reimagining place

Addiction as Ecotone - Part 17 - Kathleen Flenniken

2008-03-23T21:31:00.016-04:00

THE MAN WHO PLAYED TOO MUCH TETRIS - Kathleen Flenniken
______________________________________

It wasn’t just the way he ate his toast
..................................................................changed lanes

or squeezed between
two women
on the elevator

He looked too often toward the sky
........................................................and talked too much

with his hands

At meetings
.......................the space between executive heads

...............................................................................asked to be filled

with the world

caving in

At lunch
.......................birds swooped down
...........................................................on his crumbs

the way he’d trained them

He was a doomsday prophet

He was up to his eyeballs

.......................................flooded

...................................................with everything fallen

....................................................................................or falling

and try as he might
he couldn’t
find space
for it
all

It made him sad

when the women stepped away

___________
Kathleen Flenniken's poems have appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Mid-American Review, Farm Pulp, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry Daily. She is the recipient of a 2005 Literary Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a 2003 Literary Fellowship from Artist Trust, along with grants from Artist Trust and Seattle Office of Arts and Culture. Her first collection of poems, Famous, winner of the 2005 Prairie Schooner Prize, was released by University of Nebraska Press in 2006, and has been named a Notable Book of the Year by the American Library Association (ALA)

Addiction as Ecotone - Part 16 - Sam Rasnake

2008-03-19T23:45:00.002-04:00

Self-portrait - Sam Rasnake
______________

And if this morning is a dream,
how deep the water? how dark the closet?
I've invested the grackles of winter
to a field, sloped, untended,
with its brown almost angry stubble,
a fierce resistance to the new.
My only certainty is this window,
and not the life pitched against the glass.

_________

Sam's poetry has appeared in journals such as MiPOesias, Pebble Lake Review, and Boxcar Poetry Review. He is the author of one chapbook, Religions of the Blood (Pudding House), and one collection, Necessary Motions (Sow's Ear Press). He edits Blue Fifth Review, an online poetry journal.

Addiction as Ecotone - Part 15 - Dave Bonta

2008-03-10T14:36:00.005-04:00

Lines - Dave Bonta
______

Just as I'm about to take a freight train up my nose,
I stop with my head halfway to the rails:
a small spider is descending past my face.
I'm struck by the precise choreography of it,
her two pairs of forelegs moving in circles
like the arms of a swimmer, the next pair
sticking straight out like oars at the ready
& the hindmost pair paying out the line.
Not here, I say, giving it a nudge
to keep her off the tray's smooth lake.
She reels herself in, heading for my finger.
I push the thread a little farther & she severs
her connection. Sorry, sister, I mutter
as she drops to the floor — a chaos of newspapers —
touching down without incident among the headlines.

______

Dave blogs at Via Negativa and helps curate the online literary magazine qarrtsiluni,
which is currently seeking submissions for an Ecotone-compatable theme
"Nature in the Cracks."

Addiction as Ecotone - Part 14 - Stephanie Goehring

2008-03-05T00:01:00.002-05:00

I'm probably lying - Stephanie Goehring
____________________

but I first overdosed to understand

your addiction to injury, your obsession with chainsaws.

After the butterfly flew backward (the thrum of its wings so white)

and the bees confessed their immortality, I forgot you,

remembering how god created the world from nothing

but a scythe and the way his declaration of light

fell on a field of beans.

I overdosed again and found forgiveness was a man

walking through the lack of rain, wet to his bones.

He was wearing your clothes and said, "History is like cedar:

Get some nails for your palms or burn it for warmth,"

so I let the kerosene lick my throat.

I awoke coughing blood, pulling splinters

from between my teeth. After the wood turned to dirt,

the dirt turned to beans and the bees turned up dead

on the butterfly's wings, I remembered god

and how she created the world with no memory

of who had ever wronged her.

Addiction as Ecotone - Part 13 - Tamiko Beyer

2008-02-27T22:00:00.006-05:00

Mrs. Wu Ping is Interviewed - Tamiko Beyer
_____________________________

_____The scene: Chongqing, China. A modest house teeters on a huge mound of red
_____dirt. All around, excavated clay earth. In the distance, huge metal claws dig into
_____roofs, knock down buildings, one wall to the next –

everything that I love:
my books my broken things
my photographs my dinner
plates. ridiculous vigorous
plants on windowsills. myth,
minutia, canisters of green tea,
fish sauce bottles, ovaltine –

what, if not a life?

I dig in and the pile
drivers have at it
all around
loose roof loose wall loose the nails on the nail house

they'll not be taking this away
without tearing their pants

did you get your quote, mister
the story right? I've got to get on
I have a home to be protecting –

_____oh sure, I suppose they'll win
_____someday they'll win,

windows blowing
out with a sound like calving
glaciers __not

that I've ever heard such
a sound, but I read
I do read, mister

well, look at me run my mouth

______still a body's got to do what a body's, etc., etc.

you know, mister –
like a joke when you forget the punch-line
or a sweet you find in your pocket covered
with bits of torn receipts

__________
Tamiko Beyer's work has recently appeared in the Best of the 'Net 2007 Anthology, The Progressive and Crab Orchard Review. Tamiko says regarding this piece: Constantly in my work, I return home – to the concept of, desire for, loss. Seeing this amazing picture and reading the accompanying article, how could I not attempt to sneak into Mrs. Wu Ping's stubborn, tenacious, and terribly pragmatic voice?

