First spotted on the R train, November 2010:
I found this on the bike path along the Belt Parkway between Dyker Beach Park and Caesar's Bay:
"The gaunt trestle-work of the els brings twilight to miles of streets, the tunnels of the subways honeycomb rocks and rivers and skyscrapers. Their trains are the first things a good many New Yorkers observe in the morning and the last things a good many more remember at night."
From The WPA Guide to New York City (1939)
Spotted on the F train between 23rd Street and West 4th in Manhattan:
Spotted on the R Train this month:
My heart burns in flames of sorrow
Sparks and smoke rise turning to the sky
Within me, the heart has taken fire like candle
My body, whirling, is a lighthouse illuminated by your image
--Mihri Khatun ( 15th-century female Turkish Poet) from Poetry's Voice, Society's Song: Ottoman Lyric Poetryby Walter G. Andrews, Copyright 1985. Reprinted by permission of Univeristy of Washington, Seattle.
April, they say, is the cruelest month. It also seemed, for personal and professional reasons, to be the longest month. And, as many may have noticed, we ran a little over and into May.
This concludes the second annual installment of the Tattooed Poets Project. The endeavor seems to have attracted more fans this year, and I am thankful for that.
But I do need to extend thanks to all thirty-three poets who participated this year, and tolerated my incessant badgering for photos, poems, and details.
And to the dozens (and I do mean dozens) of poets across the country and overseas to whom I sent emails asking for either tattoos or news of poets the knew with tattoos, I thank you for humoring me and the project.
The person who receives what I call the Muldoon Award is G.C. Waldrep. Last year, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Paul Muldoon declined to participate saying "Alas, I've done the uninkable." The best response this year from an uninked poet was Mr. Waldrep's:
"What an interesting idea. But no, I remain untattooed. Except by the ravages of love and pain."
Here on the final day of the 2010 Tattooed Poets Project, we are featuring two tattooed poets (in two separate posts).
First up is Jeanann Verlee, who holds the distinction of being the one poet this year who met with me in person to discuss their tattoo. The poem below is dedicated to fellow bard Eboni Hogan, whose own contribution, not coincidentally dedicated to Jeanann, follows this post here.
*
carnivores
for Eboni Hogan
She is the prettiest thing New York City
has seen since Christmas.
It is 2:38 AM. We have matching boots,
swirl cheap red wine between half-glossed lips,
jab bent forks into hard falafels.
The night is ready to end its shift.
A plump waitress wears the city’s tightest
electric-pink sweater, (a Valentine for her beloved).
Two Marines wink from February’s side of the glass,
a king cockroach lies wait in the ladies room sink,
the swordfish on the butcher block is looking for his gullet.
It is raining Merlot.
Our construction paper hearts, soaked
all the way through.
It’s 2:38 AM and I am stuffing her with confession.
She sucks the fat, licks her fingers.
I am gutted and we are ravenous, eating with our hands:
slurp, chew, gnash. Gluttons.
Soon, the bar and the second bottle are empty.
I watch her take the dull blade of a table knife
to her chest, (my jaw hanging loose like a broken
screen door swinging in a summer monsoon).
She slices straight through her breast,
breaks off two ribs, sets them on her plate—
blood rivering through the hummus.
She takes my hand, jabs my curious fingers
into the wound. I dig in hard,
all the way up to my elbow.
She doesn’t even wince.
The cooks across the room scorch
something that once was alive.
The pink waitress brings us each a free glass
of whatever wine is left and extra napkins
to mop up the pooling red spill
from our lips.
*
One of her tattoos, intertwined with her new book, can be seen here at Tattoosday.
Thanks to Jeanann for taking the time to meet with me, sharing her tattoos and poetry, and rounding up an exciting 2010 Tattooed Poets Project!
*****
JEANANN VERLEE is a former punk rocker who collects tattoos and winks at boys. She is author of Racing Hummingbirds (Write Bloody Press, 2010) and her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The New York Quarterly, PANK, FRiGG, Danse Macabre, and Not A Muse, among others. An acclaimed performance poet who co-curates the weekly reading series Urbana Poetry Slam at the Bowery Poetry Club, Verlee has performed and facilitated workshops across North America. She was co-author and performing member of national touring company The Vortex: Conflict, Power, and Choice!, charter member of the annual Spoken Word Almanac Project, and is an ardent animal rights and humanitarian activist. She lives in New York City with her best pal (a rescue pup named Callisto) and a pair of origami lovebirds. She believes in you. Learn more at JEANANNVERLEE.com.
