Losing Earth

We slit, thin and squeeze
Earth's juices
As if to crush a sprouting flower,
In order to make the Earth our World.

Wait.

Look hard.
Crack the black that appears
To cake the sky and dry over our eyes.

We're dripping
Into other worlds.
Clouds like phantoms, rocks,
Moths and webs,
Wet with
Blue, pink soda, orange.

Perhaps the universe is only to be seen,
Not touched.

We could unzip the soil under and in us,
Beneath this sliver of sky.

To move like the moon as it curves into itself.

And inhale colors
As they take gulps of other colors.

The earth can loosen,
Shake laughing,

If only we'd make the world our Earth.

crawling into september

we all need somebody to lean on

Lean On Me - Al Green

Some times in our lives, we all have pain, we all have sorrow.
But, if we are wise, we know that there's always tomorrow.

Lean on me, when your not strong, and I'll be your friend,
I'll help you carry on. For, it won't be long, 'till I'm gonna need
somebody to lean on.

Please, swallow your pride, if I have
faith, you need to borrow. For no one can fill those of your
needs, that you won't let show.

You just call on me, brother when you need a hand,
We all need somebody to lean on.
I just might have a problem that you'll understand,
we all need somebody to lean on.

moonrise by sylvia plath

full moon on oak st. beach, chicago

Moonrise

Grub-white mulberries redden among leaves.
I'll go out and sit in white like they do,
Doing nothing. July's juice rounds their nubs.

This park is fleshed with idiot petals.
White catalpa flowers tower, topple,
Cast a round white shadow in their dying.

A pigeon rudders down. It's fantail's white
Vocation enough: opening, shutting
White petals, white fantails, ten white fingers.

Enough for fingernails to make half-moons
Redden in white palms no labor reddens.
White bruises toward color, else collapses.

Berries redden. A body of whiteness
Rots, and smells of rot under its headstone
Though the body walk out in clean linen.

I smell that whiteness here, beneath the stones
Where small ants roll their eggs, where grubs fatten.
Death may whiten in sun or out of it.

Death whitens in the egg and out of it.
I can see no color for this whiteness.
White: it is a complexion of the mind.

I tire, imagining white Niagaras
Build up from a rock root, as fountains build
Against the weighty image of their fall.

Lucina, bony mother, laboring
Among the socketed white stars, your face
Of candor pares white flesh to the white bone,

Who drag our ancient father at the heel,
White-bearded, weary. The berries purple
And bleed. The white stomach may ripen yet.

strong build

Mapplethorpe's Young Man with Arm Extended



She still had that same postcard framed, a black and white print of Mapplethorpe's Young Man with Arm Extended, on the left bedside table. She fell asleep to observing the man in the picture. He leaned out of the left corner of the frame, his arm outstretched, so that only a triangular fraction of his torso and a single black nipple were exposed. The corner of his left eye was hidden. His skin as naked and luminous as his smile. She traveled along the dark, bony shadows along his neck, gliding down the white mass of his arm. It was long and sleeveless and relaxed and it made her want to stretch her muscles out until she was light and thin and empty. The dark crevices along his fingers, neck, armpit and mouth and eyes breathed deeply into the bare wall behind him, into the bare space between him and her. To find happiness in emptiness, in a white cleanse. Was his hand playfully reaching out to her? No. She was convinced that he found happiness because he reached for everything, for anything, for nothing really.

lay ladies lay

Breakfast time in Fortaleza

Home again, absorbed in waves of overripe cajús. Loud conversations rattle and topple over each other at breakfast. Our hands and feet are kept warm by the moist wind that tastes heavily of salt. I quickly down cups of guava juice, to which my stomach loudly gurgles. The biting sugar breaks and widens the stuck, hard corners of my sleepy eyes. I know the day has begun because I hear the gas hiss and escape from Tio Byron's coca-cola can. I let milky tapiocas soak up my mouth until they taste pasty and thick. The kitchen door constantly croaks and whines, allowing the full and bitter smell of fried cheese to channel through. Our bellies feel heavy and lumpy, and serve to remind us that we're so full that we must eat more. I await Flávio's presence as I hear his clumsily loud, spread-out steps approach me, and when he does, he smells of chestnut-flavored popsicles. The wailing wind inhabits him as he speaks. And we all continue like this, in never-ending gorging on foods and talk. Until the day coils under its smells - my aunt's impossibly sweet perfumes, the plastic of toys, the burnt cheese, the leftover milk and the ripening salt that sticks to the walls.

