Month: July 2011

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Discordant

This entry is part 30 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

Dear jake-brake and tire whine
slicing like a stonecutter’s tool
through the scented dark, it’s been
a while but I know all about your

penchant for early morning throat-
clearing, those loud flushing sounds
you like to make from the outhouse
of out there. As usual they’re

reminders that beneath fleecy
cloud border or vivid blue veins
of water and sky, you’re hard at work
prying the tarp of summer loose.

Oh soon enough, soon enough: we’ll turn
a corner, and the avenues now flushed cerise
and heavy with crepe myrtle will streak
like watercolors left out in the rain.

There you are in the hot heart of pavement,
shimmering like the proverbial mirage. There
you are in every syncopated bird call; chilled
taste of winter tucked in every bite of sour fruit.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Among the Brambles

This entry is part 12 of 20 in the series Highgate Cemetery Poems

Brambly grave

Working through a black-
berry patch, you learn
a new way to move, step
high & slow as a heron,
pivot to trample back-
wards in your big boots,
& lean nimble as a lover
into the fiercest thorns
to get free. These are
not skills of widespread
applicability. But one
day when the sweat dries
& the mosquito’s skirl
dwindles to a soft wind
in the inner ear, you may
find yourself stretching,
stretching, stretching for
that last sweet berry
& wondering why in hell
your hand won’t move.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Real

This entry is part 29 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

My youngest girl asks for stories—
Real stories tonight, she says, not
made-up. Like what I did, summers when

I was her age: mornings with the wash billowing
on the line, evenings too humid for clothes
but too buggy for bare skin (smolder and fume

of mosquito coils in terra cotta dishes).
And so I tell her again of sandals kicked off
on the wooden porch, reading Gasoline Alley

and Ripley’s Believe It Or Not in
the Sunday paper, while eating mouth-
puckering green plums dipped in salt

and sugar. Sputter and flare of kerosene
lamps, lizards skittering across living
room walls. Strident cry of a black and

orange rooster tied to the tree in
the yard (its heaped bones decorate
lunch plates the next day). I have

nostalgia for these things, not
necessarily for their pieties.
And she, she wants to smell

the camphor escaping from ancient
wardrobes I pry open; wants to taste,
along with me, the star-shaped indentation

on my father’s pinky finger where the nail
should have been; to imagine the ghost nun’s
shadow beside the bell-pull at school,

summoning souls from the other side.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Artifactual

This entry is part 11 of 20 in the series Highgate Cemetery Poems

Faceless statue

When a relationship dies, what happens
to the orphaned plus sign?
Might it live on as a cemetery cross
marking some otherwise dubious grave?
At one time it could’ve been reborn as
a TV antenna mast or the minimal
skeleton of a scarecrow. Now
even crossroads seem archaic,
& a crucifix is a piece of jewelry
to finger in times of stress,
finger & twirl on its chain
around the neck — a thing humans wear
instead of a bell.
In extreme cases, the plus sign
can lose its vertical axis
& merge with the horizon,
beyond which, as we know,
there’s nothing but subtraction.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Letter to Attention

This entry is part 28 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

Dear restless, wandering mind, sometimes
you really must try to chisel your focus—

Try to listen to the soft-spoken woman
who leads us through downward-facing dogs,

warrior poses and planks, steeple
mudras, salutations, lunges—

instead of to the growing industrial whine
of your belly, where no other breakfast

but the half-cup of soy latte now sloshes
around, a whirlpool of acids and worry. Keep

count of the breaths as they come through
the branches in the upside-down trees

of your lungs. Keep count as they exit:
the thing to do is turn them into things

with wings— cicadas, perhaps. Or tiny
fireflies throwing their low-wattage beams

at the dark. Effortless effort, the teacher
intones. So don’t let the ten year old’s

giggling distract you as you try and fail
to maintain your balance, coming out

of the dancer’s pose. Are you still with me?
I know you’re tired, and you want to press

your cheek on the mat or stay supine as a corpse.
But the voice nudges you back to the shore, saying

Open your arms and legs like a starfish, open
the cage of your heart; look at the unblinking sun.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Defiler

This entry is part 27 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

Lymantriidae: family of moths, many of its component species referred to as Tussock moths; Lymantria means “defiler”.

