momebie

It has been a month. HOW HAS IT BEEN A MONTH? I legit don't know how I got here. I suppose it was just one breath after another, but man, it feels like a lot of those are missing when I think back on them.


I have read a lot of poetry in that time. A LOT. Five books worth, give or take. And I've written some. I am never going to be an amazing poet, just like I'm never going to be an amazing novelist, but the more of it I write the more right it feels to be doing it and the more I feel I need to write. I don't know, there's just something about the act of writing poetry that makes me feel like I belong in a place or to a thing finally. It's helped me try to wrangle feelings I don't think I could do in prose.

For instance, when I was in Orlando I told theemdash that I take a lot of selfies because I'm still trying to get used to my face. Her response was a totally normal 'you've had that face a long time, dude, you should probably be used to it be by now' (paraphrased, obvs). And it's true. I have had this face a long time. I am old on the internet and in real life and you'd really think that in the last thirty-two years my mental image of myself would have lined up with the reflection I see every day. And yet, I am always vaguely shocked and disappointed by the facticity of my physical being. It's not even that I'm a fat kid. I mean, I AM a fat kid and I should really do something about that. I don't feel good about it or anything. But really it's to do with the shape of my face and the way all the bits of it are arranged. I romanticize them in my head and make them way more pleasing than they actually are.

And how do I manage expectation based on a distorted image of myself, or the feedback spiral downward that it causes. Like, I clearly lust above my station all of the time. How do I convince one of those people I'm worth dating if I don't think I am?

Also, some days I just look too much like my father for comfort, but that's a WHOLE OTHER truck of issues.

When I first moved to Boston I was telling one of the then roommates about how I want to be uploaded to a computer and they asked me if I was entirely disassociative. And I mean, no? I don't think I am. In my head the computer thing has nothing to do with my physical form being a hindrance and everything to do with time being a limited resource. I feel pretty good about being a lady and the things my body can do for me. I don't not feel at home in my body. I don't want to leave it behind. I just...want to tweak it a little so that it matches who I think I am. Though, real talk, there are a lot of things I wish I cold tweak about myself to match who I think I really am in moments of extreme hubris or whatever.

Anyway, it's a feeling I scratch at regularly, trying to understand it and I think I finally got a start on getting there.

Souls glare bright in the dim glow of living,
and easily fall prey to the glass
that would cleave them in two,
seeking out affinity in another shining surface
in vanity, letting it separate the stunning interior
from the gloaming shell,
which I think is why I never find myself
sitting in the beady eyes and pouch of a mouth
of my changeling self, as she stares
clinging covetous as mist to every mirror
and window, waiting for the invention
promised us by fiction of some
shimmering beam that might unite us again,
for the practical magic of a pure, smooth surface
to become a rippling pool she can reach through
and drown me in. I love her
more than I love myself,
for her patience and her desire.
How long has she been watching me?
My whole life, surely. Thirty-two years spent
waiting for discovery to catch up with desperation
while elsewhere we fling men into a space
just as vast as the millimeter that separates
the two halves of my whole when we reach
for one another, fingers against slick, cold skin.
How do I make myself worthy of this union?
If I had the opportunity I would swap out
every piece of myself. Rebuild the ship,
make me into something fine
and deserving of interest.
Would that upset the alchemy?
Would she know me anymore?
Would she come looking?
Finally crawl through the hard way, the shards
covered with thin, white web-like fury,
disillusioned dew glistening in the anemic yellow
bathroom light, the only evidence
there was ever any version of me at all.

So yeah, poetry. Cheaper than therapy! (I should really look into that too, though.)


And because we're already talking about poetry, here's a video Richard Siken made for his poem 'Why'. It made me laugh and it made me choke up a bit and it made me say 'yes' under my breath about a hundred times.

'Why', poem and video by Richard Siken w/ music by Marianne Dissard from Marianne Dissard on Vimeo.

HOTPANTS
HOTPANTS
HOTPANTS

Poetry is serious business, you guys.

I have, in rough estimate, written about 125,000 words this year. I'm going to end the year well short of my goal of 200,000 words and not having finished the one thing I wanted to have finished this year. That said, I don't think it's a failure.