Addiction as Ecotone - Part 12 - Neil Aitken

2008-02-22T21:57:00.005-05:00

In the Long Dream of Exile - Neil Aitken
____________________________

You are counting the dark exit of crows
in the rear view mirror, or from the top of an overpass
looking back into the last flames of cloud.
Your car, steel to the world of flint, rests listless
with its windows wide, the stars slipping in
and settling down for the night.

Now, what you could not leave rides in boxes
heavy with numbers and places you've already
turned into poems. There is nothing left
in your pockets, your clothes worn down
to this list of miles taking you out of the known earth.

Outside your open window, the dark repeats
like the wind in late fall, twisting the names
of familiar back roads into a long rope of sighs.
You could lower yourself down with such longing.
It could be a woman or a young girl, the way the light
clings to that body like a sheet of immaculate heat,
invisible to the eye, but something, you are certain,
something that must be on the verge of love.

__________
Neil Aitken is the author of The Lost Country of Sight, which won the 2007 Philip Levine Prize and is forthcoming this fall from Anhinga Press. His work has been published in Barn Owl Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Drunken Boat, Poetry Southeast, Sou'wester, and elsewhere. He is the founding editor of Boxcar Poetry Review and is currently pursuing a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.
"In the Long Dream of Exile" was first published in The Drunken Boat, and also appears in his first book, The Lost Country of Sight. Neil writes that this poem "grows out of a love of loss gained from countless cross-country moves. Even now whenever I load up my vehicle to begin another move, shedding whatever I think I will not need, I am surprised to discover how deeply entangled I have become with the place I am leaving and how each new place blurs with the one before and the one before that, image upon image, longing after longing, the road the single thread stitching us all together."

Addiction as Ecotone - Part 11 - Karen Weyant

2008-02-18T23:04:00.015-05:00

The Bartender Dreams of White Moths - Karen Weyant
___________________________________

Of flutters pounding in her ears, tissue wings
snagging on loose wires of screen doors, burnt
crisp on streetlights, bent backwards around
the antennae of a car. She wakes up sweating,
thinking of bar napkins tearing on cans of beer,
bar stools, the heels of work boots heavy
with dust. One regular always sports jeans
stained with white paint, another wears
the wings of sweat stains under his arms.
Smoke rests in her mouth, coats her throat,
splits her skin. The jukebox echoes, Garth Brooks
scraping her hips, pinching her thighs.
She remembers all the last calls slipping
through the back door, hoping the night
insects grasping the screen will fly away.
They only cling tighter.

________________

Karen J. Weyant, a 2007 NYFA Fellow in poetry, teaches at Jamestown Community College
in Jamestown, New York. Her recent poems have been published in Slipstream, The Comstock
Review, Anti- and the minnesota review.

Addiction as Ecotone - Part 10 - Lyz Lenz

2008-02-14T20:53:00.006-05:00



Spotless - Lyz Lenz
_______


If he wanted their daughter, my parents figured he should take their
God. They hoped it would help him stop drinking so much. So he grabbed
them both with his broad, fat hands grasped together in prayer and
brought them to his apartment in the lower level of a split-level house
only three blocks away.

When I walk into the apartment, pushing open the door against the
past-due bills, Weight Watchers report cards, fishing lures, and shoes
that gather behind it, I know neither my sister nor God are really
here. There's no room.

Dishes pile on the counters, rings of brown residue, beans, and hard
kernels of rice cling to bowls and plates. The cable, the electricity,
and the phone go on and off, oscillating between function and
dysfunction.

In a corner of the kitchen, the linoleum peels up like a page in a
book revealing the next chapter—tacky floorboards squiggled with
glue. I press the page of linoleum back. Lining their shoes over it to keep
it from turning. I fill the sink with soap and scrub the kidney beans
out of the bowls. I vacuum the rugs. Straighten the ratty Afghans on
the couch. I spray disinfectant in the bathroom and scrub the tub with
bleach.

"You don't have to," my sister says. "It's not worth it, it's just
gonna go back to how it was."

But I wear rubber gloves and dust off the television. I straighten the
coats in the closet and stack the games in neat piles on the shelves,
starting with Clue and ending with Yahtzee.  Crayons are lined up by
color in their box.  Books are made to stand up straight, their spines
even. DVDs alphabetized. I even install a program to clean up the
naked women, bent over in high heels, who pop up in little banner ads
and groan with pleasure. I pick up the keyboard, hold it upside down
and shake until dust, pieces of food, and chewed up finger nails come
out. I shake it harder. More dust falls out. It rattles in my hands
and my throat is tight. My sister tells me to stop, stop before I break
something.

I open the windows, even in the bitter cold, letting the sharp clean
wind slice through the thick heavy air.

Then I dust and vacuum until everything is gone and the house smells
clean and the baseboards no longer carry the residue of the lives
lived in this apartment. Until there is enough room to open the door.

My sister sits on the couch. "Why do you do this? It's not like I
can't."

I smile, "I just want to help you."

