As usual, Em Spider had skipped breakfast in favor of half a pot of coffee and five hours of remote work. “QA for a streaming media platform, blah blah, who cares,” Em would say if you asked, with a practiced laugh just uncomfortable enough to encourage a change of subject. Around 2 pm, abdomen rumbling, Em scurried down to the mini-mart located in the lobby of the adjacent apartment building and grabbed a couple of microwave flies — flavorless pill-shaped factory-farmed frozen bugs, filled with a vaguely cheese-like food product. After the hurried meal and a couple more hours of […]
Journal - Poetry
Poetry Game Instructions
When the round begins place the token on your tongue. Try to pronounce a flower. Try to pronounce a city. Drop the dice in the river. Spin the thousand-year spinner. Draw a card from the deck of a ship. If the card is a club eat a bruised fruit. If the card is a diamond add a drop of blood to the soil. If the card is a heart draw again. When you land on a space start the timer. After the token has dissolved hand your tongue to the next player.
Journal - Poetry
Training memes
Prior to these glowing screens were billboards, placards, sandwich boards, curated store windows that said many of the same things: notice me, be enticed by me, think like me, buy me. Those flat relics hang around still with their chipped paint, single-message slow memes fixed to the landscape, ignored by heads-down hand-held eyes, left like those rusty training wheels in the garage for the child’s bike we once wrecked in the gravel, crying with a pet wound. Now we have so many fast reflective wheels whirring, well-heeled adult spokes spinning out millions of powerful, expansive ways to crash, so many […]
Journal - Poetry - Review (Live Event)
Brave Little Venue, No. 1: Atlantis Lounge
The red velvet curtain is drawn to hide the street windows and stained glass signage behind the stage. In the center of the ceiling, in the shadows, a mirror ball spins slowly, just in case. A skeleton piano bares its felt and metal bones. A Klimt print nude floats in a spray of flowers. Arrivals show their connections through gestures: wave and embrace, shoulder-touch and fist-bump, impromptu conferences of old acquaintances, table seating shuffles, oz-troupes skipping toward the lounge. Beers and cocktails multiply; pizzas levitate above the tables. The first band begins. “It’s tater diggin’ time” Taylor’s cello sounds round, like a big bass […]
Journal
A tale of two carrots
I offer a brief observation on a long-running debate: “carrot on a stick” and “the carrot or the stick” are two different metaphors, with two very different meanings. Mostly I have encountered folks who use “the carrot or the stick” denying that the other phrase makes any sense, and claiming that it’s a mistake. This only proves that they don’t understand it. “The carrot or the stick,” as is widely observed, is a simple metaphor for reward vs. punishment. It is useful for those who want to talk about situations where either reward or punishment can be offered as strategic […]
Journal - Poetry
Grandmother Corntassel
Grandmother Corntassel from the rolling Cherokee woods had known seventeen summers when she married John Bradley, grandson of an immigrant from Yorkshire to Virginia. When I was young I thought all ancestors lost,* shadows on a dusty cart-path that decades effaced and centuries built over. But are they not here, encircling uslike we are the spirits they summoned, and is this not their dust on our soles? Ancestors may even be tricksters, laughing at our fresh feet in the corpse-soil, our fresh eyes on the old stars, our fresh fears in the anxious human-harassed world where they fucked and sang their way through things […]
Journal - Nature - Poetry
The mountain watched us
We returned to the thrice-burned wood, shoulder of Klickitat once dense green, now spiked with ghost trees. Close to downed trunks ash white and charred black we turned soil, pulled grass, and set in live starts of oceanspray / ironwood and wooly sunflower. Around the new plantings we built flimsy graze-guards of slender limbs, snapped from the desiccated bodies. The October sun was strong and gold. The earth in our fingers was soft and dark. A raven flew over and shared its deep, purred croak. Young firs waited, waist-high, green, patient in grassy fields pierced by their forebearers’ wooden bones. […]
Poetry
Pedestrian Aria
I have patient feet. I wait for the signal. Wheels turn around me. People move themselves. The light changes. The light always changes. Is this your light, the light that you needed? This is not my light. My light is yet to come. The light changes. The light always changes. I have patient feet. I wait for the light.
Journal
Walt keeps singing
In my dream I’m walking with my love S. and we meet in Leo D. in the street. It is night, in Portland; he informs us of an event. It isn’t exactly a production, but all manner of artists and actors are there. He leads us toward a warehouse building; through a momentarily open door I can see Alex R. reclined, but attentive, in an armchair. The closed door that we reach has a square translucent window, slightly amber-orange with almost-a-letter formed from strips of tape – perhaps an H, or a T. Leo opens and we enter, and the […]
Journal
On song exchange
I have incomplete and evolving knowledge about the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest, so I am writing this post more to express my interest and ask questions, than to claim any expertise. From diverse sources I have encountered mention of song exchanges by Chinookan and other indigenous groups of the region. I have not learned the details of the process, or how they might have differed among different tribes or villages, but the general idea seems to be that songs are revered and not generally shared without permission, but they can be exchanged. If you know a song from […]