The Tattooed Poets Project: Jozi Tatham

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This poem is previously unpublished.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!

The Tattooed Poets Project: Phebe Szatmari

Today's poem comes to us from Phebe Szatmari:

Sex should be like eating

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.

Be sure to check out Phebe's lovely tattoo here.

Phebe Szatmari was working full-time in an office in Manhattan when she learned there was a shortage of poets. She immediately dropped everything and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature at Stony Brook Southampton.

In her spare time, Phebe freelance edits, teaches writing, volunteers at LIGALY (Long Island Gay and Lesbian Youth Center), serves as a judge for teen poetry slams, and practices parkour. Her poems will be published in the forthcoming Writing Outside the Lines 2010 anthology.

Thanks to Phebe for sharing her poetry with us here on the Tattooed Poets Project!

The Tattooed Poets Project: Steele Campbell

Today's poem comes to us from Steele Campbell:

My Words Are Bad Tonight

I

Lord I am not worthy

Lord

I am not worthy

but I speak words only

I should not be here

you should

proud at the lectern

springboarding

to heaven with your voices

I have nothing dazzling to say

all is

over-worn

cliché

not what you want

and I’ll just sit

quiet

with my failures

folded in my pockets

or clenched in

sinful hands

II

My words are boney

lonely

dry and twiggy

like walking sticks and limbs

of old men

with memory in the bones

thrown

to still a point

of the turning world

then to cease

in scribbled immortality

and fill the depravity

with the cold

letter frozen

to the page

III

I stole these words

borrowed from the cross

prophets

dying poets

and

Webster

to dance upon

cheating tongues

these words are not new

I did not bake them

boiling with meaning for you

to lick

taste the thick

black

inky

skins of insinuation

IV

I cannot call the gods of words

rusting in oblivion

to specific form

my words

can only say

that which

no longer needs

to be said

V

So forgive me

and my verbal deficience

you’ve been

a wonderful audience

just please

don’t

clap

~~~

Head over to Tattoosday and see Steele's tattoo here.

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.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Lisa Gill

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!

The Tattooed Poets Project: Jeff Simpson

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.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Cheryl Dumesnil

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.

Be sure to go over to Tattoosday and check out Cheryl's tattoo here.

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/.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Gina Myers

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:

3.19.10

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.

Please head on over to Tatoosday here and check out one of Gina's tattoos.


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.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Amber Clark

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 else

how 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 thistle

how stunning the names of accuracy, of Euclid's quadratic, economy, elusive hints
of anatomy, uvulas swinging the foreign name - a wind its certain welt, the sting
of a nematocyst, the telson and the carapace

to crave the wild, delicious names - éclair and brie and fig -
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)

Be sure to head over to Tattoosday and see Amber's poetry-inspired tattoo here.

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.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Aaron Anstett

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.

Be sure to head over to Tattoosday and check out Aaron's Donne-inspired tattoo here.

Thanks to Aaron for sharing his tattoo with is here on Tattoosday!

The Tattooed Poets Project: Daphne Lazarus

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.

~~~~~~

the epilogue


You, the omnipresent phantom,
A spectral apparition
Transfigured into
The bleeding azure sunrise,
The Pebble lodged in my shoe,
The glint of the bohemian crystal vase I use as a pencil holder,
Sound waves resonating forth from a melancholic song,
Reverberating heart throbs,
The affable Chimera in my siestas,
A beguiling Incubus traversing my dreams.

You morphed yourself into,
Photographs of white landscapes and alpenglow,
The zenith, the celestial sphere,
The Marrow in the bones of my lunch,
Orbs after a dry spell,
Quivering heat wave over the parched tarred road,
Jubilation after a serendipity,
Therapeutic sounds of running water,
The pungent aftertaste of ecstasy,
In the smell of the earthen rain.
Flux, constant flux

We will forever be antipodes,
Dwelling on opposite sides of the earth
Syzygies in a perpetual orbital dance,
Careening and meandering around the moon.

But now,
Analogous to a shapeless formlessness
A verisimilitude, a semblance we are.

To delete and obliterate from lucid minds,
The evils of nostalgia
A soggy quagmire.

Alas,
An epilogue to our epic Ramayana.

~~~~~~

Daphne was born in Singapore. She received her BA (Hons) in Arts Management from LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore in 2009. She has curated several contemporary art exhibitions featuring emerging Singaporean artists and an exhibition featuring art works of pioneer Singapore artists from a permanent collection of an art institution. Daphne writes for a tattoo website at www.horinaka.com in collaboration with tattoo artist Shane Tan. She was also one of the event organizers for Singapore’s first body suspension show in conjunction with the first tattoo convention in Singapore.

Daphne’s passion lies in writing about art and tattoo culture and has several articles featured in several contemporary art publications. She has also written a thesis on tattoos for her undergraduate study. She will be pursuing a Master’s in Art History at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London.

Daphne is not a poet by profession, but she uses it as a tool for catharsis. She has published literary works mostly in contemporary art journals and aspires to be an art writer and art historian.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Rebecca Wolff

Today's poem comes to us from Rebecca Wolff.