I spent much of the first half of the year frozen and freaking out about a thing I shouldn't have been freaking out about. I'm pretty sure it's not going to be published, since I haven't heard back on it. That's not the reason I shouldn't have been freaking out about it. I shouldn't have been freaking out about it because it wasn't something to freak out about. And I think my freaking out is part of why it turned out the awkward way it did. I don't know why I get so caught up in my head about my writing and what other people want and what I think I can or can't do. I'd probably be a thousand times better off if I just ignored the rest of the world and wrote what made me happy. (Captain America cyberpunk-Last Unicorn AU, HERE I COME!)

ANYWAY. July happened. I had already moved and gotten the hard part of that out of the way. I finished and submitted that thing of which we will not speak. And I submitted a poem to a magazine call. That's really where the momentum took off. I got a rejection on the poem, but they also left a note listing three other publications to submit it to who they thought might take it, which is promising and probably part of why I've had the confidence to continue pursuing poetry, most fervently here at the end of the year. Out of three poems submitted to anything ever I've had two acceptances (one published online and one published in print) and one personal rejection. That's not terrible odds.

I still don't feel like I can call myself a poet, but I also don't feel embarrassed anymore to say that I write poetry. Progress all around, really. I'm currently getting help with a chapbook of queer fairy tale poems I'm going to submit to a contest in January. I still want to finish off the Sorry About the Robots chapbook and submit/publish that.

On the prose side it's been more about progress than completion, which I suppose is good in the long run, but it doesn't make me feel very accomplished. I had a breakthrough on Burst in the form of deciding to make it an all lady circus. I had a breakthrough on Dickhead Angels about the central conflict so that it's no longer just two dudes road tripping around the US ramping up sexual tension for no discernable reason. I wrote a fairy tale, which I should probably revisit to flesh out. I have had no breakthrough on Volunteer Vampires, which is what I told theemdash I'd send her a draft of by the end of the year. I am still going to try to rewrite the WWII AU in the BDESFN universe to send to by the end of the year so I don't owe her $50. (Because real talk, I do not have $50.) And I think a lot about Dupe City, so I want to try and get something under my feet on that one in the new year.

Which brings me to the public service announcement portion of my talk:


GetYourWordsOut: Year Seven!
Pledges & Requirements | GYWO.net

DO YOU ENJOY WRITING? DO YOU LIKE TRACKING WORD COUNTS AND BEING HELD ACCOUNTABLE? THEN getyourwordsout IS THE COMMUNITY FOR YOU. Going into its seventh year, the GYWO community is stronger than ever. We're trying out new things and getting people more involved. I'm running the community Tumblr. There are regular discussions and help posts and opportunities to share what you're working on. I can absolutely say that having the community around has helped me to get more done when I was feeling stuck. I highly recommend it to all you writerly types on my list, of which there are many.

So, all that said, it's time to think forward. I don't have a plan for the new year (though I'll work one out soon enough), but I do have a wish list of sorts. It looks like this.

• Complete Sorry About the Robots. Figure out if I can submit it or if I should self-pub it.
  
• Submit a poem for possible publication at least once a month.
  
• Complete a draft of Burst.
  
• Complete a draft of Volunteer Vampires.
  
• Make headway on Dupe City.
  
• Make headway on Dickhead Angels.
  
• Continue to think about the BDESFN and do absolutely nothing about it.
  
• Look at fairy tale and decide if it could be a YA novel.
  
• Continue to come up with ludicrous ideas for future stories.

I think I'll have my hands full in 2015 in the best possible way.

What about you? How have you done this year? What are your goals for the next? Will you be joining the fun at GYWO?

Today I took off work and spent some time at the Boston Museum of Fine Art. It was a pretty great day. I wandered and looked at beautiful things and wrote today's poem for the PAD. On an average day I wake up wondering why I waste my time at work when there's so much more fulfilling stuff to see and do elsewhere, but I have a feeling tomorrow's going to be worse. Art hangover, if ya knowwhatimean.

There's a collection there by the contemporary artist Shinique Smith. I find her work incredibly charming, which I'm sure comes off as more derogatory than I mean it to. It's that mixture of collage and texture and bright colors presented in a way which makes the mundane, static nature of every day clothing into something dynamic. Included in the installation is a piece called Breath & Line, which consists of a room of mirrors writ large with calligraphic graffiti.

