Inspiration + Motivation

It has started staying dark in the mornings

The deep blue haze of dreamscapes disappointing

It isn’t simple and its absence isn’t felt

Only noticed from the window above the kitchen sink

It’s chilly now, shivering in thick socks

Walking off or walking onwards

Its teeth are still sharp, undulled by any creation spurred in this house

oh siren oh muse
what waves take me

Pets + Notebooks

I’m living with all these dead pets.
The weight of pending inevitability.
end point and eternity at a crossroad.
They’re here now and forever
What feels like forever

Dogs can’t tell time, they don’t understand
an hour, or a week, or a lifespan
they are here asleep atop your head
and then they’re here forever in the cold spots
on your couch and in the quiet delivery of the mail
You need to let go of time and scratch the unreachable
spot behind their ears. When it is unreachable you will
want to crawl there, curl into that soft velvet spot.
just sitting timeless.

■ ■ ■ ■ ■

I have a new moleskin. I’ve been without a notebook for almost two weeks and my practice fell off a cliff. In a silent way, the way kids get taken from carnivals in the 80s. Spooky season is blanketing me and suddenly I turned around and lost all the days and pages. The notebook deserves more recognition than I was giving it. I used to think of my notebook as a lifeline, an extra boost and a helper to my creative practice, but I see it now as a bloodline. A vein and an artery. An essential organ to me.

I am resuscitated (I had to use spell check to figure out that word).

Moleskins + Plane Rides

This is the end of a moleskin journal. There’s a weird finality happening even thought I have another one waiting. This is my first time seeing the end. There’s patchy spots, days were missed and may as well be non-existent. There’s nothing congratulatory here. I guess I expected a little note that read “hey you found the end, well done”. I’m going to leave the last last page blank with intention. I might return to this moleskin and have another comment to make.

⭘ ⭘ ⭘ ⭘ ⭘

Today we’re flying to Minneapolis for Ghost Files. An impulsive adventure which I’m grateful for. Time on a place feels good for my core. I feel contained and purposeful as I’m taken somewhere. The moleskin has that same sentiment as I flip through the pages. I was taken somewhere the last year and a half, these odd field notes on my creative ideas will rest here now. I will board a new plane, to a new place, chauffeured into that sense of purpose.

Elderly Ikea Woman + Haunted House

Elderly Ikea Woman Claims Curbside Table

When you went and grabbed the paint chip peeled dolly you knew that the table would be yours. When you called out to me “will you help load this?” with my arms full of take out food, headed to my own table, you just knew I wasn’t going to say no. Nothing about you was new, nothing modern. Your jeans had seen a garden, your blouse threads parsing on one sleeve. Maybe for you, from the curb, the table looked more like a mirror. Scuffed, chipped, discarded, and you thought not this time, this time you will come home with me, you are useful and I can show you. As you wobbled over realizing there was no way you were loading the table alone, our eyes met, and my food was set down, and together onto the dolly we (but mostly me) let the table fall. On the dolly outstretched, the legs stood skyward like a dead bug and you only waved your hand above the big composite slab as thanks. Forward you wobbled, the dolly dragging behind you over the uneven sidewalk.

⭘ ⭘ ⭘ ⭘ ⭘

3317 S Kinnickinnic Ave.

Before I even set food on the first board the stairs creaked my name. My name.. my name.. the house was wrapping itself around me, leaving me rooms without an exit. Without an exit I’d find eternity in the house, in the white peeling cupboards, and the wood grain floors worn black. Blackness crawled in all the edges of every room, crawled along the baseboards, crawled along the ceilings behind the light fixtures, crawled even in the corners of the bathroom sink. Sinking into the old carpet as I reached the second story landing I looked out on a hardwood wall where I entered through what was once the stain glass door. Doors inside the house were endless, almost as endless as the whispers kissing the hairs on my neck that knew my name. My name.. my name.. every room would take you deeper, further into the house into a new den or room with a nook you’ve never seen. Seen from the outside in a room on the second story that we suspected was the library was often a candle light, flickering between the nailed on two by fours and that’s what prompted this adventure to begin with. With all the muster and gall I approached the front door expecting the knob to resistingly wiggle with a lock but opening easily, the door swung in. In I stepped. Stepped through the door, stepped up the whispering stairs, stepped across the deep second floor carpet, stepped right up to another door, on the second story. A story, I told myself, as candle light flickered across the front of my shoes, just a story and nothing to worry. Worry is not enough to describe me as I swung open the door, the wailing shriek that was heard outside, the nail pulling yell of confusion and anger as a voice, maybe my voice, screeched “what is my name?!”