Here on the last day of the 2010 Tattooed Poets Project, we are featuring two tattooed poets (in two separate posts).
Eboni Hogan's poem below is dedicated to her friend and fellow poet Jeanann Verlee, whose own contribution, not coincidentally dedicated to Eboni, is above here.
Tabasco for Jeanann Verlee
I.
We eat everything so smothered in Tabasco, it leaves our fingers ringing. When we share a plate, we do not have to accommodate the daintier palate by quartering off a sauce-free section with first-rate ventilation systems and plexi-glass. We brandish the little bottle furiously, haphazard and without warning. The poor falafel treads the screaming red lagoon on a makeshift raft of lettuce. I imagine that the red-head learned how to pronounce the items on the menu from her Greek ex-husband, who would be horror-struck by this sacrilege of tzatziki. From her tales, I’ve concluded that a man like him deserves nothing less than a good goring with a hummus smeared fork. Tonight we count the names of those like him. Display each one on the table top as evidence that our greatest mistakes were charmers with crooked teeth and bad handwriting.
II.
It is Valentine’s Day. In the forty minutes it took me to ride the train to the West Village, I witnessed three separate occasions of women sobbing, yelling, or a frightening combination of both. I watched a girl, no more than 16, curdling on the uptown platform. She juggled an overstuffed teddy bear, a bouquet of plastic roses flickering like Christmas lights. Unexpectedly, she turned to the sheepish boy standing beside her, still obediently clutching her knock-off Vuitton in his thick fist,
and struck him once in the gut with the blinking bouquet with so much force, the lights in half of them ceased to twinkle.
III.
The European family dining at the table beside ours finds our conversation far more compelling than their own. They must wonder at the strange notion of two women wearing black dresses and clunky silver rings dining together on a holiday meant for meant for lovers. Because we know that they are listening in, we don’t spare them the gore, layering in words like “detached,” and “hemorrhage,” and “depressive”. If they must know, we will give them full coverage, unabridged. They will learn how to stage a coup d’état in a cab that refuses the ride to Queens or Brooklyn or just up the block, study the way a sidewalk rampage can never be figured into travel time, commit to memory the occasions when tears came unexpected while grocery shopping or watching a particularly sappy commercial about rescue shelters or tsunamis or fabric softener. Catalog the moments when we’d wished we weren’t so good with words.
As I tell the story about the time I cried so hard on a flight from London to New York City, that the flight attendant secretly handed me a napkin cradling a sleeping pill, the European mother turns to look into my face as though she may have remembered being on that very plane with some weepy American girl fraying her eyes into black sores— but, no.
She is met with the narrowed glare of the red-head who speaks louder now, peppering their meal with terms like “fume” and “razor.”
IV.
It was in this very restaurant that I was dumped,
not once…
but twice…
by the same man.
One might think that after the second rupture I might reconsider meeting the man for “dinner” and “conversation,” at least not without considerable re-enforcements.
A sock full of quarters,
A getaway car.
V.
Our mouths are churchyards. There are no bells adorning the graves of the sleeping. Every coffin lid is raked in anguish, pink polish embedded in the grooves. The ghosts have been known to fly from between our teeth and take to the streets, only wishing to be held into flesh again. Tonight they stay put, ignoring the Navy boys roaming 6th Avenue, the lesbian couple monopolizing the only working stall, the employee bussing the plates before the last olive pit had been cleared of its meat. Tonight they will cause no spills, lose no friends. They will patiently wait an hour for the train watching the night’s lovers quarrel and kiss across the Manhattan bridge.
Yes, it's May, but we have two more days of the Tattooed Poets Project before we're done for the year.