I like to put my nose right up to the art. I like to study the texture. And while I'm sure there's a way to view Breath & Line without also viewing yourself--several groups of people came in while I was there, hovered at the entryway to look around, and then went out again--there's not a chance I was going to view it that way. So I saw myself. And I saw the interruption of the thick black lines clashing across a familiar image. It made me think about selfie culture and how most of my favorite art works in opposition to my senses and if it's possible to observe something without leaving a part of yourself behind in the observation. Like we're just leaving opalescent bread crumb trails through time in the hopes that one day we'll be able to follow them back to the way we were.

We can't, of course, which is part of why I think we're so fascinated with our own images. Or at least part of why I'm so fascinated with mine. It was these thoughts that led to me taking a picture of myself in the art and then writing a second poem for the day. Sometimes even narcissism is productive!

It's easy to think art breaks even.
Creators leave a penny's worth
of blood in a gilt frame.
Then we come to take it away
a drop at a time.
If that were true,
the buildings would soon be empty,
and we'd charge up the great stone steps,
hungry,
empty,
demanding to be allowed to drink ourselves warm.
But instead of a penny we all leave a pound,
creators and ingestors,
leaving only brittle flesh,
taking only smoking scars.
Because through the glass art looks
like a healing water. We drink
and we drink, finding only fire,
scorching our throats in search of relief.
It's only because we let ourselves
believe it's self-inflicted
that we continue to ignore the burning
underneath our skin.
If art were zero sum,
they would call it war.

Basically, don't ever think of yourself as if you're not a piece of art.

You know how sometimes you sit down to write a couple of sentences about a thing and end up realizing you had more feelings about it than you thought you did? Yeah, this is kind of like that.

So, the Writer's Digest poetry blog, Poetic Asides, does Poem-A-Day challenges in April and November. I did not get very far in April and never caught back up, but I'm doing a good job so far with November. Six for six! I'd been planning on just churning out poems for Sorry About the Robots based on the prompts, but for the last several prompts I've been moved in other directions. My new plan is to write poems about robots when I can, and when I can't, to write queer fairy tale poems. Because if there's one thing this world needs more of, it's that. Clearly.

(Queer as in 'odd' and also queer as in 'gay'. I'm a regular in both boxes!)

Well, I like tonight's, so I'm reposting it here. I DO WHAT I WANT. Right now I want to write a hundred more like it, but we'll see how that goes.

Soon after giving up their child
the young parents moved to Niagra,
so that they could spend their lives
assessing other people’s faults.
And eating salads without feeling guilty.

Rapunzel knows this because sometimes
when the old woman who adopted her is drunk
on wine and years, she says things
that she’ll later regret. And also because,
the tower has wifi.

But maybe it’s for the best, that
in a world where even the roses are fickle,
she gets to keep the golden moments
she made up in her mind, and not have to
cast out any of the bad ones that naturally
build up when you spend to much time with people.

It’s not like it used to be, even the witch
agrees. Rapunzel’s had three boyfriends
and two girlfriends, and has never had to deal
with morning breath, or shaving, or sharing
the last slice of pizza. She owns a vibrator.

Life is good. Life is longing anyway,
if the one thousand and five movies viewed
with her Netflix account is any indication.
Just last week she learned she had a sister:
who’s on a swim team, who listens to Taylor Swift,
who also loves Sailor Moon. Who keeps her hair short.

Rapunzel knows it’s a betrayal, but
she can’t keep herself from befriending the girl
and talking to her on twitter. She types the words
I’m your sister and deletes them again over
and over. It’s a betrayal, but the thrumming,
warm box under her fingers is so inviting.

The night Damon Salvatore is locked in
purgatory, is the night she hits send. It’s
a moment of weakness she’ll pay for, but
there’s nothing that can be done now.
She needs to share with someone
who will understand, and even from her tower,
the sunsets are beautiful.

And then her sister comes and saves her and they drive down Route 66 visiting all the tourist traps and telling each other stories. LIFE GOALS, TBH.

The one from last night was also fairy tale influenced, but weirder and darker. Someone on the Poetic Asides blog commented to say they like it when poets 'have thoughts that are different.' I uh, I don't know what means, since I'm pretty sure we've been making up fairy tales since before cave art. I guess they're probably just noting the difference between emotional poetry and poetry with a fictional narrative, but those two things overlap for me so it feels weird and redundant to have it pointed out. Reminds me of the LJ Idol debates over biographical journal type entries versus fictional narrative entries.