Before Todos los Santos, the Day
of the Dead, armed with whitewash,
buckets, and brooms we visit
the graves of our dearly departed,

to clear the gathered debris of
the previous year— dry leaves
and bracken pushing up through
cracked concrete, bits of amber-

colored glass from broken Cerveza
Negra bottles. Someone’s grand-
father’s grave has been spray-painted
with graffiti; and the stone cherubs’

wings have been chipped for sport.
What do we know of eternity? What
could we do to stave off the hardening
froth of days? In the groves of trees,

above rows of headstones, cicadas rub
their tymbals and sing their heated songs
of courtship. Two months later, all of them
will die, leaving behind eggs that will emerge

in seventeen years. Among the skeletal branches,
the tussock moth caterpillar is busily at work.
For every mouthful of leaf, a tufted crown; red-
light glands on its back signaling imminent

danger: dazzling mystery: inevitable conclusion.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Eating roast ox at the outhouse races


Watch on Vimeo.

Yesterday I went to Martinsburg, Pennsylvania with a couple of friends to take in the newly-revived tradition there of outhouse races, a fundraising event sponsored by the local firehall. This was my first exposure to an activity of apparently quite widespread popularity: a Google search for “outhouse race” turns up photos, videos and articles on events from the Ozarks to Michigan to Alaska. One of the outhouses in attendance (and the one that won) bore a painting of the Confederate flag, which led me to wonder whether outhouse racing is seen as a Southern thing originally.

Contestants were judged on design as well as speed, and each outhouse had an occupant and four pushers. There weren’t that many outhouses this year, but the crowd didn’t seem to mind. It was, among other things, a rolling display of folk art, notional shithouses with painted-on names — The Midnight Dumpster, The Boss’s Office. They ran multiple heats and everyone yucked it up. One of the outhouses lost a wheel, but otherwise there were no NASCAR-style crashes. I suggested they have a pit crew next year, but making a pit stop in an outhouse might be kind of redundant, come to think of it.

Afterwards, we joined the crowd at the pavilions in the park, where the firemen were cooking cheap dinner fare — roast ox sandwiches for $2.00, barbecued chicken for $4.00. I had the former: a round, brown patty in a bun. It wasn’t too bad slathered with condiments. We sat with a friendly couple who, seeing our photographic equipment, peppered us with suggestions of cool things to go see in Pennsylvania. He had worked for Conrail, he said, but quit after “the rebels” (meaning Norfolk-Southern, headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia) took it over and ran roughshod over workers — a story I’ve heard before.

Afterwards, we sat out on the main drag until dusk, talking and watching a steady stream of classic cars, tricked-out Harleys and other outlandish vehicles go past. It was an all-American kind of day, I thought. I was led to muse about how, as a people, we are in love with speed and consumption. The result: when we gotta go, we gotta go.

*

I got home to discover my night-blooming cereus had opened, filling the room with a pungent, aromatic scent. By morning, it had already deflated, consigned, as it were, to the midnight dumpster.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Ode to the Pedicure Place at the Mall

This entry is part 26 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

That kind of day— when even the wren
in the tree swipes its bill back and forth
on the end of a dead limb, as if sharpening

a knife on the whetstone. And so instead
of waiting resigned for the blade to fall,
or the basilisk to sink its old caried

tooth into the vein throbbing at the base
of my nape, I betake myself to a spa
called Millennium Nails at the mall.