When asked to submit a poem, Cody Todd said, referring to the tattoo he submitted (on Tattoosday, here):
"Sadly, I don't have any noir poems. I'd love one to explore a relationship between noir and poetry, even though I doubt it is possible. The early work of Larry Levis is noir-ish (e.g. "L.A. Loiterings" or "Fish") but I don't think it was his conceit to explore that relationship, even if it exists. The work of Bukowski, voluminous as it may be, comes from a kind of noir persona that the poet created for himself, but again, not really an attempt to explore the poetics, if any exist, of noir. I do have a weird poem here that I wrote in a woman's persona, and she came to me one night as a rather desperate and dark soul."
Portrait
Portrait of child swinging on an old tire, tied to a tree. Portrait
of man hammering a stake into the earth. Portrait of wedding:
the space-eyes of everyone, happy as hell. Welcome to hell. Oh
portraits ringing in our memories like unanswerable telephones
in abandoned offices. Hello portrait, it’s me. I’m alone and still
thinking about you, portrait. Getting drunk alone. Lipstick has
to be refreshed after each glass. Don’t leave me alone, portrait.
I am almost dead, almost smoking another night away, almost
admiring the stars, wanting to eat the their own cold smiles.
As we reach the final days of the Tattooed Poets Project 2010, let's read this poem from Jozi Tatham:
Huntsville, Alabama
-William Eggleston, 1978
An old man sits on the end
of a hospital made bed, and he watches
to the left with hospital made hands
in his lap. The room collapses
behind him, folding in on itself in
neatly creased corners, a white tiled
ceiling only slightly illuminated by
the unseen light that hangs by a chain,
and a murder red shag carpet vacuumed into
cornstalk rows, with walls the color of
sunflowers in late fall, sopping
in decay under a dirty south sun. Everything
is static. A plastic, sticky vinyl
that squeaks with the old
man’s presence, and it doesn’t
really matter where you go, as long as
you check out from this room, so the
shine can be buffed and the corners can be
cut. The geometry of breathing. He woke
this morning, ironed his white
shirt so that the subtle crease down
the middle back hugged his spine,
wet his comb in the alcove
bathroom before running it through
the hair that rings the crown that was
misplaced long ago, shined the same
black wing-tipped shoes he bought for
a job interview at the post office that he
walked out of with half a torn stamp stuck
to his sole and nothing more, and all he
can do now is lick the sticky side and hope
that the room holds up for a little while
longer, because check out isn’t until noon.
~~~
This poem is previously unpublished.
Please check out one of Jozi's amazing tattoos over on Tattoosday here.
Jozi Tatham is currently a poetry MFA student at George Mason University in Virginia. She hails from Milwaukee, WI where she received her BA and the place which serves as "the inspiration for most of my being thus far." She has been published in newspapers and small publications in the Milwaukee area for poetry and nonfiction.
Thanks to Jozi for participating in the Tattooed Poets Project!
Today's poem comes to us from Phebe Szatmari:
Sex should be like eatingBe sure to check out Phebe's lovely tattoo here.
Sex should be like eating
she told me last night.
Something that we just do—
which is exactly the opposite
from the way she touched me.
Magnetic electrical impulses
begin in my arm and shock like a current through
the hollow empty hull of a ship
that floats in the water
allowing the balance of buoyancy
that is the tugging of equal gravities,
those captured airs that will never stop trying to escape.
And yet release in my breath, on her neck
until another shock fills me again.
This is not like eating—
shocking with our hands, our lips,
carving down the spine, through the body.
Today's poem comes to us from Steele Campbell:
Steele Campbell is currently living (and I mean that robustly). He is essentially transient, but has paused his peregrination at Auburn University to complete a Master’s Degree on the fiction of Marilynne Robinson. He is the recipient of the Robert Hughes Mount Jr. Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets two years running and has been published in Decompression, The Boston Literary Review, Rope and Wire and Touchstones. He is the student poetry editor of the Southern Humanities Review. You can visit him at www.steelecampbell.net. Today's contribution on the Tattooed Poets Project comes to us from Lisa Gill:
Locomotion Poem for Two Voices
from The Relenting by Lisa Gill
SNAKE
Let there be locomotion.