A Place You Love + Workshop Notes

Friday at Granny’s

The screen door always screams a little when it opens. Who walks in is unknown. Feet climb the stairs. The kitchen door opens. hurrah! hurrah! hurrah! yelled at the person in the entryway. There is a beer in the fridge for them, almost always. Around the immemorial table we fit ourselves together, cozy on chairs brought in from other rooms. As an aunt or uncle regales us with a tale of when they were kids, and then someone asks what happened to so and so, and no one agrees on the details and there’s a kid from sixth grade whose name goes unremembered. And here an hour feels like a minute and the table snacks get picked at and someone has rearranged all the fridge magnets to put the ones they bought front and center and the light from the kitchen windows casts yellow on the lawn and the shadows of the clothes lines trace themselves across the yard and up to the stars. When the fridge is empty, by angel’s grace or perhaps the chalk inscription above the door frame, the high squeak of the spring door screams. Who walks in is unknown. Their feet climb the stairs. The kitchen door opens and hurrah! They’ve brought a twelve pack. The tales turnover and the clock barely moves and the screen door will not close completely til the late hours of the night. There will be a beer left in the fridge with your name on it, for next Friday.

▲ ▲ ▲ ▲ ▲

Time > Swirling > Revolving > Circular
”unknown” - word choice
loving chaos / good sound / noises
clear structure
movement in objects
”immemorial” - word choice
ambiguity in the objects - this is good / relatable / non-exclusive
lights are the only color

chaos - chaos in a good way

Ongoing - everything comes full circle
Long middle sentences are working.

What I’ve Read - October ‘22

The FIRST What I’ve Read that I’m posting! I intend for this to be a reader update but also reflective to where I’m at with writing. Seeing it as place for me to do a status check on my creative self and find out if I’m reeling off into the darkness of eternity or seeing some sort of light or watching too much TV. I’ll also link out to my GoodReads here if you’re interested. I try to keep that up to date.

THE CHECK IN

September is always a weird month, I feel like I forget that it exists every year and when the end of the month comes I feel like I’ve stepped out of some time frozen daze into the present. I am enrolled with The Attic Institute in a prose poetry class which so far has been fine, the writing prompts for the class are all very personal. I recently traveled, which I think is a writers best friend, to San Francisco and stayed at the Beacon Grand which had an amazingly lovely library nook (that you see pictured above). I logged some good hours both reading and writing in those chairs.

I received 5 different rejections on submissions this month, which means.. someone had to read my writing! The pending list on my submittable is getting short and I need to spend some time really pushing to get pieces out there. Also feeling very generative because I’m in that class, I’m excited to have a pile to start revising. Onto the books!

THE SHORT LIST

Lunch Poems - Frank O’hara
Words That Must Somehow Be Said - Kay Boyle
Being Geniuses Together (1920-1930) - Robert McAlmon / Kay Boyle
It’s Okay to be Not Okay - Christina Tran
Pocket Zines - Liberty Gibby

THE BOOKS

Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara

Honestly, I think I can say Frank O’Hara is not for me. I didn’t do a ton of digging into who Frank was. It is possible I’m missing some bigger context. A lot of poems are pretty raw and visceral. There’s a quality of matter of factness and the subject matters seem almost off the cuff but delivered well. It was very easy to feel as if I was living a day with Frank in New York. I think that raw edge gave this sense of just hitting the reader with reality hard but in a way that triggers something in your brain into process mode.

There was two lines from an untitled poem about Lana Turner Collapsing at a party that stick with me
”there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California”

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Words That Must Somehow Be Said by Kay Boyle

I am always amazed what wasn’t covered in my college education. Kay Boyle is a writer, poet, activist, journalist, publisher who I’m fascinated by. Often I am caught yearning for more theory content so I started reading essays of other writers and this book does not disappoint. About of 1/3rd of the essays are on writing while the rest covers her family life, politics, and the human condition. If you’re looking for fuel for your tank this book should be in your hands.

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Being Geniuses Together (1920-1930) by Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle

This book, is insane. Robert McAlmon is a fantastic publisher in the 1920s living between Paris and London. This Memoir is regarded as one of the most true representations of the arts and writing scene in France at the time. Spoiler, he publishes Kay Boyle. Post mortem Kay Boyle takes his memoir and inserts her own memoir for the same years in between the chapters. It is an amazing slice of a life that isn’t my own. I’m just about halfway through and this book may be in my top ten list. There is lots and LOTS of name dropping which can get overwhelming but also is interesting to do a little digging on the who’s who that I’ve never heard of.