The water in the basin swirls with warmth;
and a dark-haired woman named Maria takes
my tired, callused feet into her two gloved

hands. She lathers and massages with pomegranate
oils, sugar and crushed walnut seed scrubs till—
don’t laugh— the ginger-root knobs on my toes

unclench. When she lifts my feet to pat them
dry on the terrycloth towel, I know all about
her so-called best friend who didn’t come

to her wedding, and she knows the age
when I had my first child. Is it the light
chemical veil of ammonia floating in the air,

or the low-key bubble of voices across the room?
No matter: I can only think of the poet who’d written
of the world in a grain of sand and of holding

infinity in the palm of his hand; and of how,
likely, he never had a pedicure in all his life.
Maria and I bend over rainbow rows of bottles

with names like Haze of Love or Cha-Cha-Champagne;
Snake Charmer, Bling to Me, Seize the Daze, Fire Starter—
for all I know, they could be ruby-lit signs:

shiny new fortunes just waiting to be painted on.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Shit

This entry is part 25 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

“Whither the thrush whose ethereal notes
woke me at dawn? A male towhee flies up to a sunlit
branch and takes a shit, singing.” ~ Dave Bonta

Explaining idioms to my youngest child,
I remembered a book we used to keep
in the bathroom of my childhood home,
stuffed into the basket of dog-eared

Good Housekeeping and Better Homes
and Gardens magazines: An Irreverent
and Almost Complete Social History of
the Bathroom— dishing out in droll

anecdotal detail the likely reasons for
expressions such as Don’t throw the baby
out with the bathwater (the master
of the medieval household the first to dunk

himself in the tub, the rest of the family
succeeeding); and Careful that you don’t
get the short end of the stick (public
toilets at a time when organic implements

were used in lieu of toilet paper, which
hadn’t been invented yet). The same book
blandly made the case for privies and
outhouses still being then so rare,

that belled skirts, hooped petticoats,
and perfume provided cover or necessary
counterpoint. Sometimes I can hardly
remember how I raised my older

daughters from birth through
toddlerhood without diapers whose
sticky tabs you could pry loose
after wiping and changing, to refasten

the bundle for tidy disposal in the can.
Shit, says the man skidding out of the drive-
way then hitting the row of garbage bins.
Shit, says his wife as the shit

hits the fan. A friend tells me
that in moments of great stress,
when not only his bosses but clients
get viciously mean, he closes his eyes

and simply imagines what they might
look like without a stitch of clothing,
or grunting on the pot; then smiles at
the equalizing release that ensues.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

At play in the fields of Google

This entry is part 17 of 20 in the series Poetics and technology

UPDATE (9/1/11): I’ve decided to end my use of Google+ due to Google’s intransigence over its identity policy. One Facebook is enough! See you over at the other corporate soul-stealer.

Cory Doctorow sums up the issues better than I could.

*

So I’ve joined Google+, the fantastic new social network for talking about Google+. (It’s still in private beta, but I have invitations if anyone wants one.) Enthusiasm for the still-developing service has been balanced by skepticism that we actually need another general-purpose social network — see for example what Lorianne DiSabato and Beth Adams have blogged about it. Here are my initial reactions.

1) Facebook has had a “lists” feature for quite some time, supposedly allowing one to keep up with subsets of one’s contacts — family, close friends, blogger buddies, etc. Unfortunately, it never shows me more than the most recent day or two of posts from the lists I’ve set up, and even then doesn’t seem to include everything. Facebook is good at suggesting people I should add to each semi-functional list, which makes me suspect it’s really all about data-mining with advertisers in mind: figure out how specifically we network so they can better target us in coordinated advertising campaigns. Now, there’s no guarantee that Google+’s ballyhooed “circles” won’t have the same ultimate purpose. But the interface for screening one’s data-stream by subset of contacts is much smoother, it’s not three clicks away, and (so far at least) it works.

2) Data portability is a critical issue for me. Google+ lets you download and save all your posts at any time. I like that. Despite my very liberal views on copyright and content-sharing, I don’t like the feeling I get over at Facebook that my content isn’t really my own.

3) Much as I like the 140-character limit at Twitter and Identi.ca as an enforcer of concision and spur to creativity for my microblogging at The Morning Porch, I don’t otherwise see the point, and I resent Facebook limiting the length of status updates. Google+ lets you go on as long as you like. It’s bloggish.