I still maintain that you learn more about me from my fiction than you do from my life, but what that means in the light of this one I don't know.

[Heavy lifting.] Had my first call with the Health Coach last night. I didn't cry and she didn't try to shame me! We talked about my goals and my current state of disrepair and all of the things I know I need to do but just...don't. That is seriously the story of my life at this point. I draw up diagrams and lists of things I could do to make myself happy and productive and healthy, and then I set them on fire and go off to eat chocolate cake in bed. Because eating chocolate cake in bed makes me just happy enough at the moment to make it not matter that I'm going to be blindsided by miserableness later.

SO. Project Shell Game is in effect. So-called Project Shell Game because the three major things I need to start doing are so interconnected that I'm finding it impossible to work on one because of the others. I need to A) get to sleep at a decent hour so that I can B) wake up by 6:30AM and C) walk three miles before work at least three days a week. Maybe if I can follow all of these then I will be able to pick out the one thing that makes me happiest in the long run. Maybe there's a pearl under all three. Who knows. That's the one thing I told her I'd work on. I want to be able to give her good news when she calls back in April. I also want to not die during that run I signed up for, so there's that.


[Art and shit.] I mentioned a while back that I wanted to run a game of Artist's Telephone, because it would be fun. Now that we're drawing close to summer I'm thinking that I really would like to set it up. It might be best to host over Tumblr, but I can figure out the particulars when I see if there's actual interest. For those who don't know, Artist's Telephone is a game where one person creates a piece of art and then the next person in line uses that piece of art to inspire them to create a new piece of art, and on and on. If you think this sounds fun to you, would you please respond to this poll?

[Poll #1904553]

Also, I'm leaving this post unlocked, so feel free to share this with other people you think might enjoy it.


[Words and shit.] I need a pair of eyes to help me whip a poem into shape. Anyone? Bueller?

ARE ALL OF YOU AT 45,000 YET? BECAUSE I'M NOT! I'm actually at half that, which I find pretty exciting, and also pretty disappointing since I have done NO WORK WHATSOEVER on the thing I meant to be writing. My brain needs to shut up and sit down and get to work. I'll probably force it to later this week. Over the weekend I didn't write nearly as much as I needed to. And when I did it was stupid little things that don't belong anywhere, like this:
You give me form.
Sometimes I don’t think that I exist,
except for when you’re there to see me.
It’s your eyes that pin me in place
and carve me from the empty space, pulling
from the air the parts of me that you want to see.

Yup, still not a poet.

Today's picture is in direct opposition to my lack of productivity. Today's picture wants to get shit done, and black gloves are for killing.

Original Fiction.
290 words.

It's always the love that does Them
in. How unlike humans They are,
is what They tell Themselves in Their day
to day business. And They're right. They are
as unlike humans as a thing can get.

Humans are made out of clay. Out of necessity
their minds and bodies are malleable.
They need things. Greed. Fear. Lust
for a more permanent state of being. Time pushes
them along, pulls the strings in a way that God does not
care to do. His wisdom is in distraction.

They are made of fire. They burn
and hurtle through empty space, even as They are
standing still. They do not make Themselves known
to the humans because the humans already know too much.
The humans know of the Morning Star who forsake them.

Burning. Bringing light, They climb in His estimation.
They claw against each Other, dodging the human
emotions that are strewn about the cutting room floor.
They rise, until all that's left to reach for is love.
The one thing to which They are not immune.

He made it in Their image and, not knowing what to do
with it They let it weigh them down. They come crashing
back again, feathers singed with tar. They feel it this time.
They crawl. They carve out a place for themselves in the world.
In having a place they suddenly have bodies. Suddenly Are.

Being is too much. They reach up again, jump, scramble
for purpose. When They look at the stars They look on
them with the love that They can't clean off. It sticks
to everything and reminds Them that They have bodies.
The stars don't. The stars merely burn. But They—

are through with burning.


Ugh. I am so fucking nervous about this. You never learn unless you try though, right? I'm blaming it partially on pocky_slash, who threw out the writing chat prompt that generated the ficlet that turned into this. This entry was written for Topic 10: Icarus at therealljidol. All comments and questions are welcome.