Also always this:
"Normalizing the abnormal is a disorder that is rampant accross cultures."
-Clarissa Pinkola in Women Who run with the Wolves

"everything has its own language"
-Maggie

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Working on a new piece that needs an anchor, a known inspiration. Right now it is a boots up, poached woman with sappy hands and sheer glee. A bit berserk and hysterical- even zenned out at times. Mostly it involves talking dirty to the garden.

I have been in an emotional whirlpool-foaming and all. I realize that even when I am sober, I still have this urge to self-destruct. Which is why I bike like a mad woman all over this town and try to burn out that feeling instead of letting it scorch me from the inside.

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Discovered: Sarah Fox. Poet here in Minneapolis. Yes. Thank you poetry for opening my brain a wee bit more everyday.

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Listened to Beruit in the car ride home from a Boundary Waters trip with friends and watched the sun slowly swallow Lake Superior. I whispered prayers out the window of the car and over the curve of the landscape hoping they'd reach my Grandma.

We saw a mama moose with two baby moose crunching on lily pads and it left me in the canoe, wind blowing the nose, spinning circles with my mouth closed, full of swaying pine trees, nothing to say.

Pics from the Boundary Waters trip and my b-day jazz fest in the living room!

Harlem, Boston, Montpelier, Claremont

A trip it was...


Mt. Ascutney near Claremont, NH.


Montpelier, VT.


Davis Square Boston.


Morningside Park.


Banjo Jim's.


Central Park.

It was great to come back to Minneapolis...this trip, specifically the NH bit, made me realize how lucky I am to work as an immigration advcoate in a progressive city. There is an anti-Muslim sentiment that is freakishly pervasive in rural America- no matter what region you are in. I grew up in a small town and I remember what it was like...folks are always putting their own self-hate and anger onto whatever marginalized group is vulnerable at the time. Some group of people that eveyone that is privileged can agree on and come together and identify over and feel part of as a community. It is a weird group psychology thing. The opposite of community, really.

On a lighter note. Chas and I did yoga in Claremont while we were there and I had this moment of blood-spilling meditation. My body warmed in a way that made me want to do it on a regular basis. I felt as if I was on the train ride still-from NYC to Boston- and I could feel the breaks squealing...and myself pouring after the whistling stopped.

post zen weekend in vegas

Well what can I say. It is difficult to find time to blog in the summertime.

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I've spent the majority of my day putting in a raised-bed garden in our cooperative like run apartment. Today I just put in the herbs: garlic chives, fennel, sweet majoram, sweet basil, rosemary, and dill. Am at the very end of The Ominvore's Deliemma and feel strongly about trying to eat even more local than I already am. The book is astonishingly brilliant- a look at natural history through the lens of food, including, the evolutinary, existential, and economical theories that drive such a thesis. It is good to get confirmation that it is more important to eat local than to eat organic--particularly "industry organic."

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I was sick as a dog while at the immigration conference in Vegas--barely spoke a word to anyone, except to re-fill my hot water for tea. Afterwards, I realized it was quite profound, to be that silent for that long in one of the loudest, raunchiest cities I've ever wandered. I felt like Curly Sue in my hotel room at the Palazzo.

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Am feeling a bit anti-industry after this trip and reading and gardening. It is not in my blood to push for numbers or money. The older I get the slower I go and I am loving it. I am grateful for dinners with friends and family where we sit and talk the night away. Truly connect. Wild connect. The romance in conversation.


happy belated Chastity!

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I revised my sequence/series piece, "Naturalization" and am thinking that I'll include it in almost all of my MFA writing samples this fall. My best friend, and writing comrade, gave some excellent suggestions about how to distinguish the characters, which now are indeterminite pronouns. And also how each section weaves with the larger engine of the piece but still has its own trajectory and how to think of the order of the sections with this in mind.

working on four new pieces-that are swilling in me simultaneously:

1)"FOIA" (Freedom of Information Act) w/ a quote: "I don't know someone's insides." Am thinking of doing this as a fragments poem. Had an interesting conversation at work about Islam and domestic violence and being a Westerner..may surface in this piece, will see where it goes as I draft.
2)"Hound Me" (result of processing the loss of eye contact with a dog/intution/death-backwards birth
3)"Atomic Potter" (twirling beauties/moonwalking time)
4) "Virgins" (south dakota cowboy)

So, am just collecting bits here and there to shape these in the next couple of weeks which might be difficult as Chas and I leave for NYC next weekend. As a side note she booked a gig at Banjo's Jim's on the 4th! Am looking forward to traveling with a lover to a new place.