let's live on a different map

dreaming with hands

I dreamt that I had walked into a vast room with cages and cages of hands, all aligned into a perfect grid. Women, with their mountainous hats and deep black dresses blown from the hip, shuffled along the aisles. A white metallic light coated the floors and the cages' bony metal bands. Occasionally, the figure of a thin man in a square-fit suit appeared as a lamppost among the black and white batting of bosoms and flounced skirts. I did not move. I waited until the people slowly sifted, until I was left with a few clicking heels - their sounds clear and full, in control of their own echoes. Now mainly hands were gloved in light. I first looked at them as a group: all erect upon small pedestals, their fingers soflty bending back and forth, as plants waving in the wind. One hand specifically caught my eye: its tawny palm bublous and swollen, making its lines markedly dark, calling attention to their braid-like patterns that bled slightly along their edges. I became exasperated by this hand - by the way it shyly curled its index finger inward, by the way a freckle nestled in between two folds of skin and by the way the bitter light carved into it like a pit. I needed to read and know this hand. I began to perspire in between my fingers. I paced the aisles - one hand, one stranger, after another. My hands were slippery. Maps and maps of skin looking at me with no eyes. I felt a splash of wet on my thigh. I looked at my hands: two soapy flushed webs of bubbly skin collapsing unto the floor.

thinking in colors

"...sangue é a coisa secreta de cada um, a tragédia vivificante." - Clarice Lispector, A hora da estrela

bruised like a peach,
ripe like her body,
for the love of love

- Baudelaire

The tool for change

Cube Light, by Ai Weiwei. Photograph: Miguel Villagran. (taken from the guardian)

I wrote the following piece for a Courage Forum in New York in the spring:



Art can sometimes be easily set aside into the supposedly self-contained 'art world'. Such a world can be considered safe in that it is traditionally set within museum walls; it does not invade the 'real world'.

But Ai Weiwei has proved such a viewpoint wrong. His work rather bursts out of any container; it screams. It frightens and threatens the attacked, which of late has been the Chinese government.

As we map out a list of courageous figures, we tend to look to the history of the past rather than of the present. It might be easier to study the past, since we have already acquired the personal distance that is gained with time. With such a distance, we are allowed to analyze the patterns of history with a more neutral eye. It is more challenging to react to the entangled complications of the present: we tend to not yet completely know how to evaluate it, how to react to it, or what to believe. The present is in fact frightening to face.

But there are courageous people, such as Ai, who do not wait for the safety and reassurance that come with personal detachment. They do not wait for history to happen; rather, they help shape that history by following their instincts.

Ai should be noted foremost for his honest and fierce approach to life: he has unfailingly stuck to his beliefs, unafraid of any perilous consequences. An important Chinese artist and activist, Ai is above all human. Whenever he speaks out in his work, he does is it out of a personal duty that he feels for humanity. Specifically, he has repeatedly spoken against the oppressive and corrupt actions of the Chinese government.

What is extraordinary about Ai is that his courage is in essence quite simple: he looks (and makes us look) and speaks. Indeed, it does not take a momentous gesture or a mind-blowing invention to display courage. Rather, Ai shows that we are all endowed with the tool for change, which is our human expression. However, it is such expression that is often censored in China. Ai has been considered troublesome at home and has been under government investigation and surveillance. His blog has been censored and eventually shut down. This situation, however, has not prevented Ai from continuing to assert his beliefs.

The most recent example that significantly testifies to Ai's courage was his project regarding the victims of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. He was in the process of compiling and publicizing the names of five thousand children whose school buildings had crushed them to death when the earthquake hit. Such a project in part arose out of anger towards the Chinese coverage of the earthquake, which curtailed the disastrous aftermath. His involvement in such an investigation eventually led to a severe beating on the head by Chinese officials, which later caused a cerebral hemorrhage. Despite such violent treatment, Ai continues to communicate with the world through his art and through the web. He will be having a major exhibition at the Tate this coming fall.

Even when Ai's work does not specifically attack a political situation, his intention is always to break down familiarity and numbness. He reminds us that we need to see the world through our own eyes, not through the government's, not through the media's. We need to respond to what we see. Indeed, Ai awakens our consciences in a profound, bold and risk-taking way.

ape(wo)man

I think I'm so sophisticated 'cos I'm living my life like a good homosapien,
But all around me everybody's multiplying and they're walking round like flies, man,
So I'm no better than the animals sitting in their cages in the zoo, man,
'Cos compared to the flowers and the birds and the trees I am an apeman.
I think I'm so educated and I'm so civilized 'cos I'm a strict vegetarian,
But with the over-population and inflation and starvation and the crazy politicians,
I don't feel safe in this world no more,
I don't want to die in a nuclear war,
I want to sail away to a distant shore and make like an ape man.
I'm an apeman, I'm an ape, apeman,
Oh, I'm an apeman,
I'm a King Kong man, I'm a vood-doo man, oh I'm an apeman.
'Cos compared to the sun that sits in the sky,
Compared to the clouds as they roll by,
Compared to the bugs and the spiders and flies,
I am an apeman.