"You've done enough."

The door slams. I turn and see a new stack of bills, now crooked in
their basket holder. Not organized by due date and size. He must be
home. I leave. I can't see it go back to the way it really is. But I
come back the next week, this time with my own assortment of sprays
and disinfectants marshaled together in a sturdy blue bucket. This
time I clean better. This time I move the couch and hear metallic
pinging as I vacuum dirt, buttons, and paper clips from behind it.
This time I clean the dark wood under the linoleum, using my finger
nails to pick up the dried fragments of cheese, kernels of rice, and
hard gray pieces of dirt that have wedged themselves between the
linoleum and the wood. I scrub it with hot water that burns my hands.
This time I don't wear gloves. The linoleum feels pliable and I press
it down on the floorboards again. On top of it I put shoes, purses,
and a wayward umbrella. I stand there with the neat pile of heavy
things holding down the linoleum, hoping my weight will remind it that
it needs to be in its place. It needs to be clean.

One night, I dream my hands press gently against the surface of my
sister's once white walls, now marked with black scuffs, the dried
tears of an unknown brown liquid, and several deep red splatters. I
dip my toothbrush in a blue bucket filled with bleach and I scrub,
taking away every mess. Cleaning every stain.

I am no longer invited over to my sister's house. At Christmas and on
birthdays, I do my best to ignore her yellowing skin, the soft break
in her voice. In return, she never mentions those three months I
tried to make her life spotless.

Addiction as Ecotone - Part 9 - Shin Yu Pai

2008-02-11T11:35:00.001-05:00

hals und beinbruch - Shin Yu Pai
____________________

in the motherland not
just women and
dwarves who undergo the knife

an up and coming aspirant
in Beijing reports from
the operating table

I need to be at least five
foot nine to achieve what
I want in life

chisel and mallet
taken to the knee
clean snap of bone

heredity, bone stunt or
nanism, overturn a sentence
to new opportunities

in the government
a chance at law school or
to act in film

ugly duckling to
silly goose, the world
a stage break

a leg

______
Shin Yu Pai is the author of Works on Paper (Convivio Bookworks), Sightings: Selected Works [2000 - 2005] (1913 Press, 2007), The Love Hotel Poems (Press Lorentz, 2006), Unnecessary Roughness (xPress(ed), 2005), Equivalence (La Alameda, 2003), and Ten Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers (Third Ear Books, 1998).

Addiction as Ecotone - Part 8 - Brent Goodman

2008-02-09T10:08:00.000-05:00

White Crosses - Brent Goodman
____________

mouthful swallow bitter chalk
not all the pills go down
muffled dusty plastic bottle rattles
tugging off over-handed grunt

not all the pills go down
gravel endless mind spark nausea
tugging off over-handed grunt
neighbors aiming binoculars

gravel endless mind spark nausea
smoke lighting smoke
neighbors aiming binoculars
skin vibrates into invisible

smoke lighting smoke
bleeding-eyed up all night
skin vibrates into invisible
puke-blue birthday cake

bleeding-eyed up all night
stop talking stop talking
puke-blue birthday cake
ingrown splinters under nail

stop talking stop talking
pinhole camera piercing drywall
ingrown splinters under nail
cockring hardon aching

pinhole camera piercing drywall
3 days sleepless 4 nights gone
cockring aching hardon
truck stop teen teller's stares

3 days sleepless 4 nights gone
muffled dusty plastic bottle rattles
truck stop teen teller's stares
mouthful swallow bitter chalk

______
Brent Goodman lives and writes in northern Wisconsin. Most recently his poems have appeared in Court Green, Anti -, Rattle, Pebble Lake Review and elsewhere.
Regarding "White Crosses," which is a pantoum, Brent says: "White Crosses" was my first attempt to capture the years I spent trapped inside a living pantoum, doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. Instead living in a world of increasing contradictions between ecstasy and exhaustion, paranoia and exhibitionism, desire and impossibility. I think all addictions lead to the ultimate contradiction between life and death, and recovery is the decision to choose to claw your way out of that vortex before it is no longer your own choice.

Addiction as Ecotone - Part 7 - Ron Slate

2008-02-07T10:57:00.000-05:00

Light Fingers - Ron Slate
______________

Feather duster in a child’s grip

swished over bottles of Old Grand-Dad

in my father’s liquor store,

my hand hovering briefly

above rolls of coin in the cash drawer,

other objects stolen from local merchants –

a magnifying glass,

a hi-lo thermometer, an Indian rubber baseball,

novelties, candy, cigarettes:

If you wouldn’t give me what I deserved,

what you seemed to promise,

then I would take it from you.

The splendor of scissors.

The consideration of a rubber stamp

“for your attention.”

At some point, after the accumulation

of the objects of desire,

and later, after they became unforgettable,

beyond understanding and useless,

this is when I looked back and saw the boy

making a daring effort to be part

of the family’s sadness.

All of the grief that preceded me –

war, fire, the destruction of culture,

the powerlessness of parents,

the compensations of shameful inward lives –

this, I perceived, is simply what it means

to be human. So now there is nothing

to wrest into myself,

for myself.

But there is the spirit leaping with dread

and exultation, demanding everything.

And the old cunning.

