Address to a Tomato

(Written for an end-of-summer tomato-themed dinner party. Credit goes to Henry Schiller both for the first stanza and for organizing the dinner party.)

Good luck to you and your plump face,
Great chieftain of the nightshade race!
Above them all you take your place,
Pasta, soup, or salad with egg:
Well are you worthy of a grace
As long as my bone-y leg.

The groaning platter there you fill,
Your luscious curves like distant hills,
Your flesh will help to heal my ills
In times of need,
While on your skin the dew distills
Like crimson bead.

The knife is sharpened, quick and right,
And through you’re sliced with subtle sleight,
Your innards gleaming in the light,
A gushing spring,
And then, oh what a glorious sight,
Juicy, seedy thing!

Then, slice by slice, they slurp and eat,
Dogs chew your scraps, I take my seat,
And on we strive, our palates sweet
With ripe-red gore,
Your season come and gone, too fleet,
While you we adore.

Would anyone, fed long on lies
Of chemicals and salts and dyes
Enough to make an honest pig cry
With anguished squeal,
Look down with sneering or scornful eyes
On such a meal?

Poor devil! See him over his slop,
As sickly as a soggy mop,
His breathing labored, guts in a flop,
His skin so pale;
No feat of vigor can he top;
He’s bound to fail.

But see the rustic tomato-fed,
The happy earth has blessed her head,
With boundless energy she’ll tread
Through storm and strife,
With fruit-filled belly, one step ahead
For all her life.

To whatever powers make us your care
And see that we have food and fare:
We want no brown or lifeless ware,
No meats or doughs,
But if you’d grant our heartfelt prayers,
Give us tomatoes!

happy 2015

‘Twas the night before New Year’s, when all through the house

Not a creature was sober, not even a mouse;

The streamers were hung from the ceiling with care,

In preparation for guests who soon would be there;

The champagne was nestled all snug on its ice;

While countdowns and make-outs began to seem nice;

And bae in her bow tie, and I in my vest,

Had just begun pregaming the long winter’s fest,

When out on the street there arose such a clatter,

I sprang from the couch to see what was the matter.

Away to the side door I drunkenly tripped,

Stepped out in the snow and tried not to slip.

The moon on the trash heaps and gutters of slush

Made me pause, the wind whipping, my face growing flush,

When what to my wondering eyes did appear,

But a huge group of queermos all carrying beer,

With a swaggering leader, her style all the rage,

I knew in a moment she must be Ellen Page.

Flyer than eagles  her wingwomen they came,

And she whistled, and shouted, and called them by name:

“Hey, Kristen! now, Portia! now Ellen and Vixen!

On, Laverne! on, Riese! on, Samira and Blitzen!

To the top of the porch! to the end of the hall!

Now drink away! sing away! dance away all!”

So up to the porch the roller girls they flew

With bags full of whiskey, and rainbow cake too—

As I drew in my head, and was turning around,

Into the house Ellen Page came with a bound.

In her best Tomboy snapback, her cheeks all aglow,

her clothes were all dusted with glitter and snow;

She flipped up the collar of her frayed denim vest,

And her Canadian flannel out-gayed all the rest.

Her eyes—how they smoldered! her smirk was so dreamy!

The holes in her jeans made us all a bit steamy!

Her eyeliner game was as always mad strong,

And her skinny tie proved that she could do no wrong;

With effortless cool, she opened a beer with her teeth

when I noticed the mistletoe she was dancing beneath;

I sidled up towards her, with no ounce of stealth,

And I blushed when she smiled, in spite of myself;

A wink of her eye and a touch of her hand

were all that it took; I could barely stand;

She spoke not a word, but started dancing with me,

Robyn playing in the background, as gay as could be.

And laying her hand on the side of my face,

she kissed me, then turned with queerest of grace;

She slipped on her blazer, gave her posse a call,

And away they all ran to Times Square and the ball.

And I heard her exclaim, as she danced out of sight—

“Happy New Year to all, and to all a gay night!”

cactus heart

Despite what my lack of recent blog posts might suggest, I haven’t completely neglected my creative writing since starting grad school. In fact, my poem “Two for the 8 o’clock show” is in the latest issue of Cactus Heart! It was just released today, and I can’t wait to read it once I’m done with all of my term papers for this semester.

I also recently had a few pieces very graciously rejected by The Open Bar (Tin House’s blog). Their Broadside Thirty series features short pieces (thirty lines or less) by poets under thirty. Below is one of my thirty-line cast-offs. Enjoy!

–

Confession

I’ve seen oceans from airplanes.
I’ve seen Asia in electronic
pixels and plastic.
I’ve heard that if you put a shell to your ear,
it blocks out the traffic.

The bus schedule is in hieroglyphs,
the newspaper in Latin.
I’m a land of busted languages,
land of crumpled receipts, land of dollar bills.
My politics are shallow.
My pockets are deep.

Eat me to death –
I am sugar and syrup and salt.
The cabinets are empty
and the plates are filth.
My nails are grit.
My teeth are plaque.
My brain’s in the gutter
and my lungs are in bed.

Binge on borrowed money,
stolen sweets, waste time on wifi
from the neighbors next door.
Quest through the comments section –
“Asshole, idiot, faggot, slut.”
Sticks, stones, bones, and such.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll take out the trash.
On Tuesday I’ll wash the dishes.
On Saturday I’ll put the dog to sleep,
grab my bootstraps,
pull.

prey

Track my path, unfurling

distance.

Pocket knives with
their sick slick sheen
open
blood-rusty and hot.

Fists clench on cue.