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Am feeling blissed out right now. Am just about to bike to a club to go dancing for pride weekend and have had a relatively slow day reflecting and will be trippin next week. I had been stressin about finding time to write and started reading Women Who Run With the Wolves, particularly the section on "Nourishing the Creative Life":

"It is up to her to inform them that when she has "that look" in her eyes, it does not mean she is a vacant lot waiting to be filled. It means she is balancing a big cardhouse of ideas on a single fingertip, and she is carefully connecting all the cards using tiny crystalline bones and a little spit, and if she can just get it all to the table without it falling down or flying apart, she can bring an image from the unseen world into being. To speak to her in that moment is to creat a Harpy wind that blows the entire structure to tatters. To speak to her in that moment is to break her heart."

--and other bits that talk about over-responsibility (i.e. cleaning the entire house before sitting down to do whatever it is that you love to do/whatever burns inside you to get out)
--how to be insistent on my own tempo and to venture by myself, keeping the wild psyche intact and not lose it to domesticity, over-anaylzing, or work
--how to be in my body with certainty and how stories are medicine

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Also just rediscovered this favorite line in Fanny Howe's collection On the Ground.

from "Kneeling Bus"

"How disassemble

the hypocritical
crippling factor in every body?"

I saw her read this poem at the Loft Literary center a year or so ago and almost sunk into the floor when she got to this line.

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watched: The Reader and Revolutionary Road and thinking: the heightened level of communication and honesty that is needed in a relationship in order to make sure each partner is going towards their own individualism while growing as a couple towards new journeys--and how hopefully, mystery underlies even our most certain decisions, whether they be yes or no

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listening to: DeYarmond Edison "Silent Signs"

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putting on: dancing shoes

human superiority

I read this over at my friend's mother's blog:

"The more technology allows us to prop ourselves up by putting everyone else down, the more we'll level our blunderbusses at every passing ant."
This idea of "better than vs less than" caught my attention this morning. The image of feeling superior and separate from nature is inviting. Human superiority over the animals, the belief that we are in control of animals and that we are free to exercise power over them, bending their natural instincts to our will at whim.


And it got me thinking. I remember the first time I had a conversation about why we humans act as if we are superior to nature and animals. It was over a cold glass of red wine while I was looking out my flat window, talking with a friend I had travelled to Edinburgh, Scotland with. She was an anthropology major and was working at the natural history museum and I had just graduated in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. To say the least, my friend opened my eyes to this invitation spoken about above. It dismantled a lot of what I had studied in cultural studies and I was angry at the time, but in the last couple of years I have realized that I was completely not in tune with the natural world. I always thought consciousness, language, social movement-that these were the driving force in this world. I was so wrong. I mean, culturally these work in conjunction with the natural world. I think I may have rolled seven ciggarettes in this one sitting and maybe even drank the whole bottle of wine. I remember focusing on the moss and the viney green leaves that climbed the building, almost swallowing it, as my friend explained to me that homosexuals are still partaking in the evolutionary drive to reproduce because they are looking for a mate and they are having sex-it's just that they happen not to reproduce. At the time, I was caught up in social construction and I hadn't fit into my world view, how I, as a queer woman, fit into this picture of natural history. The idea that humans had only been around for a teeny bit in the large scale of history blew my mind. It is funny how you don't feel yourself changing until you look back and acknowledge where you were then and where you are at now. And all of a sudden, BAM. Here you are. Thank you mam.