When Mrs. O’Brien suggested that Joseph,

her son, and I go to see his priest

about our common venal behavior,

my mother, a Holocaust survivor,

threw her out of the house.

I returned to my favorite pastime:

a book of sleight-of-hand tricks,

small objects, all objects, vanishing.

______
Ron Slate founded The Chowder Review in 1973 (where he was joined years later by Floyd Skloot). You can read his Poetry Foundation profile here. "Light Fingers" comes from The Incentive of the Maggot, which was awarded Bread Loaf's Bakeless Prize (judged by Robert Pinsky) and nominated for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle poetry prize.

Ron says about this poem: I dimly perceive a link between poetry and petty thievery's sleight of hand. It cheers me to think there may be a trail of crumbs (or hastily discarded booty) leading from my adolescent hi-jinks to my adult pullings-of-wool-over-this-and-that. My favorite god is Hermes, the trickster, god of the business transaction, too. I must be obsessed with the topic after all, because my new poems include some shady dealings and even a little felony.

Addiction as Ecotone - Part 6 - Sandra Simonds

2008-02-04T23:03:00.000-05:00

I am Small - Sandra Simonds
___________

but my life is enormous.
Huge as angels.

Huge as a zookeeper's
heart. Who knows

how large the
zoo is when you take

into account
the surface area of all

the cages. Not to
forget the aorta. Let's get

hitched in the
roomy cage of

the latest newly extinct
species. He's

gone. There's space.
In this country

they make lists (in
hieroglyphics)

of all the unions
that have ever taken place

and all the unions that
will ever take place.

There's no way out of this one, Sam.

That's what they call a nation.
That's when they ask the syringe

and turkey-baster-
holding zookeeper

to sedate
the elephants

and artificially inseminate
the blasé Pandas.

_____
Sandra Simonds has poetry published in countless journals, including Colorado Review, New Orleans Review and No Tell Motel. She's the creator of Wildlife Poetry Magazine, and helps edit the DIY (Do It Yourself) Poetry Publishing Cooperative site. Check out her blog to see her chapbooks, poems and sundry pop-opinions.

Addiction as Ecotone - Part 5 - Collin Kelley

2008-02-02T21:51:00.000-05:00

Whipping Boy - Collin Kelley
_______________

Tina’s fingers tighten on my arm,
we should go now, she says,
but we don’t, because the main
attraction is about to begin.

It’s Beale Street at millennium’s end,
humidity so thick it coats like oil,
and I have two hands around a bucket
of alcohol, craving blackout.

I lean against a streetlamp, surrounded
by revelers, oblivious of everyone,
until I hear the first crack of leather
and a cheer both derisive and dangerous.

Ken drunk in the street, hands on his knees
being whipped with his own belt,
the one Tina says he took off and handed
to strangers, begging to be beaten.

I lose count of the tourists who take
a whack at him, who giggle and run,
never notice the mounted cop watching
at the corner of S. Lauderdale, waiting.

When the redneck walks up, takes the belt,
his thin lips turn to sneer, he snaps the leather,
Tina’s fingers then, and Ken is smiling
until the belt makes contact and he buckles.

The thwack reverberates in every sweat drop
of dispersing crowd as redneck throws the belt
on Ken’s prone body, fucking faggot,
saunters away, and the cop just grins.

_______
Collin Kelley is the author of the poetry collection Better To Travel, the spoken word CD HalfLife Crisis, and the chapbook Slow To Burn (2006, MetroMania Press). Kelley, a Georgia Author of the Year Award-winner and Pushcart Prize nominee, is also co-editor of the Java Monkey Speaks Poetry Anthology series from Poetry Atlanta Press. A chapbook of new work, After the Poison, is forthcoming in 2008 from Finishing Line Press.
Colin writes regarding this poem: "Whipping Boy" was the first poem I thought of when I saw the theme [for this series]. This poem is true. I was in a strange city with my lover, who was an alcoholic, and I was starting to fall back on my tendency to self-medicate to deal with our crumbling relationship. The fact that I stood there, recognizing the danger, but did nothing reverberates today...The gay community in Atlanta is, to a degree, insulated against homophobia because there is such a large gay population. The incident in Memphis was an eye-opening experience -- the open homophobia, the police allowing the situation to escalate. Talk about stepping outside your ecosystem.

Addiction as Ecotone - Part 4 - Peter Pereira

2008-01-28T00:25:00.000-05:00

Oniomania - Peter Pereira
____________

Not so much the desire
for owning things
as the inability to choose
between hunter or emerald
green, to buy
just roses, when there are birds
of paradise, dahlias,
delphinium, and baby’s breath.
At center an emptiness
large as a half-off sale table.
What could be so wrong
with a little indulgence?
To wander the aisles of fresh
new good things knowing
any of them could be hers?
With a closet full of shoes
unworn back home,
she’s looking for love
but it’s not for sale —
so she grabs three of
the next best thing.

_____
This poem appears in Peter's newest book, What's Written on the Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2007). Peter is a physician in Seattle, and was a founding member of Floating Brigde Press. His previous book, Saying the World, was also out of Copper Canyon.

