ED Inn

Two months after I get the job I cut my hair.
It is always in my way, choking me in my sleep.
When you vomit on hair it stinks for days.
I check in the lot of them while my fingers
tap dance DTs across the keyboard.
The anorexics are Anas. The bulimics are Mias.
Binge Eaters aren’t glamorous enough
for a cutesy name.
My DTs are running hard today.
The smell of alcohol seeps from my pores.

I shit in the bathroom the next building over,
making excuses to look for something in storage
several times a day, maybe some
girl’s file who has finally managed to obliterate her life,
a clipboard left there during the obesity program
the night before. Small miracle, this empty building
and its empty bathroom,
just a few steps away.
I find the irony of showing up to work
after one hour of sleep and a night of coke
and booze, unwashed, smoky, sunglassed,
utterly amusing.

We all smile.
Hello!
Hi! How are you today?!?
Oh I am doing just fine!

The bathroom door is rigged, it won’t lock.
There are candles burning in there
despite the insurance risks.
Enya plays in the waiting room,
promising the medicinal peace of a stabilized mind.
I smile and hide my new tattoo,
scabs crusting over where I carved my ex-girlfriend’s
initials into my ankle, waiting patiently
for the thin white scars they’ll leave behind.

We all have our problems.
H has 17 cats and her bed sheets smell like piss.
K lives in an enclave of white but wears only black.
Dr. __ lives in the forgetting room of her own starved sleep.
The smell of shit from my alcoholized intestines
cannot be covered by green tea candles.
Anyone who says vodka doesn’t smell has never been a drinker.
Everyone knows and says nothing.
I usher in the fat kids to teach them how not to be fat.
We all smile.

Heal, be well, be normal.

 

Paper Skin

Slack-jawed treason,
the word begin.
Two streets perpendicular.
Sign of the cross.
A town
fit jigsaw with houses,
red brick and stone.
To avoid for so long
one invents the concept
stranger
a dozen times,
pretends indifference
where there is ________.
Fill in the noun.
Explain it with novels,
Rilke,
tower it a palimpsest
of regret.
Center the crosshairs
on what never happened.
Poise.
Pull the trigger slowly,
barely,
all wait, wait.
The word anticipation.
Fuck with words.
Dusty paragraphs,
inscriptions, quotes,
touch through dead-long poets.
Flesh it out
over asphalt and wire,
negative space,
absent art on page.
Begin,
anticipate.
Milton, fiery lakes
licking fallen angels,
perverse.
Desire writ on parchment.
Oh paper skin, burn.

 

resignation

shut my body off.
inhale the click,
shunt the combination.
shut. off.
self-consume
until only rickety skeleton remains,

unrecognizable.

swelling ache
where wrinkled heart sits,
moth in the night globe.
hand trailing down to touch
myself in the dark.

this is the hour when no one knows you.
circle above the ridge
like a bat,

battering wings,
high frequency,
waves.

phantom of the opera

just when i thought i would dare reach up and tear off your mask, you tore it off yourself.
underneath your skin was the puckered film of an almost-passed peach. i’d wanted something less
sure of summer. the pit but not the fuzz. a stink but not the sweet. not this soft flesh. not
this, a crimson cave where your mouth should have been. from the antechamber off the long hall
your voice growled dark and low. juice ran down my forearm. sticky rivulets. traces of sugar and
tart.

a girl sings over the ground where i planted the seed. a tree grows despite the promise of fall. a
woman throws herself from the balcony, is caught in the wings. a voice growls low and dark. a
stink but not the sweet. a pit but not the fuzz. hell’s mouth opens wide, the woman steps in. on
a fire escape a girl lights a sparkler and eats a peach. the side- walk twinkles with glass and
mica. below, asphalt calls.

 

 

Artist-Poet’s Statement

The impulse to create is singular for me, but when I set about either writing or making art, that impulse takes widely different forms. I’m an extremist—I either do something all the way or I don’t do it all, and this is true of both my art and poetry. I’ve made things and written things for as long as I can remember—when I was a kid I organized sidewalk craft fairs in my neighborhood & have many very funny early poems collected in dozens of journals—but I rarely work in either medium simultaneously. The urge to make art or write comes upon me suddenly.

I will literally be sweeping or making dinner or some other mundane household chore, and will be struck by the impulse. When I get into “art-mode” I’ll spend hours in my studio painting and gluing and cutting and gilding, and each piece will spark another piece that I can barely stand to wait to begin.

Usually this continues for several months until I’m tapped out. The same is true of writing. One idea sparks another,and I’ll spend months working on my poems until I feel like I’m just writing for the sake of writing and not actually saying anything I would even want to bother reading, let alone anyone else. These periods occur in a back-and-forth type of format; I am never not working on something.

Most recently my artwork has become less two-dimensional and more three-dimensional. I do not necessarily have any technical skill in the visual arts—I took two basic art classes in
college—and so I don’t strive for perfection in any sense in my artwork. I work quickly and intuitively and the results are usually raw and unrefined, which is appropriate for my themes. I think of my artwork as expressing some of the most basic ideas that I may be grappling with at any point in my life, and enjoy the freedom I allow myself to just express without worrying about selling my work or “making it” in the art world. Usually I deal with emotions that seem too raw or fresh to write about, and more than once an idea I explored in the studio makes its way into my writing. Art, then, is a way for me to give myself permission to explore something further.

My poetry, on the other hand, is something that I take very seriously and practice at and promote. I consider myself a poet first and an artist second. Lately I’ve been working on longer series of poems, and I’ve found this structure approach to be extremely satisfying and fruitful. Last summer I completed a series of 12 poems entitled collectively Numerology of a Year; currently I’m working on a series of poems based on superstitions. I work on several poems at a time, and I revise and edit my work like a madwoman. I’m verbal by nature, and so I use my poetry as a way to say all the things I want to say without talking off any one particular person’s ear.

Currently I’m seeing a fusion of both my artwork and poetry happening that I never expected. I’m involved in the process of making homemade, limited edition chapbooks of some of my poems, and am enjoying the process of sewing and writing and the visual handicraft and presentation of the finished product. While my artwork has used text for as long as I’ve been making art, my poetry has never had such a huge infusion of the visual beyond being aware of the poem’s presence on the page, and so I appreciate and welcome this recent development.