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It’s Okay That It’s Not Okay by Christina Tran

Another memoir, this comic covers Christina Tran’s journey coping by working. I found this at the Portland Zine Symposium and the summary said “dealing with why we can’t turn off” and I feel like I struggle with that. Especially as the pressures of work and life start to amass, it isn’t always easy to not be pushing productivity. Really delightful comic that had some really great use of negative space and silence within the art.

Christina Tran’s Website: https://christinatran.com/

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Lil Zines by Liberty Gibby

Also found at the zine event, Liberty’s table had probably 100 of these little zines. The first attention grabber was they were being sold from a binder with nine slot pages you’d typically use for trading cards. The second was that they were so digestible and delivered some serious impact. I’m always striving to give my reader a piece to take away with them and this format literally lets you pocket the work. I’m hungry to get back on the riso printer and this made some gears start turning.

Liberty’s Instagram

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Mall + Fall

When I arrived to open the buzz of the coffee shop is already alive, sometimes with a line out the door. Patrons wrapped in scarves and hates and the hands of kids dragged out too early murmur murmur murmur between their seen breath. Every store unclicks the large locks on their large glass doors. At 9am we throw them wide to welcome the crowd. We know the mall, the quiet hours, we stand sentry at the counters on days when it rains and there is no foot traffic. Today in fall you can almost smell the lake, carried between the leaves. There is a unity between us. The guy from the Yankee candle store waves in as he walks by our door. The bond we know is unsaid.

—

Quiet unsaid bond of promise between the sentinel workers at the mall. We will never know our names but would cry should one of us die. There is a hope between us to see each other tomorrow but at the same time never again. Knowing or believing that your unamed self has found a better life. We know the quiet hours of the mall, when we open early, the pending energy of the shopper before the hard loud unlock of our doors. “Welcome in!” you weighty tourists in our castle.

Discard Table + Movie Credits

Prompt: Pick an incident that happened in the past month that has stuck with you, maybe for an unknown reason.

Rickety and warped you wheeled your dolly to the corner to try to claim the discarded Ikea table. The edges scuffed and dinged from a life lived, you proclaim “I’m taking it, will you help me load it?” and I would. The plastic painted legs with gouges stood outstretched on the dolly, waiting for an embrace. Wobbling off you threw a hand of thanks in the air, carelessly navigating the first sidewalk crack.

(now with a different tense or perspective)

You knew this table was yours. So much so you went home and grabbed a dolly. When you saw me and asked “will you help me load it?” you knew no one would say no. You may have seen yourself in the table, aged the same in table years, you both wobbled, you both had scars, here you both were on the curb. When the table was on your dolly, legs up like a dying bug, you only waved before dragging away the dolly on the uneven sidewalk.

■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Prompt: loose vs periodic sentences, somewhere meaningful

The credits, white, scrolling quick across the screen, need witnesses. They require us to view them in their accomplishment and see with our own eyes the persons who delivered the story to us. The viewer should show reverence, thanks, waiting with their jacket and half eaten popcorn, and call out the names like heroes. Every best boy and animal handler, boom operator or, more recently, covid coordinator packaged this movie up. You should sit for the credits if even a single scene would leave the theater with you, because then you are in debt and owe the names on the screen an easy, quiet, tribute.

Anadiplosis + Haunted Houses

ana·​di·​plo·​sis: repetition of a prominent and usually the last word in one phrase or clause at the beginning of the next (as in "rely on his honor—honor such as his?")

With the grip of a chamber pot descending the stairs. Stairs two stories high keeled even and solid wood. Wood stained such a deep brown you would be hard pressed to scuff even an edge. Even, an edge, I stand on enthralled with this little chateau and ready to destroy every board. Every board knew me when I stepped in from the wilderness of the world and now would creak a soft whisper in my ear before my step would come down.

—

Every board knew me when I stepped in from the wilderness, into the house. the house would creak in anticipation of my next move before even I knew that I was taking a step. Steps broke up every room, one up or one down to get between the rooms. Rooms, so many, crammed into this little chateau, getting to know me in an endless way. Way up on the second story an open shutter whacked the side of the house, pulling back in a big swing, inhaling, and saying my name. Name.. my name… I grip the bannister, unable to count the steps as I ascend.