Addiction as Ecotone - Part 3 - Margaret Stawowy

2008-01-26T09:41:00.000-05:00

Wanderlust of the Comatose - Margaret Stawowy
_____________________________

Somewhere in Neurology, questions swim before you, elusive,
cryptic as the phantom fish they expect you to catch.
What trail of synapse are you warping, each day as long as two years?
If you want to go home, try counting backwards from 100 by 3’s—
just follow the lizards crawling across the ceiling—
when you reach negative 1, look down.
See the women on the shore? That’s your name they’re calling.
Your dog is in the driveway waiting,
while the lotus eaters prepare your homecoming banquet:
goat and hot links on the grill.
Great deejay, but it’s still a boring party with too many good old boys
pissing in the bushes.
What they don’t get is that you live in two places now, disconnected
as your broken ribs served up on a platter.
Your eyelids suspend over bruised sunsets, hot as infection.
Just one twitch and subterranean seas will rise again.

______
Margaret writes concerning this poem's connection to addiction/compulsion: 2007 was the year when I became one of the women on the shore, calling names of friends in hospital beds. Watching them slide in and out of consciousness/lucidity, listening to their startling pronouncements, they seemed in the thrall of some sort of interior odyssey, charting odd roads of brain geography. Heady stuff, yes, but at what price?

Addiction as Ecotone - Part 2 - Michelle Billman

2008-01-24T00:14:00.000-05:00

Left to Right - Michelle Billman
_____________

Missing Student’s Body Found on Golf Course. Duke Grad Student Shot to Death. At Least 33 Dead in Virginia Rampage. These are the yellow bricks I follow after the time for sleep has come and gone, fingers tapping the mouse as my eyes accept the glowing text—click, scroll, left to right, left to right, click, scroll. I’m validated. My checking—the locks at least twice, the too-big walk-in closet, the bath tub behind that opaque curtain, underneath the bed—is reasonable, responsible, a part of my daily routine. Click. My window checks, when I peer out into my sleeping neighborhood from the bottom corner of a drape or blind just to make sure, are normal, something everyone must do, surely; with these headlines you’d be stupid not to. Scroll. I make sure that no one’s hiding in the garage, stalking the back yard, or crouched underneath the bathroom sink. If the heater gives an occasional burst of cold air, I search for the opened window. Left to right. Around midnight or one, the heater’s clicks and drums start to murmur. My dog’s irregular snores whisper. The smoke detector’s green light floats like a target. Left to right.

In daylight, even though I can’t “check” things, I take inventories of which classrooms have what windows—big, small, I could fit through that, easy-to-open, first floor, second floor, how many steps to get there?—what exits—nearby doors, flights of stairs, long and bare hallways—and what ducking places—desks, tables, cabinets, where else? My inventories include people, too. A woman alone in a movie theatre, a man with a hood pulled over his head, anyone without a visitor sticker at work, crowds. Virginia Tech Gunman Identified as a Student.
I search because I didn’t see it the first time.

Addiction as Ecotone - Part 1 - Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

2008-01-22T12:46:00.000-05:00

A Brief History of Colonialism - Jane Joritz-Nakagawa
_______________________________

i (the early years)
. . . on the bed, my knees touching the refrigerator. wherefore art thou. this hotel
looks just like the last one. the last time i was in total disregard of flesh. it

lasted for what seemed an infirmary. an eternity of colonialism creates a wealth
of subtraction in which your ladle always fits. i sip up your secret tusk like

pathogenic noblesse one by one. i feel the vertical celebration of misuse
approaching at great speed, transparent as whim. over absence and

withdrawal, various imprisonment strategies masquerade as prayer, more
or less sustaining this readiness for future monopolies of spaciousness & nostalgia

ii (the middle period)
. . . on the table, my knees
against the wall. wherefore art,
though? this hostel
looks a lot like the last one don't you think. the last time
i was in total
disregard of mesh-like bellicosity lasting
for what
seemed an eternity an inferno of
colonialism made a muck
of collapse in which your pitchfork always fits. i lap up
your secret musk like

pathological nothingness one by one. a
virtual celebration of mayhem
approaching at great speed, transparent as bling over absence and

withdrawal, various survival
strategies masquerade as plans, more
or less sustaining this blueprint for future monographs
of disquiet & largesse

iii (dream of the future)
. . .
on the sofa, my hands
grabbing the table. wherefore art
has gone no one knows. this brothel
looks like the last one pretty
much. the last time
i was in total

disgust of .... it
lasted for what
seemed like an umbilical. an emblem of
colonialism creates a stain
of subservience in which
your cup is always filled to the brim. i am impaled
by your secret bulkhead
luck like perfectionistic nonsense
one by one. a
visible celebration of misogyny
following at great speech, trashy as spring, flash over substance

and wherewithal, mysterious forms of
sabotage masquerade as paralysis mostly
sustaining the myths of
speciousness and neuralgia

___________

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa is an Associate Professor at the Aichi University of Education in Japan, and writes concerning this poem: Currently I am reading a book titled Dreaming the Actual (SUNY, 2000), which includes translations of Israeli female poets. One of the poets included, Hedva Harechavi, is described therein as having a "passionate, obsessive, unrelenting" poetic voice. I think much of my recent work, especially those poems and essays which less covertly have as their theme capitalism, war, feminism, and ecopoetics, are written in a voice that could be described in much the same way. Some verge on hysteria. This poem is part of a large series of such works. I thought of using the word "capitalism" rather than colonialism, but to me the word colonialism confers more responsibility, illuminating better the process and the relationships. This poem will be included in my forthcoming (third) poetry book to be titled EXHIBIT C.