4) While it would be nice to have a “Facebook for grown-ups,” and I’ll be happy if Google+ becomes that and gets mass adoption, at this point I’m most interested in social networking around specific interests or for specific purposes. (Just look at the success of Goodreads among book-readers and Ravelry among knitters.) It’s not clear to me yet whether Google+, with its circles and video-chat “hangouts,” represents a major step forward in this regard. I am considering getting a webcam, though — the possibilities for small-group readings and workshops are very tantalizing. I’ve always hesitated to organize conference calls on Skype due to the sometimes intermittent nature of our internet connection here; far better if it were hosted in the cloud, as Google+ hangouts are. Also, spontaneous get-togethers are often the best kind, and creative types in particular are hard to herd, as would be necessary if I ever tried the Skype approach.

5) Like Beth and Lorianne, I’m a blogger first and foremost. I think that anyone who really has anything to say on a regular basis should have their own blog, and that we should preferentially leave comments about blog posts at the point of origin and stop letting discussions fragment and dissipate at a half-dozen different places where the link might be shared.

6) A link-sharing culture, regardless of its host (Google+, Reddit, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, etc.) is fundamentally about enthusiasm for things that others have written, captured or made. This is both good and bad. I like the enthusiasm (and the frequent displays of wit), but I get frustrated after a while and want to say, O.K., but what have you made? Where are your poems? Hang out too much with professional writers or artists, though, and you’ll notice that we tend to go in the opposite direction, rarely sharing anything we didn’t make ourselves. Is it possible that our participation in social networks has helped mitigate this tendency a little? Or for those of us who were already blogging before Facebook and Twitter got big, has it actually shrunk our blogs, diminishing the emphasis we once placed on linking out, assembling sidebar linkrolls, and being social, because hey, we’re doing enough of that elsewhere? Self-centered and often anti-social as I am, I do try to strike a balance between self-promotion and other-promotion, but it’s not always easy. I like to think my use of Facebook has forced me to at least stay focused on the problem.

7) Email is still the “killer app” for me and I think for almost everyone over the age of 30. Unlike phone calls or (god help us) instant messaging, it doesn’t interrupt whatever I’m doing and destroy my concentration. We need less distraction, not more. What keeps me involved in online social interactions are email notifications, and the more customizable those notifications are, the happier I am. Facebook has recently gotten pretty good in this regard, letting me decide on a page-by-page and group-by-group basis how I want to be notified. It would be nice if I could do this for each comment thread as well, because some discussions you really want to follow and others, not so much. (I’ve seen participants in Facebook conversations go back and delete their comments just to stop the flood of notifications when the conversation goes on too long!)

It is in this regard that the older blogging platforms are really falling behind WordPress. I’m much less likely to leave a comment anymore if can’t keep track of follow-up discussion via email. I’ll actually be surprised if Blogger doesn’t overhaul its archaic commenting system soon, and introduce a “subscribe to other comments in this thread” feature when it does so. Typepad is probably a lost cause. (Incidentally, for self-hosted WordPress bloggers, I recommend the plugin I’m using, Subscribe to Comments Reloaded, rather than the original Subscribe to Comments, which hasn’t been updated since 2007. Previously I used a different plugin with a double opt-in feature — in other words, the subscriber had to not only check a box, but reply to an email in order to confirm each and every subscription. That’s too many hoops to jump through, I think.)

The point is that for me and I presume most other email-oriented people who want to participate in online conversations, it’s important that we have the option to follow discussions via email — and that we have fine-grained controls, including the option to unsubscribe from any discussion at any time. WordPress.com currently leads the social media field in this regard, which may seem ironic, since WordPress is all about traditional, long-form blogging and website creation rather than social networking. The highlight of the latest version of the software is a distraction-free writing option, which shows what the developers prioritize. At the same time, they have more — and, I gather, better — mobile phone applications than any other blogging platform. But I think it only makes sense that those who most value thoughtful communication would build the best tools for discussion and response.