Let us wind through the grasses across the mesa
and up through the boulders to the top of the ridge;
let us keep climbing until I can scale mountains with you,
some red-faced cliff with petroglyphs
or a bluff topped with aspens,
any place we can rise up counterintuitive
while monsoons run down arroyos…
WOMAN
As if gravity were always something to succumb to
instead of just another kind of magnetism
designed to remind you
to scale
me
because today my body has become simply some unexpected soft surface
for you to encounter in your environment,
as if love were tactile,
or timely,
as if love didn’t have rough edges,
my own elbows and knees,
a scathing surface of jutting collarbone and breast,
together we are a cacophony of softness and hardness.
SNAKE
My spine against your belly.
WOMAN
Your ribs wrapped by the reach of my arms.
SNAKE
My jaw pressed against your sternum.
WOMAN
Hard valley of animal meeting reptile.
SNAKE
The length of our long bodies intertwined…
WOMAN
Because I am the one who can help you molt
the parts of your body hardened by parasites,
the epidermis solidified so tough you can’t grow
or breathe into who you are becoming…
SNAKE
And I am the one who can help you remember
that fear doesn’t have to be fraught with expectations of danger;
sometimes it’s simply anticipation of interactions not yet experienced.
If there is a reason for our togetherness, let it be vulnerability,
the sloughing off of old ways, the abandonment of fierce exoskeletons
that protect us a little too well,
as if you and I have been calling it safe to be sealed under a bell jar,
as if that vacuum were enough to merit the word “alive”….
when the other option is this…
WOMAN
Intensity of now.
~~~~~
Be sure to check out one of Lisa's tattoos over on Tattoosday here.
New Mexico poet Lisa Gill is the recipient of a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a 2010 New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award, and just earned her MFA from the University of New Mexico this April. She is a literary arts activist, currently booking poets for "Church of Beethoven," and the author of three books of poetry, Red as a Lotus, Mortar & Pestle, and Dark Enough. A fourth book, The Relenting, is forthcoming with New Rivers Press (June 2010) and can be considered either a play or a poem scripted for two voices, rattler and woman. She'll be touring the play in the upcoming year, starting with a staged reading with Tricklock's Kevin Elder at 516 Arts in Albuquerque in June and then onward to Minnesota, LA, hopefully even to NY.
Thanks to Lisa for sharing her work with us here on the Tattooed Poets Project!
Today's poem comes to us from Jeff Simpson:
Reunions
This is the night of the living dead or the morning after,
which I always imagine as a hangover
of restless souls, human and zombie alike, converging
to maim each other in the spirit
of fellowship, but today we've come here for the brisket
and potato salad
and the moonshine, which threatens to melt the two-liter
Mountain Dew bottle into an emerald
puddle while a group of third cousins tune guitars,
fiddles, dobros, an electric bass,
before singing songs about the heartland and their collective
achy breaky hearts.
And so we’ll huddle up because we are bound by blood,
or so the story goes. Year after year
we come here to catch up on the latest weather reports,
obituaries, the pitiful retelling
of Uncle Ed’s death, a man who, as far as I can tell, was never
anybody’s uncle, tales of triumphant
poker games or the purchasing of a new Lincoln, fables
with plots that remind me
of a pulp novel I once found at a truck stop in Tucumcari:
Trailer Park Trash,
a tale of two people whose “love was as mobile as their home.”
Mobile love and mobile people
who once migrated from Mobile, Alabama to the southern
plains of Oklahoma
to work the oil fields and multiply, and now there are kids
running around the room I’ve never seen,
bodies floating to and fro inside the Seminole Convention
Center next to the Jimmy Austin
Golf Course where men in polo shirts are teeing off
on the eleventh hole,
dreaming of the nineteenth, bourbon and cigars for everyone,
while workers from the Department
of Corrections operate heavy machinery, pluck crab grass
from velvety greens.
What is this fascination with all the little cells of the world—
family reunions, class reunions,
Sting and The Police reuniting for one last performance
of “Roxanne”?
What is this love for folding chairs and vinyl tablecloths,
for supreme carrot cake,
for bullet holes and war stories, for rumors of illnesses,
stints in rehab,
for knowing at what age I can expect to develop Parkinson’s?
The band revs up.