Series 2 - Addiction as Ecotone - An Invitation to Submit

2008-01-14T21:30:00.001-05:00

(NOTE: Submissions for Series 2 - Addiction as Ecotone - are now closed.)

Ecotone: a transitional zone standing between two connected, yet separate ecosystems.

Addiction: the state of being enslaved to something that is
psychologically or physically habit-forming to such an
extent that its cessation causes severe trauma. *

We're interested in exploring addictions (particularly their beginnings and, in some cases, their resolutions) as an ecotone—a transitional place separating past and present, reality and fantasy. We thus invite you to submit artistic expressions you have related to this idea. (We're open to anything: striking text, video, finger paints, sand sculptures...)

Has your body served as the vessel for a chemical addiction? Your mind ensnared by an online addiction? Your soul trapped by the lyrics of a bad 80's band? However you view addiction as an ecotone, we're interested. Surprise us. Give us something brilliant, something edgy, and we'll launch your piece into the blogosphere (also called rogue publishing). You never know who might be watching.

Submission Guidelines:

While we are most interested in pieces that are unpublished, and will be more likely to accept your submission if Reimagining Place is its first home, we will consider previously published works during moments of weakness.
Our aesthetic tastes are as divergent and diverse as the landscapes we encounter. Language poems. Confessional narratives. Lyric essays. We'll consider anything sharp; however, given the nature of this site, brief is better. On rare occasions we'll publish something over 1,000 words.
This current series is tentatively slated to remain open through March, and submissions are welcome through this period.

You can send submissions to davidhg[at]ecotonejournal.com.

*Definitions are adapted from dictionary.com.

The Body as Ecotone - Part 9 - Jessica Goodfellow

2007-11-19T21:36:00.000-05:00

How to Describe the Desert Without Saying Water - Jessica Goodfellow
____________________________________________________

Wanted: bauble of milky mouth.

Fat knee of shameless need, kneading.

Wanted: fontanelle ticking, a fist

of collateral tightening. Frightening

whorl of faintest resemblance—thin

as glaze, angle, or desire.

What I wouldn’t have (forsaken).

Crone whispered, Bridegroom hissed—

My groggy head in vespers once

northward canted. Cant = can’t.

My fault. Crone’s nostrums: always

it was water, variables afloat, science

listing. Crone intoned the Water Deva,

snake in the well. From feminine flotsam

infused a brooding brew. Awoke my desert(ed)

troth to sit unsheathed in a rainstorm.

The one constant was water—no planet

without it breathes. I was no planet.

And now. My moon blooms amphibian.

Glory, my taproot has plummeted.

My matrix is configured. Hosanna.

Madonna figure, de rigueur,

who once beleaguered be.

Full regalia my penetralia is.

Jessica describes "How to Describe the Desert Without Saying Water" as "an expression of my own body's transitional place between infertility and pregnancy (but not infertility and fertility; my experience has been, once infertile, always infertile, even after the babies come. And they did come.)

The Body as Ecotone - Part 8 - Nicole Cartwright Denison

2007-11-09T09:06:00.000-05:00

the smuggler speaks of maim - Nicole Cartwright Denison
_______________________________

I dreamt the phantom limb
past the crook of arm
back of knee
tingling, tugging
an affront
to purpose,
movement

notice, then practice their
leers at the appendage

do they not recognize
offending members
bared in the marketplace,
my crimes for all to see

pity they clamor
for bloodlust
bloodletting
terrible sport

single digit
left counting,
one foot saved
to ease my travels

The Body as Ecotone - Part 7 - Jarvis Slacks

2007-11-08T19:18:00.000-05:00

On Keloids - Jarvis Slacks
______________________

It’s called keloid. Key. Loid. It is when the skin won’t heal like most people’s skin heals. Think of the skin healing cross-sectionally, lacing together and then melting to produce a seamless reality where a mistake happened. A keloid is the opposite. The skin lumps together and then just tries to figure things out the best it can. It is like the skin says, Can blood get out? No? Then we’re done here. No one really knows why the condition exists. And, yes, it is most common in black people. My people. In some counties, they still call us “you people.”

Keloids are the most wonderful scares. They rise up off the skin, or make the skin appear completely different than it did before. I have one on the back of my right hand. It happened after a bad night with a bad girl. I was riding my bike and flipped and slid and there they were: five new scars that will never go away. When people ask about it I tell them the truth: a mistake. But I’m not talking about the bike accident. I’m talking about the night before. Scars are direct representations of the things you do—I am a firm believer that, somehow and sometime, you have to pay for your mistakes.

For example, there is a scar on my belly. On the left side, up and down. I called my sister a foul name (bitch). Then I climbed a tree. Then I slid down the tree, and my belly took off some of the bark. It was huge, then, the scar. The length of my body. Now it is as long as my pinky. There is also one on my shin, from my foot to my knee, where I refused to help my mother do something. I can’t remember what. Then I ran into the underpinning of my house on a four-wheeler. There are scars from where I dated this girl for a week, this girl I shouldn’t have, and then I got ring-worm and now there are dozens of little places where the skin is dark, places where it should be light.

