underneath

Plugged into this evening, snug like hips touching at 10:06 p.m., the A train barreling away from work towards sleep and a squeaking bed, blanket worn and perfectly fine tucked beneath a duvet. No one will see it and if the cousins come to stay we’ll switch it for the wool your mother gave us (too warm in the spring and at all times green. We don’t mind the spots that break the diagonal lines; proof that that the dog was once young. We were young, when we bought it. We were tired; we’d spent the whole day looking to fill time, our stomachs full with broth and not much else. It was Christmas. All of the world was on the street shopping for one another and we could only think of ourselves).  

Overheard

Walking on 32nd Street this afternoon, between 8th and 9th Avenues,
"Yeah, she seems great. She's a nudist."

Other Life

Were we to meet

on the green, lush face of a mountain

billygoats

scavenging for meaning and faced suddenly with a set of eyes

parallel to our plots of fenced-in quiet

how would you react?
                                  I would cry out,

a foreign and gutteral response that would, in its intensity,

scare even me.

I was born too late

Acid-washed soul, dip-dyed, wrung and hung improperly. I swear, its too soon. to be reborn. Can I skip the now, go to After or Then?

I used to play dress-up for kings. Eat figs plump with possibility--an evening unraveling with satisfying clinks, flatware on porcelain, the slender arms of golden clocks sweeping fluidly 'round, never quite able to hug on the Next.

And I traveled, only to places I wanted to be.

Hid only from wind.

Carried with me only stories. I loved the color of things, of emotions. I loved black as I do blue, citrus and ruddy hues that burnt at the edges, transformed and revolved as the twist of a neck. Moving always, as time breathes, shallow but

impossibly deep, even in the most trivial of settings.

But the most ordinary, extraordinary. How easily we teach when learning. The universe exhaling, its rib cage shifting with a puff of déjà vu. Hasn't mama been here before? Am I not her, she me? We both wear blue and dance upon a cobalt highway found in the corridor of a rented cabin, the kind we always laughed about. 

King Louis of Vuitton, a god of sun, and reign and shoes.

untitled by David Meltzer

home to the city

I feel delicate as paper
when all I want to do
is disintegrate

turn into soil
and birth a ripe flower

the kind that could feed
the ravaged, shirtless man
lying flat on the corner.

Samurai Song

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.


When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.


When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.


When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.


When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.


Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.



                                    -Robert Pinsky

strike that, reverse

look at Damien's t-shirt
then look here
then over here,
then there,
then here

and finally, into your soul

The List

My college roommate and I used to play a game while riding bikes to class in the morning, where we’d assign a date to the weather. A perfectly balmy spring morning might win the title of April 22nd. With tequila froth flavoring from a Smith Street taqueria, today felt like Spring.  Cherry blossoms are bursting on all of the street corners, covering brownstone stairs with a snow of petals and filling the air with the scent of piss.

I realize that I’ve let this blog lay dormant for too long. To refer back to its beginning, a seeding of thought, I will indulge and honor Sir Kurt Vonnegut with a list. Craaack! With his hallowed name pressed against the cheek of this electric beast, thunder strikes! He must be pleased (though I am ashamed to note how few posts I’ve written in the two years hence, when he and I shared our first encounter here with a marching band outside my window). I’ll be bound to roofed structures tomorrow; lucky I am to have walked a small hydrangea thirteen blocks home today.

 Alas, here we have all of the other tasks and endeavors that today brought forth list-worthy note:

- Pricing art is subjective. And often absurd. I came across a smattering of paintings in a local indie market from a very local artist. There were a few nice illustrations for $50, some simple paintings for around $200, and one brand name, 8x10 dedication to Damien Hirst that looked kind of like a simplified root structure…for 25 K. Casually mentioning the title of the painting (“Dedicated to Damien Hirst”) in the comfort of your own matchbox apartment: priceless $25,000.

- Records are still the way the way to go. $5 brand name wax, man!
- I get to use phrases like, “we’ll take the B-52 ” in all seriousness. But a bus will show up.
- At 26, I am still very much figuring out my childhood.

- Many women in New York wear scowls to accompany the latest look.
- I don’t visit The Invisible Dog enough.
- I want to learn French, and then move to France.

- I forgot to ask whether miniature lemon trees bear miniature lemons.
- Competition is so stiff, that a purveyor will try and sell you a hydrangea as you hold your recently acquired hydrangea. 
- The streets of Brooklyn are wings of a museum.

- Tulips close like lips to a cool pursuer.