Also, I have been reflecting on what triggers me to control my immediate surroundings, whether it is in nature, another human, or my writing. Asserting control over any situation is the easiest way to affirm to the self that it will prevail. However, in most cases, when I am asserting control-the kind that intrudes on the natural rhythms in nature, relationships, even creative spirit-I feel that I am the furthest I can be from growth.

What drives people to feel/act as superior over others? Does this tie into instinctual evolutionary drives? I know it has everything to do with power and control, but on the level of-where does this come from, why?

Did I mention that living with Early made me realize that the most spiritual experiences are often the animal warm kind? The kind that are so close to the ground, so far from right or wrong, the kind that are locked in the instinctual. Poetry is held here, I think. Maybe right above instinct- where the skin of consciousness covers and cases it.

here's when i gush

saw him last time he was in town at the Cedar and it was a great, almost spiritual show. i listened to his albums all winter and am hooked.
favorite song: Daughter of the Sun

tonight i plan on taking chas out to the Ecopolitan for some raw food goodness and then we'll go get settled into what i hope will be a soul filled evening.

The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism & Socialism

I'm going to this tonight at the Guthrie!

Finally had a slower couple of days last weekend. This weekend is fast approaching. I've been trying to get everything done and ready to go camping with some friends.

The last couple of weeks I've been in planning mode. Chas I purchased our tix for NYC and New Hampshire and I'll be going to Vegas for the Annual Immigration Lawyers Assoc. Should be interesting. Vegas is not how I roll but we'll see. I'm excited to go out east and finally meet Chastity's sisters. We'll be spending the fourth grilling out in Harlem!

Have been working on my MFA manuscript. Think I've got about 20-25 pages worth of poems that I am ready to submit to friends for feedback in order to finalize fall submissions. A lot of the poems have already been workshopped on Steve's forum and have gone through multiple modes of existence so I'm looking forward to having this finalized small colleciton. Even if I don't get into any schools I'll be able to send poems out to journals and continue using all of the lessons I've learned from compiling the manuscript. Just having this deadline is nice because it drives me to follow projects/pieces through to the end. Also, it is kind of a marking point--I can now move onto newer pieces and give them my full attention. I have been drafting my personal statement..right now it's pretty formulaic...needs some flava. I didn't realize how difficult it'd be to try and pin point the moment or the moments in life where I realized that I want to write full-time and live the life of writing..still not sure about teaching for a career, but I do want to TA in an MFA program. I am glad I waited 4 years after undergrad to experience as much as I have and to see if this is what I really want to do. I've been writing more in the last four years than ever before. I was definitely not ready right after college. Next it's the more administrative tasks of the application process.

Life as an immigration legal assistant is legal, assistant-like, and full of immigration. Sad sad news about Mogadishu and the fighting that has recently broke out--it's displacing 500 refugees or more a day.

My bike rides to work have been difficult with the wind slapping me around and with all of the construction in downtown Minneapolis. When I get home, or to work, after a windy ride my legs feel like they might just burst. If anybody has been recently flipped off by a girl on a yellow bike it was probably me. Don't honk and please respect the bike lanes mothafuckas!!!!

listening to: the hum of air circulating this building. and of course: K'nann. I catch myself singing "Wav'in Flag" all the time. Gives me goosebumps.

drinking: h2o..later tonight hopefully some tea after a homolicious production by Tony Kushner

reading: still knee deep in The Omnivore's Dilemma. I have been slacking on reading fiction and contemporary poetry but feel like this break might be helping me step outside of my preferred reading habits. Although I admit that I write better the more I read, especially creative works.

Am missing Early. I sent smoke signals to him with the fire we had in the back yard on Saturday. Did you see em bud?

Off to the show! (not really, but soon)

Our Common Treasury

Here are some pics from the Mayday parade. Was a gorgeous day. The ceremony, the political theater, the people.....god I love Powderhorn.

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I've been singing "These Tears Ain't Mine (reprise)" by Roma di Luna to Chastity all day...oooooh there's nothing worse/than sleeping on bad words...

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am thinking of starting a couple of character poems...some of them have been in me for a while, but reading Rigoberto Gonzalez's So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water unitl It Breaks is inspiring me to actually draft them.
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[singing]