Recently I’ve been having conversations about plastic surgery with beautiful women. These women are older, yes, and they are afraid of what aging may bring in thirty years. The conversations seemed to bounce off me. My body isn’t something to fix. It isn’t something that can be remedied. My body doesn’t have scars, I have scars. Emotional, physical, whatever, I’m riddled. My belly isn’t big. I’m big. My leg doesn’t hurt. I hurt. I am slowly understanding that this place that I spend so much time with, my body, is so much of me. People say, Get rid of the physical. Look past the flesh. I’m embracing my flesh, fully accepting of it. This is me, I say, sometimes, to people. These days, I tend to walk around my house naked, the windows open.

This could be me getting old, not caring about the ideas of beauty as much as I used to, when beauty was obtainable. Or it could be me getting more arrogant, thinking my body is the most beautiful body in the world. And I really do think that. When I look in the mirror, I don’t want to be anyone else. I couldn’t imagine it. A certain level of arrogance can save you a lifetime of doubts, some costly medical procedures, or some therapy. Scars aren’t so bad. As long as you remember where they came from—how not to get them, again.

The Body as Ecotone - Part 6 - Kate Sweeney

2007-11-04T00:31:00.000-04:00

The Tattooed Lady Speaks - Kate Sweeney

My first tattoo isn’t small. I live in a southern town, which means that any season other than the dead of winter, you’ll see it. The other one is pretty readily visible, too. Because now there are two. Somehow this happened, and intrinsically, it pleases me. But still, I don’t want to be identified as “The Tattooed Girl.”

Did this ever get to the Lion Tamer? Did he long for the world to know he could also play the kazoo so sweetly it could lull a babe to slumber? I heard no one bought it when Snake Woman mentioned she’d taken up photography. And the Fat Lady. Well. She’s still battling it out.

Except of course, the difference is that every ounce of unwanted attention in this matter is my fault. No one else forced me into first one tattoo studio and then another, a few years and hundreds of miles later. Oh, and nobody forced my hand in deciding Tattoo Number One would be a primitive explosion of vivid red-orange rose blossoms just beneath my shoulder blades. It’s this that introduced me to the phenomenon of people I didn’t know well identifying me as The Girl With That Tattoo. All my doing.

I did this. And not just because I thought the design was pretty, but because of how I imagined it identified me. The obvious problem, however, is that I don’t get to control the significance other people place on my tattoos. Other people do not see this ink and think, “Ah. Bookish and creative.” The men at the truck stops see it and send up wise smirks. My grandmother saw them only recently—not my idea. (Thanks, sis’!) To her, the tattoos amounted to disappointment; marked me as “common.” To some guys at bars, they signify “promiscuous but scary.” In reality, I am both shy in a number of matters and neurotic, but not psychotic. Then there’s the typical “Ah, trendy!” reaction, followed in the same breath, with “Foolhardy.” As in, “She’ll regret that in five years.” When I told a colleague once that I got those roses done in my mid-twenties, she said, “Oh! I’d assumed it was like, one of those regretful things you did back when you were eighteen.”
Um, no.

The worst though, is people who assume because I have a couple, that I am a fan of tattoos in general. That I’ll
1. like
and
2. want to talk about
that dolphin on your belly/the Celtic band across your arm/your future plans to map that scene from Gladiator across your back.
Listen: I’m not a conventioneer. I just don’t want to talk about tattoos, yours or mine.

It’s unsettling to be reminded of one's physical appearance by people you’ve just met. I feel for the pregnant woman whose fate it is to have strangers in grocery stores reach out to brush their fingers across her swollen belly, as if her body somehow no longer belonged to her.

What makes it especially irritating is that in large part, the reason I got these tattoos has everything to do with claiming my body as my own. If there’s anything I want people to get when they see me, it’s that I’m someone who tries not to buy into fashion norms or conventional consumerist hoo-ha, thank you. The word “fashion” makes me squirm. Like malls, like thong underpants. I’ll say so with my body. I’ll say so right up front.

The agonizing, hilarious irony is that of course, in fashion’s predictable arc, tattoos, like Chuck Taylor shoes and so many things before them, long ago went from being anti-fashion statements to being signs of hipness. Where was I when this happened? Maybe at this bar, wearing a variant of the same outfit I’ve worn since I was 17: Converses and some $2 thrift store dress. And hey, look: everyone around me here now looks like this too, although that's no sign that they share my politics or passions. And yet maybe tonight I’ll make some sort of connection. Because listen: there’s this guy trying to get my attention over the music; wait, what? He leans over. Shouts into my ear.
“My ex-girlfriend had a tattoo sort of like that!”
Oh, really?
“She was a real bitch!”
All right.

The Body as Ecotone - Part 5 - Jeannine Hall Gailey

2007-11-02T18:20:00.000-04:00

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made; or, How Am I Like the X-Men? - Jeannine Hall Gailey

___________________________________

We all start out as children wondering if we are special, unique. We secretly believe we are not like anyone else; that, like Superman, we are orphans from a different planet, with phenomenal superpowers, being raised by "regular" humans. Sometimes these beliefs come true, but not in exactly the ways we had hoped.