I am the life let loose,

rabbit evading the snare.

idol worship

Another month, another reading list. The summer is coming to a close, so I’ve been rushing to get through the last of my leisure reading before classes start next week. As much as I love the challenge of reading philosophy, I will certainly miss being able to dedicate a large portion of my waking hours to immersing myself in fiction and poetry. This month, I’ve been obsessed with a few writers in particular. 

Anne Carson:

Men in the Off Hours

Haruki Murakami:

A Wild Sheep Chase
Norwegian Wood

Jeanette Winterson:

The Passion
Written on the Body
Weight
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
The PowerBook

I will continue to read these three authors religiously, Winterson for the intensity of emotion that comes through in her writing and for her wonderfully queer characters, Murakami for his strangeness and disregard for the boundary between fantasy and reality, and Carson for her ability to mix academic scholarship with poetry in genre-defying ways. I know that I will have Carson to turn to when I am challenged to do work in philosophy while continuing to be a poet, and I am glad to have her words as a guide in my future writing endeavors.

If it’s pure, raw feeling you want, though, look no further than Winterson’s writing:

“This is where the story starts. Here, in these long lines of laptop DNA. Here we take your chromosomes, twenty-three pairs, and alter your height, eyes, teeth, sex. This is an invented world. You can be free just for one night.

Undress.
Take off you clothes. Take off your body. Hang them up behind the door. Tonight we can go deeper than disguise.

It’s only a story, you say. So it is, and the rest of life with it – creation story, love story, horror, crime, the strange story of you and I.

The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told. I have to tell it myself.

What is it that I have to tell myself again and again?

That there is always a new beginning, a different end.

I can change the story. I am the story.”

(from The PowerBook)

afterlife

I study indifference,

pause the expansion of the universe,

desire curled as a bud in the flesh,

burrowing down in the gut.

Now, my soul is

weightless.

I float between the twinned stillnesses

of hunger and fear,

drawing breaths never to be exhaled.

 

 
So light

the wind on sunny days

is my fate,

my body drifts,

unexpectant,

ethereal,

limned.

six word stories

It is Ernest Hemingway’s 115th birthday, and there is no better way to celebrate than to hastily write six word flash fiction. (That’s a blatant lie. There is surely a better way, and it would most likely involve alcohol, sexism, and shooting wildlife.) Hemingway supposedly won a $10 bet when he managed to write this story in just six words:

“For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”

 

Despite my lack of a $1.66 per word incentive, here are a few of my own attempts:

The match fell, still lit. Oops.

“Me or the dog?” “The dog.”

I left without telling him why.

Was it bad for you, too?

Apples and humans: both gravity-prone. 

Quit job. Smelled roses. Ignored debt.

“Happy Birthday, Ernie!” “Where’s my absinthe?”

And lastly, although it was written in the context of her full-length novel, The Passion, I quote Jeanette Winterson:

“I’m telling you stories. Trust me.”

 

summer canon

When it reaches 100ºF in the afternoon and the only activity that is both free and not sweat-inducing is taking the bus to the public library, it makes sense that one would spend most of the summer reading in the safety of air conditioned rooms. This is exactly what I have been doing. Despite my lack of recent posts, I have been writing, too, though I am hoarding away my new poems until I have made it past the usual all-my-writing-is-terrible phase of the revision process. In lieu, then, of posting anything original, I am very lazily offering up a list of the things I have read this summer so far. I would highly recommend all of them. 

by Anne Carson:  

Glass, Irony and God 
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
Antigonick
Autobiography of Red 

by Jeanette Winterson:

Art Objects
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? 

by Virginia Woolf:

A Room of One’s Own
Mrs. Dalloway

On my desk is also Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, which I have been reading only a few pages at a time when I’m in the mood for theory, and I also have a daunting stack of Derrida that I checked out last week in a moment of extreme readerly optimism. I will in all likelihood read 20-30 pages of a random chapter of Writing and Difference before losing my scholarly resolve and switching back to fiction. Woolf’s Orlando and To The Lighthouse are piled underneath Derrida’s essay collections, and they look inviting. In the course of writing this post, I have also put two of Winterson’s novels, The Passion and Written on the Body, on hold through the magic that is online cataloging. Give a bibliophile a library card…  

from Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?:  

“I picked up my pile of books for shelving. The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own. I looked up at the enormous stained-glass window and the beautiful oak staircase. I loved that building.

The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior – benefits that extended to every area of life. It was orderly, like the universe. It had logic. It was dependable. Using it allowed a kind of moral uplift, as one’s own chaos was also brought under control.

‘Whenever I am troubled,’ said the librarian, ‘I think about the Dewey decimal system.’

‘Then what happens?’ asked the junior, rather overawed.

‘Then I understand that trouble is just something that has been filed in the wrong place.’”

#gpoy

The one and only downside of being included in a print publication is that I can’t easily link to my work online. I’ve wanted to share my poems that have been published in Pages for a while, and so here they are, thanks to my realization that camera phones exist. (On that note, I recently started using instagram. So far, this has primarily involved posting pictures of Austin with artsy filters. Follow me so that I feel validated in this endeavor. As always, my handle is hctrees.)

from Belleville Park Pages 21, Late May 2014

from Belleville Park Pages 12, Late November 2013

glutton

I am binging to fill up the empty parts of me.
Oil and grain and sugar and salt
all packed in until I am solid stone.
I will sink to the bottom of the pool
and no one will look for me there.

I am building muscle, all density and heat
until I am a molten mass
hurtling through space, reckless.
I am a loose cannon, iron, wrought.
My flesh will bash through your flesh.

Was it good for you, too?
Good is a loaded word for loaded bodies.
My eyes are brimmed up with glances,
my wrists are weighted: blood and tendon and time.
Hear me out. My hands are wide enough for us both.