The music bears us as we bear the music, as we lay witness
to tradition and ceremony
and rituals, the way Cherokee women wear their hair long
until the death of a loved one,
then out come the scissors; the way small town citizenry
fill the stands on homecoming
adorned with war paint and gold bells; the way peaceniks
and students poured into Altamont
in ’69 to watch Mick Jagger, all snarl and swagger,
sing “Gimme Shelter”
to a swirling mob of Hells Angels so they could feel like they
belonged to one great human tribe.
And I’ll admit I’m partial to concerts and bikers
and leather jackets,
just as I’m partial to all these people who have my mother’s
eyes and possess a genealogy
of patchwork quilts, some bearing the name of every first-born
son because we’re a family
of male heirs, because we’re phallocentric, because the band
plays on as I sit forking my carrot
cake and drinking my coffee before it goes cold, before I start
to forget the names.
Head over to Tattoosday to see Jeff's tattoo here.
Born and raised in southwest Oklahoma, Jeff Simpson received his MFA from Oklahoma State University in 2009. He is the founder and managing editor of The Fiddleback, an online arts & literature journal that will launch its first issue later this year. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Copper Nickel, Harpur Palate, The Pinch, and H_NGM_N. His first full-length collection, Vertical Hold, will be published by Steel Toe Books in 2011.
Today's poem comes to us from Cheryl Dumesnil.
Titled "Triangle Tattoo," it appears in In Praise of Falling (University of Pittsburgh Press 2009), and also appeared in Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos (co-edited with Kim Addonizio, published by Warner 2003).
Triangle Tattoo
Wood-planked floor, twelve-foot
ceiling, a wall of glossy snapshots—
dragonfly, water lily, barbed wire
spiraling a woman’s thigh. The artist
bends over my love’s shaved leg,
his palate of paper cups filled with ink.
Through her skin, three finches
emerge on a blackberry branch,
ink mixed with blood beading her calf.
For the third time, I run downstairs
to the car, slap the gearshift into
neutral, roll over the parking cop’s
chalk mark, buying us time. Hours
I sat beside them, telling stories,
changing the music, rubbing color
back into her fingertips. Now
I lean against the car and listen—
the buzz of his needle piercing
her skin, the heart-shaped sign
swinging its rusted chain. This is
my job—he will change her body
forever, I will love what she becomes.
Winner of the 2008 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, Cheryl Dumesnil is the author of In Praise of Falling, editor of Hitched! Wedding Stories from San Francisco City Hall, and co-editor, with Kim Addonizio, of Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos. Her poems have appeared in Nimrod, Indiana Review, Calyx, and Many Mountains Moving, among other literary magazines. Her essays have appeared on literarymama.com, hipmama.com, mamazine.com and in Hip Mama Zine. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and their two sons. Visit her at http://www.cheryldumesnil.com/.
Today's poet is no stranger to us here at The Tattooed Poets Project. Gina Myers appeared last year here on BillyBlog, one of three poets from our inaugural year to return with more work in 2010.
This year, she offers the following poem:
3.19.10Please head on over to Tatoosday here and check out one of Gina's tattoos.
I just tried to save a man
who didn't need saving
which sounds like a great line
for a poem, but it's a line
from my life / I apologized
to the 911 operator as I watched
the man, who seconds ago was lying
in the street & crying out in pain,
stand up & walk away / Now,
a little shaken, I'm locked in
my apartment / It's just past
midnight, a new day / I try to recall
all the pills I have taken
in the past 24 hours to determine
if I can take one more or crack
this beer, something to calm
my nerves / I explained to the operator,
I'm a woman, I am alone /
The darkness surrounds / There was no one
else on the street & for some reason
I was scared but I couldn't not
do something / The sickness I have
will not go away / Because sometimes
this is how poems happen: months
& months of not writing followed
by a brief moment, a second needed
to share this moment with someone,
my imaginary reader, so I can pretend
I am not alone.
Gina Myers lives in Saginaw, MI, where she works as the Associate Editor of 360 Main Street, the Book Review Editor of NewPages, and the Reviews Editor of H_NGM_N. Her first full-length collection of poetry, A Model Year, was published by Coconut Books in 2009.