There's a verse in Psalm 139 that goes something like "I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; I know that full well." When I studied biology for my undergraduate degree, and had the opportunity to do some real life dissection of the human body (a rarity for an undergrad, usually reserved for med school students) I did marvel that everything turned out so well: the layers of fascia, the bones beneath the sleek muscles, the fascinatingly complex eye and heart. I remember the professor saying, "None of your cadavers will look like the pictures in the text books; every body has a little abnormality - an enlarged liver, for instance, in this person, or a collapsed lung in this one. Some people have too many vertebrae in their spines, or too few, or an extra dozen feet of colon in their digestive tract." It was a wake-up call for me as I worked on the cadaver with my scalpel, not to take anything for granted. Maybe an organ was hiding beneath another organ, or it was on the wrong side, or it had a different shape and color.

My little brother and I read the X-Men comics together in the mid-eighties, a comic that focuses on characters who, through genetic mutation, have developed powers (like spontaneous healing or controlling the weather) that make them extremely helpful to the human race but also make them outsiders who have to battle bigotry against "mutant kind."

Recently, my hematologist, the kind of doctor that everyone should hope to have (caring, smart, dedicated, and a persistent detective) asked me to come in to her office to meet a few other doctors who were experts in the research of their respective fields, visitors at the University of Washington, where my hematologist teaches. One of the doctors, a woman about my age who looked like someone they'd cast as a doctor in a show like Grey's Anatomy (I think she was a pathologist, an expert in rare infectious diseases - now there's an interesting career!) was asking me about my various genetic and congenital abnormalities and health problems: an extremely rare genetic bleeding disorder called PAI-1 Deficiency, a "horseshoe" or single, long kidney hugging the front of my abdomen, a "twinned" uterus, an abnormal heartbeat, asthma, an enlarged thyroid, an allergy to sunlight (blisters and flu symptoms when I go out in bright sun for too long) and alcohol (I pass out after less than half a glass of wine.)

"Wow," she said, "Genetically, you've got to be one out of, like, 50 million. Have you noticed yourself developing any special powers? You know, like the X-Men?"

"Not yet," I responded, "but I'm pretty sure they're going to manifest any day now."

I know I am unique. Different. Special. Fearfully made, yes. Wonderfully made? I'm still working on coming to terms with that. A sense of wonder. Wondering.

The Body as Ecotone - Part 4 - Laurel Snyder

2007-10-31T13:13:00.000-04:00

Bris as Ecotone - Laurel Snyder

_________________________________________

_____Priest: To what part of your body do you refer most often?

_____Young Man: To God

__________~Antonin Artaud

So—a baby gets born, and the baby has a body, and the body is good. Then God says, “Cut off a bit of that body, why don’t you? Just the smallest part—”

God wants to see what we’ll do. It’s an experiment.

We prove to be good subjects.

We cut. We snip. We hack a bit of the body away. We prove our excellent listening skills. We get a gold star, a lollipop. We get a god.

Except—

Except that now we’re the maker. Or the tiniest part. This dominion is now ours, not because it has been given to us but because it has been taken by us. We held the knife.

And who holds the knife? Who takes?

We have taken charge of the body with the body. And the world has followed the body’s lead. Our ears heard a voice. Our fingers fumbled for a blade. Our offspring (next, better selves) lay before us, waiting.

And—

Our hands become his hands. Our knife is his knife. And his knife is us.

We turned.

The Body as Ecotone - Part 3 - Alison Stine

2007-10-26T19:02:00.000-04:00

The Earrings - Alison Stine
___________________

The earrings are small, hand-beaten gold disks. They look like they were shaped by tiny thumbs. I bought them in London, when I was twenty years old. They were displayed in an aquarium, the tiny jewelry hung from tiny driftwood branches. They cost forty pounds, which was a lot, especially for a twenty year-old girl without pierced ears. I think the store was called Bloomsbury, but the black velvet drawstring bag they came in is so old, the name has worn away.

The name has worn away from me touching it, opening the bag, and dumping the earrings into my hands, and touching them, as I do every few months, every few days, lately.

They are the only pair of earrings I own or have ever owned.

Because I don’t have my ears pierced.

Because I am deaf in one ear.

Because of a rare birth defect which is often much worse.

I have no other piercings. I have no tattoos. I often dye my hair, but it’s usually mistaken for my natural color. I am plain and bare as a plain tree, and I want that to change.

This year for my birthday—January25th—I am getting my ears pierced.

I am getting my ears pierced to prove to myself that I can change, that I can change my body, that I am not too old. I want to change in preparation for a larger change: I am getting my hearing fixed, or at least, I am going to see a doctor to see if it can be fixed.

I’m afraid of the gun, and I’m afraid of the needle, and I’m very, very afraid of the doctor, and what he might say, and how it might be no.

The gold earrings are one of the greatest gifts I have given myself—although most would say I have not gotten any good out of them, as I have never worn them. But buying them, spending so much money to buy them, was a sign to myself. Hang on to myself.

One day you will be strong enough to change.
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