 

Minor, minor, minor, Major.

the sea sponge

train bellowing heard from 6th floor vantage
point in the night
when any sound
a signal.

the way lyrics, tidbits from some Los Angeles thought,

seep into this form
cropping up behind eyelids and memory boards
like palm trees in a rural American town,
the type plastic-wrapped in winter

cut too short for summer. irregular
and increasingly common. (these walls porous, an embarassment.)

YET

were we to bury the wordly body a U.S. demagogue
surely
we'd lay the mass in a Swarovski-lined coffin lodged in a redwood sarcophagus
small as a thimble considering the immensity
of His sins.

oh, to be but a man.
to say "U.S." with such little conviction: the color of a flag, patterened kilt,
the detours our grandfathers took--none matter, and yet

the epiphany

Some weeks ago I had an experience that doesn't sound like it should have been life-changing; I went to a hair salon. It wasn’t packaged in a Lower East Side tenement-turned-beauty parlor, or amidst the next we-swear-its up-and-coming pocket in Brooklyn. It was on Fifth Avenue in The Plaza Hotel: the Warren-Tricomi Salon.

I remember exactly what I was wearing, a key in my mind that usually signifies some noteworthy occasion. At the 8th grade Christmas dance I wore a silky brown miniskirt with an off-white angora sweater and flip-flops (cringe), a pale blue kimono from Melrose Avenue to my 23rd birthday, and high-waisted silk pants with espadrilles and an opaque black top to the first fashion show I shot. In my closet I have the perfect black 1950s dress to wear to the offices of Vogue. But on that particular day I donned a shearling coat, long black velvet skirt, a Chanel-inspired green woven jacket and a terribly vintage—but very cute—grey felt hat. Eloise could have gotten away with the outfit, were she 25 and dealing with a pauper’s budget. I rode the train that morning to work reading a Bazaar Special Runway Report, and took my time with a profile of Linda Fargo, the senior Vice President of Bergdorf Goodman and front row Fashion Week staple. The day had started typically enough. I checked my email and followed up on a lead for a TimeOut New York article. By seven that night I was waltzing through gilded marble hallways and up red velvet steps.


When I met stylist Edward Tricomi, the subject of my TONY writeup, I first mistook him for a bell boy in his bandleader garb, then as the reincarnated spirit of Mick Jagger before realizing besides that being impossible, none other than Linda Fargo was sitting in the chair he beckoned me to visit. How could it be that the subject of my morning meditation should be sitting in front of me less than 8 hours later? It was then that the epiphany occurred: You have no idea what adventures are in store each day. Because of this, you must be prepared.


But how? I was right to have read up on Edward and the salon before embarking on the interview. If there’s a journalist that wouldn’t have I hope we never meet. As for the Linda connection, I believe it was both chance and fate, two words I believe stand for the same thing. The cosmos aligned and our three planets converged simply because the time and the universe had moved in such a way. Though Edward and I hit it off during the ensuing hour-long interview, I doubt Linda registered my name in the seven minutes it took for her to get her platinum silver hair trimmed. This epiphany wasn’t a celebrity encounter, far from it: I simply hadn’t noticed I was barreling though space during the past few months filled with endless work days and quick weekends with the typical distractions of a New York twenty-something (where do we eat? Can I make rent if I buy these boots? Why is the library waiting list for The Corrections so long? Shouldn’t they have extra copies?) The evening was proof.


It’s not to say I don’t try to slow down and refocus amidst the bombardment of everyday life. What I was reminded of was the glorious nature of chance. I had been moving towards that moment my whole life, since the days I’d spent writing poetry in a collaged journal and clipping cerulean and lime Narciso Rodriguez creations from the first fashion magazine my mother ever gave me (it was, coincidentally, Bazaar). The runway recaps I wrote though college, first in the student newspaper then in a local weekly paper garnered experience and research that made my transition to New York an easy one. But along the way, with all my plans and dreams and aspirations I forgot to budget for surprise, which of course needs only a seam to permeate.

head quarters

the if that you and I share,
small licks of time that drip like ice cream in heat
-too quick-
and s l o w,
like thick, rich cream moves,
free to roll but wed always to the past, its aftertaste a sweet indulgence
when the present salty

sleep whale

compost

sentimental break
ing,
breathing, cracking
ex
hal
a tion

that paints a cover
thick like pancake batter we deep fry in the liquid of Forget.

oh, and I eat you
the sweet fruits of yesterday
and all the yellowing
auburn sunsets that last night cost nothing

and today I would sell
a crippled limb for.