—

Inside the walls know the hairs on my arms, standing them on edge in the hallway. Hallways bending and turning, taking me nowhere. Nowhere, no rooms that meant anything but they suck me in. In is the only place I can be with this house, even the windows look out to repeating nothing.

(eehh this is all pretty abstract and not concrete enough)

—

Each board creaked my name. My name, my name, lost somewhere in the corner of the second floor bathroom tiles. Tiles you cannot follow, in patterns you cannot discern, looping themselves into spaced cracks in the wall. Walls that you cannot follow to a door.

Repetition + Memories

Sat down at the point at the bend of the lake, Zaremba’s White Birch Resort sits. Everything at the resort runs downhill from the top of the gravel driveway down to the end of the beach. When the rain came, we were on vacation. We wouldn’t sit inside and the water only sat in puddles where car tires were parked. In the rain the water ran gouges through the gravel driveway, cut culverts through the loose dirt along the cabin walls, pushed down through the sand on the beach where we sat, building little bridges over little rivers.

Poetry Class 2 + More Prompts

Prose poetry class continues to deliver. I’m challenged every exercise to take a new approach to the my writing and push myself to use devices that I would normally ignore only allow to happen if they happened naturally. The challenge has been good and I’m starting to build up two handfuls of samples that I can go back and rework.

▲ ▲ ▲ ▲ ▲

Prompt: Focus on repetition and a place from your childhood

Sat down on the point at the bend of the lake, Zaremba’s White Birch Resort sits. Everything runs downhill. From the top of the gravel driveway down to the end of the beach. Water never sat in puddles. Water ran gouges through the gravel driveway, through the loose dirt, along the cabins, through the sand on the beach, where we sat building little bridges over little rivers.

○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Prompt: Ekphrasis - a poem responding to art. Utilize conjunctions. Art - I am The Village by Chagall

I and the village but me and this horse and this hose knows the cow but the milk maid knows nothing and so the milk maid’s brother off with his sickle and the sickle not in the field where it knows but me in the village so this horse nibbles softly the berries in my palm.

6 Words + Movie Theater

Prompt: Use these 6 words. quit / love / film / innocent / glob / hail-mary

What love the quiet dark of the theater provides. Unabashed and innocent, I will never quit being hugged by the plush red seats, never not let the film on screen cover me, tucking as tight around my elbows as the glob of candy in my shoe sole. This screened room is my hail-mary, a temple and a sanctuary that I trust and in turn takes me on an escape.

Mountains + Fake Death

Deep in the Paint Rock Mountains
a stranger thought you dead
On the rock at the bottom
of a tiny roaring waterfall
laying basked in afternoon sun
Less than ten people knew
and panic could not spread
only dissipate into the dense tree lines
Even if they’d screamed, only the
flicking quick ears of the horse
would hear them
Sprawled on the rock
Fish nibbling at the surface in the pool
The static roar of the water
continuing to blot out any other thought
as they descend through the brush
to the body
Only the gentle tap of a toe
on your shoulder would wake you

Sewers + Mountains

Prompt: What do you see when you look in the sewer?

The center, the focal point, is never the scariest, the middle, is not what frightens, the middle offers possibly the only chance of escape, plunging further from the edge, deeper in hopes of safety, the outside brink, the shadows of will grab at us should we blink.

○ ○ ○ ○ ○

What do you see when you look in the sewer?
Down past the ladder rungs
Where unnamed men descended earlier in the day
What is down there for you?
Past the concrete lip, into the dark abyss of promise

once in the mountains, you found a waterfall
in the afternoon you dozed on a hot flat rock
the water never stopped whispering
when the guide found you
they thought you dead, fallen while climbing
and screamed for help, but not loud enough
to overcome the roaring of the plunge pool by your head

With your ear on the street, hot to your cheek
from the hole the water echoes
come down
come meet the promise
and see what lies beneath

Gin + Fizzes

Gin fizzes on leather swiveled chairs with hard pointless questions filling the low lights and spaces between the trumpet pulls. The crystaled glass rim of short drinks starting to sing from the counter to the booth. Drums like tinsel enter and all the chairs sway and pivot. Questions echo off the bar back, bouncing between the mirror and the bottles. Time can’t be kept in this improvision. Hard questions the flatten the drinks, that won’t be dissolved, that pull the seats forward to the stretching edge of the leather, grow loose.

Bed + Poetry Class 1

Getting back to bed, acknowledging you sprinted the first hour of the morning too quickly, returning to calm while the world outside builds itself. If you were traveling by ship across the ocean and could suddenly fly, step right off the deck and float above the waves, watching the barge carry on and out of sight.