~~~~~

Mad as Hell/Not Going To Take It



When they tapered off my meds
                (no “they”)
began to feel it

they say depression is anger

misspent
                   (no “they” anywhere)


tapered off my meds unsupervised

food tastes larger
loins activate
crystal reformation

into pronoun conversion

was elected to become
accounted for

raised my hands into

criminalized


feeling politicized

finally

long sigh.


feeling it at the gas pump
fumes unchained

—I will report you—

squad car drove up
my tailpipe

called my friend

in
to see what he could do for us

~~~~~

Be sure to head over to Tattoosday to see a couple of Rebecca's seven tattoos here.

Rebecca Wolff is the author of three books of poems: Manderley, Figment, and The King. Her novel The Beginners is coming out in 2011 from Riverhead Books. She is the editor and publisher of Fence and Fence Books, and publisher of The Constant Critic. She lives in Athens, New York, with Ira Sher and Asher Wolff and Margot Sher.

Thanks to Rebecca for sharing her poetry with us here on BillyBlog!

The Tattooed Poets Project: Brendan Constantine

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

Please be sure to head over to Tattoosday to see one of Brendan's tattoos here.

Brendan Constantine is a poet based in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in numerous journals, notably Ploughshares, Ninth Letter,The Cortland Review & RUNES. His book, Letters To Guns, was released in 2009 from Red Hen Press. He is currently poet in residence at The Windward School and Loyola Marymount University Extension.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Alexandra Teague

Today's poem comes to us from Alexandra Teague, from her prize-winning first collection, Mortal Geography:

~~~

Hurricane Season

When I become accustomed at last to lying in bed alone,

sheets finely wrinkled as curtains blown across the windows

of dreams, and the crane-necked streetlight fills the room

with its electric-nerved, luminous vision, what I had

seen for my future (the restless flowering of his arms in sleep

around my shoulder, the soiled pillows in their matching cases

where our faces, breaths apart, turned toward and away) recedes

like the hurricane that never hit land the night we met,

when the beach was evacuated, the buildings shuttered in plywood,

and the news crews stood dry amid the whipping palms,

in the margins of their own story. Later, we saw a photograph shot

high in the clouds: the storm’s eye turning above the ocean,

as we swam at midnight in the pool naked, waiting to be swept up

in a chlorine shudder, a geyser of winds, into the rapture

of our lives. And though we almost bought it together, we didn’t.

Somewhere, framed in its calm bay of glass, that storm is hanging—

on the gallery’s wall at the pinpoint end of this land, or in a room

like the one where even now he is lying beside her, sleep’s

aperture narrowing around them, and all the years when we almost

loved each other forever, at last, blown far off the shore of this life.

~~~

Be sure to head over to Tattoosday to see two of Alexandra's tattoos here.

Alexandra Teague’s first book of poetry, Mortal Geography, won the Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and has just been published (April 2010) by Persea Books. Her work has also appeared in Best New Poets 2008, Best American Poetry 2009, and The Yale Anthology of Younger American Poetry, as well as journals including The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, and New England Review. She was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and has since lived in Arkansas, Missouri, Florida, Montana, Hawaii, and California. She currently teaches English at City College of San Francisco and lives in Oakland. For more information about upcoming readings and publications, visit www.alexandrateague.com.

Thanks to Alexandra for sharing her poetry with us here on the Tattooed Poets Project!

The Tattooed Poets Project: Julie Platt

Today's poem comes to us from Julie Platt. It's our first sestina in this year's Tattooed Poet's Project:

STEADFAST MUZZLES

I traveled to this place to earn this sentence: The last blue

tiger stood stoic, slate-blue, stone-blue, still, behind my gun’s

mouth and I did not take him. And yet I only half-believed

the whispers that the blue tiger’s singularity could stay

wickedness, and make god stand still. The thicket, infinite

has caught me…Say you bought a pouch of stones

soaked in tiger piss—to lure him. Then more stones

divided and divided from the trail you left, pointing at blue

shadows everywhere. You might think you had infinite

luck; you could squat under the leaves, polish your singular gun

and think that if you learned the land’s tongue you could stay

awake here, blending into bramblescapes…You trust that to live

is to represent in your heart what is impossible, and to believe

it when it steps outside. This is why I had to go back for the stones,

each and every one, lest the tiger follow…I stayed

with some dark-skinned people for a while, and they offered blue

ochre for my face, and frowned, then laughed at my gun

as if I had been fashioning a trap for something infinite,

some god-animal with petrifying eyes. Still I had infinite

patience, I had a gun, I had that bag of stones and a live

wire from my mind to something edgeless there, and I was gunning

for the prize, and for its blessing. But those dreadful stones

divided, multiplied, obscene miracle in my hands, the blue

unwieldy flood of them and their stink, and I couldn’t stay

under cover. I ran out into the tiger maw and stayed

there, and prayed for just one…Do you think the infinite

machine is kind? Do you think it folds you in its blue

shade like a papoose, uncovers your eyes slowly, lets you live

with each expanding rapture, as with a single stone?

Never, stones are never one in number…I had my gun

cocked a thousand times in my mind, I had my gun

and I had to take the tiger when it pawed out, I told myself to stay

awake, I had my dream of a singular god, I had the stones,

I had the stones, the stones had me, the god had me, the infinite

and me and all our steadfast muzzles diving and dividing, still alive

in the dividing, how can I say the sentence that I’ve earned: O blue

one, look how I slide my gun into my mouth to mute my infinite

tongue, tiger, stay where I can see you singular, take me alive

tiger, and roll these stones away, their numberless, horrific blue.

Be sure to check out Julie's tattoo over on Tattoosday here.

Julie Platt was born and raised in Pittsburgh and now lives in Michigan. Her print poetry chapbook, In the Kingdom of My Familiar, was published by Tilt Press in 2008. My mini e-chapbook, Imitation Animals, was published by Gold Wake Press in 2009. Two poems from
Imitation Animals were selected to appear in Dzanc Books' Best of the Web 2010. My work will also appear in the forthcoming e-anthology Poems to Sweat By: Hungry Young Poets 2009, published by VanVinkinroy's Indie e-Book Emporium.

Thanks to Julie for sharing her poetry with us here on BillyBlog!

[If you enjoyed the sestina form, I will shamelessly plug my own entry in last year's Tattooed Poets Project, by linking my "Maiden Sestina" here.]