In man's evolution he has created the city and
The motor traffic rumble, but give me half a chance
And I'd be taking off my clothes and living in the jungle.
'Cos the only time that I feel at ease,
Is swinging up and down in a coconut tree,
Oh, what a life of luxury, to be like an apeman.
I'm an apeman, I'm an ape, apeman, Oh, I'm an apeman,
I'm a King Kong man, I'm a voo-doo man,
I am an ape man.
I look out the window, but I can't see the sky,
'Cos the air pollution is fogging up my eyes,
I want to get out of this city alive,
And make like an ape man.

- excerpt from "Apeman" by The Kinks

Excerpt from my short story "Hunger in America"

The sheets were soiled with shit and animated globs of red and brown blood that spread in a web of streams. The pale woman consumed the air about her in a way previously unfamiliar to her. She inhaled it, forcefully, from her oral, vaginal and nasal openings. Her body blown with cool, slow-rising air. She swallowed the accumulated thick salty spit in her mouth and closed her eyes to its slow descent down her throat, into her wide, empty belly. It was this moment that blessed her with the name mother. She took the baby by its wet rolls of fat, pressing her fingers into them, slipping her own sallow hard skin under the rolls' bright, flushed colors. We are one skin, she thought. The baby smelled of her, hot and metallic. She began to search for herself in the baby's crumply features that still looked stuck inside the skin, like small pink buds that hadn't flowered. But she was convinced that this baby - this baby that she had been feeding and consuming for months, and that she had finally thrown up - was she. Like a part of her that had just been violently broken off. The baby started to cry. The mother was surprised by this, that it had a voice of its own. She listened to the crying pleasingly. She was fascinated by the fact that these sharp, cutting wails came from somewhere inside of her.

"She's probably hungry," the nurse said half-irritated. The mother looked back at the nurse with those white-stained eyes of her that made her gaze broken, distracted. The mother took the baby to her breast and let it wildly suck on her nipple. The breast responded to the gravity of the baby's mouth as it moved and inflated and deflated to the flood of milk. The mother emptied, poured herself into this other self, a feeling that left her whole body mumbling.

The world: a place in which we humans inhabit; a vast space - initially as naked and as pure as the way in which we imagine the other glowing, distant planets. It is a silent place that speaks only in its shaking ground, tearing winds and growths. It is silent enough to let us manipulate it. So we have carved into and reaped from its belly and have become just as much a part of it as the sun that bleeds through it, and the darkness that penetrates. In possessing the world in our minds, we can forget that the world is first a very small place called Earth. The Earth is not the world. The world is a word so vast that it rises from the mouth and never descends to give a grounded answer. It is word that meanders about, that audaciously stretches and thickens until it shrinks and coils. It is always in search for an answer that is as big as itself. But it won't ever find it. Because the world - and the notion to know it - is a human concept. It is something concocted by the bubbly, hyperactive human mind. It is formless and floating. But we hold it and define it and call it dear.

The Earth is physically separate from and exterior to us, but the world has become a part of us. To know the world is to bloom and widen your senses. To reach out as far as you can with your body. You have to touch the world, see it, taste it and swallow it in order to know it. I do not know it. There are voices echoing everywhere right now. There are countless creatures pumping blood under water. Tears are currently collecting. Legs and legs are jerking to orgasms and someone is miserably poor. Something is being born. The world is never something whole. It is a vision that, once attained, is born bursting, and then splits and shatters.

But the Earth is physically something whole, rising, swelling with forms, with no boundaries, free with an air where everything can fit. It is plush and thick and living. But we, the knowledgeable we, are breaking it, thinning it, squeezing its juices as if we were crushing a sprouting flower, in order to make the earth our World. The World is a map - a place of boundaries, of countries, of stains across a globe. And so, sadly, this World is "us".

"A woman's body, with its thousand and one thresholds of ardor...will make the old single-grooved mother tongue reverberate with more than one language" - Cixous

3987 El Prado Boulevard

The powdery murmur of footsteps hatched
And filmed over the house floors. A thinning stream
Of pattering toes. It smelled of musk,
Of perfume lifted off skin.
Trudging through the gloppy, toothed air,
The rooms grew full. Rooms that yawned
Unhinged drawers, left in their exhales.

Lift this house in parts: then toss them in light.
Open their beefy legs and cut through the sinew.
Collect them in swollen embraces. Serve them on platters,
Then rinse your mouth. Laughter will shoot from your littered belly.
Let it mingle with the low sound of wood. It will smell
Of piled scorching days and your eyes will slip to your soles.
Accept that only you are made of one piece. Your body
Forever knuckled under this house's muscular palms.