■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Oh to know the author
to see them at the bank counter
laying out bills
perhaps Genius is not made, perhaps
hard work is not the only way, no way
to tell
but wait.
▲ ▲ ▲ ▲ ▲

Prompt: utilize assonance and or consonance
”what does it mean to do what you do?”

Every morning I’m caught drinking coffee for the caffeine high. Despite cup after cup I come back and keep coming back pleased with the sea of brown inside me. I am careful and cautious because the tide may turn to a hurricane, causing my head to migraine.

muscle memory + fire nights

Today restarts a struggle. Not against but towards, not away from but to. I return to work. A balance and a muscle needs to be rebuilt or re-remembered between the analytical side of my self and my creative mind, wandering through ideas. There’s an optimism beneath these words. The struggle is of enablement and working harder for something I want has never hindered me. Tomorrow I begin a prose poetry course. Having that course now, at the beginning of a new job will hopefully help keep momentum. I’m often proud of the work I generate in a structured setting and look forward to tomorrow.

▲ ▲ ▲ ▲ ▲

The heat of the night is heavy
a discomfort
at my feet grumbles
an immovable object
Above through the skylight
the moon is pitched in red
When I inhale I inhale
a million burnt leaves
Fans hum unevenly
pushing air nowhere
air purifiers hum black
restless in the weight of the heat
somewhere south the world burns

More Jazz Cats + “be ready to write”

Jazz cats riffing and sniffing
dust off dark bar counters
The bass player sharpens knives
on his own alcoholic obliteration
Headlights snap-p-p-p off like christmas
ornaments as the trumpets herald
Here in the dark the cats gather
Age old cats, those that survive,
their old narrow eyes
observe the city changing
Mike, a known cat, got the gig
for them, they sit curled around,
their instruments, in low lights together
with one another and going different places
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
”be ready to write”

being ready to write is hardly ever the issue.

I would throw myself on the pen.

My mind is not cleared.

I swing a mental chair in my mental ring, around around, windmill style, clearing space. The hot white lights of the arena bare down, my eyes and the crowd is empty. There are no seats even, the arena collapses down from the back, folding like an Ikea shelf, and I am standing in the grass again, the air is soft, I close my eyes.

Space Succulent + Jazz Cats

Prompt: succulent / nebulous / griffin

Tiny succulent reaching to the sun
what gates will you
open, show me the stars
Grow, grow & smash the glass
grow during the night
without eyes to size you up
fill the window with the width
of your stalk & let the low leaves die off
like a mighty red wood, clear a path beneath you
Never clinging, standing on your own, get huge
Let them chop at you, try to bring you back to earth
as you go up up up above the roofs,
higher then we can climb
Do not break them, they will part for you
& shield you from our view.
Touch the stars tiny succulent, be
a bridge to the cosmos and remember
who planted you, when I ascend send to me
a griffin at the cloud line to carry me
up into space, I will follow you
through the plump swole leaves you’ve grown
towards the sun, where you will always point
& together we will explore incineration.

⚬ ⚬ ⚬ ⚬ ⚬

Old jazz musicians sit behind me. Speaking a language that doesn’t quite connect. Everyone is a cat and they talk of self destruction. The Japanese cat who played bass that slapped and sharpened knives drunk. He died, from the alcohol not the knives but he could really play. Portland has changed for them but their line up still runs the same laugh ins. Mike the cat who knows open gigs is still around. The self harm of the world around them is becoming too much. People openly take drugs on the street, a cat smashed the headlights and the windows of one of their Volvos over the weekend. The improv of life has descended into chaos and now the cats need order.

Clones + Hot Breath

Today everyone looked almost like someone I knew. Enough that I made eye contact too long racking my brain for a name of the person I haven’t paid mind to in four or five years. Every dog everywhere was a golden doodle. My coffee was big in all the wrong ways.

▲ ▲ ▲ ▲ ▲

Across from me the final course is served. The double sewn tablecloth growing frayed. Summer, overfilled, looks at me but I cannot leave scraps on my plate. I roll backwards. Off the bench, falling but looking up, flying down, soaring into the dirt of Autumn. Dust folding over me followed by the leaves auburn. My ankles catch the tablecloth, tugging the picnic set off, clattering, shattering on top of the leaves, the dust, me. Underneath it all I can still feel Summer’s hot breath in the crease of my elbow.