Today's poem on the Tattooed Poets Project is courtesy of Amber Clark:
Of Names
and how amazing the names of ex lovers on the tongue
how lovely and sardonic their lull, the names of all the towns
you slept through on your way to somewhere elsehow sweeping the names of lost things, unremembered names,
tucked in a botanist's notebook - calyx and clover and pistil - how sweet
the sound of a gun cocked back and the rooster at dawn, and the thistlehow stunning the names of accuracy, of Euclid's quadratic, economy, elusive hints
to crave the wild, delicious names - éclair and brie and fig -
of anatomy, uvulas swinging the foreign name - a wind its certain welt, the sting
of a nematocyst, the telson and the carapace
the music of the treble clef and tremble of an aural math, the sprig
of spring come clean again, the cochlea gone mad
(- first published in Pebble Lake Review Winter 2010 Issue)
Amber Clark teaches English and literature at Northwest Florida State College as well as Gulf Coast Community College. She reads for Tin House, and she will be guest judging the Scratch Poetry Contest in June 2010. While most of her own work can still be found on napkins and matchbooks, in personal journals and private word docs, and on the windshields of friends' and lovers' cars, most recently, her work can also be found in Pebble Lake Review, SandScript, Slow Trains, Underground Window, and Poetry365. A graduate of The College of William & Mary and The Radcliffe Publishing Institute at the Center for Advanced Study at Harvard, she also holds a MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University at Charlotte.
Today's poem is also a tattoo poem, and it is delivered to us by Aaron Anstett, the current Pikes Peak Poet Laureate!
NEEDLING
1.
In our bodies, we move uniformly.
No one owns a rickshaw tattoo
that actually clatters, hip to rib,
dust rising off the skin.
2.
Across my torso,
print a flesh-tone color tattoo
of the word Invisibility.
3.
Think of people
with their own names emblazoned
as if they might forget.
Call me anything:
alphabet braceleting one wrist.
4.
Circling an ankle: many nations’ monuments.
She stepped from the bath like a giantess.
5.
An old man’s arm tattoos,
green like just-before tornadoes
and the taste of anesthesia.
Once, nothing shone so brightly for him.
6.
Tattoo two lungs
and I’ll return yearly
to have them darkened.
7.
How bare the body looks
around the first one.
8.
Best, for me, the flaming prophecies:
Stick Knife Here, Born to Die,
the ones redundant at autopsies:
stream of air bubbles
rising from the mermaid’s red mouth
on a drowned man’s palm.
Aaron Anstett's collections are Sustenance, No Accident (Nebraska Book Award and Balcones Poetry Prize), and Each Place the Body's. He's completing the last weeks of his term as the inaugural Pikes Peak Poet Laureate and lives in Colorado with his wife, Lesley, and children, Molly, Cooper, and Rachel.Today's poem was contributed by Daphne Lazarus, whose work has appeared previously in Holly Rose Review. Be sure to check out her amazing tattoo over on Tattoosday here.
Today's poem comes to us from Rebecca Wolff.
Today's poem in the Tattooed Poets Project comes to us from Brendan Constantine:
The Man In the Next Bed
The man in the next bed has
a habit of silver; he darkens
when he’s not under hand.
He blames the road atlas
for bringing him here, for
counting the miles in gold.
The man in the next bed is
cast out of bronze. The man
next to him out of wax. Hold
him too long, he’ll furrow
and tantrum all night like
a candle. The man next to him
talks to his pillow. He blames it
for his dreams; his falling
& his crawling dreams. Why
did you show me tigers? Why
were my legs full of mud ?
The man next to him has
an answer, he listens to the roof
for angels. It’s raining
bishops & bastards, he yells
& hides his medicine cup
in the sheets. The orderlies
know better than to take it;
he’d only steal another
from the man in the next bed.
That man is the president
of Monaco, it says so
on his pectoral tattoo: I am
the president of Monaco.
In case of emergency, call
a jeweler. In the bed next to him
there’s a man who breaks
his fingers as a calling. God
tells him which to snap
or save. He leaves himself
one to point with, to accuse
the man in the next bed; the man
who built the hospital, who
doesn’t remember building it,
whose heart plays the machine
beside him, whose eyes stay
open, vacant as the next bed
& the next bed over.
This poem originally appeared in the journal, Chaparral, 2009
