Chicago Musings on the L

I do not fear you, brother bee.
We are the same, you and I:
We have in us one good sting
To deal before we die.

Online Hide & Seek

The above's the 1st round in my collage journal; it got edited down to the poem below:

Digital comes forth
to organize your life
into facebook - traces
of journeys, neon blurs
smeared on your path.

A forgettable past,
and the way it was
lost and found.

Blue Moon

the blue moon from my house last night

It’s the beginning:

a blue moon, blazing.
bright arms striking out
Black. Light, inverted
smoke wafting down
to my skin like ash. Alone,
waiting for the clock to strike
her witching hour.
Is she ready? Flushed, husky,
lust-filled for magic? This
primal drive invades my iris
rings. Binding, finding myself facing
the Dark from within. She sings.

Once, in a blue moon,
this is how it ends.

“Philologia: Such is this gift, that bites as it gives”

Each word, a name. A gift
to bind together and draw apart,
granted from a settled throne
crafted of collected expressions,
Sovereign.

The queen’s a veil of incense between slate
and stars, whispering her dreams. Sometimes,
she howls, sometimes, she sings.

I cannot see the king, but his decrees
dictate this castle of universe, the etiquette of
interaction, court.

There is
comfort in them woven,
absence in their wake:
my king, the symbols,
my queen, their meanings,
together sweep us through (systemic
spells of aid and debt.)

Royal favors, words, and royal angers, too:
waves of welcome, banishment
twined atop the Omniscient
Word-King’s Scepter,
one dip weighing us all
like a scale with a feather.
One flick cremates, the other embalms,
both stuff our casings with meaning.

What tax must we pay for such privilege?

Beware their lexi-cons, precarious declarations
possessing us all. We drown, word filled or
word less. We drown and we find
our names are carved on the dotted lines
along the bottom of the settled throne.



-for Real Toads’ Get Listed – July, you have to use 3 of the following words: taxman, heat, prison, fear, mail, inevitable, premise, sovereign, system, advice, beware, & kept.

I think I used 2-and-2-halves of these words: sovereign, beware, system(ic), & tax (which is half of “taxman”).

This poem actually started as a reflection on several Real Toads’ Tuesday Challenge poems (Susie Clevenger's "Crumpled Scent" and Crayfish's "Over Tea - TB"), combined with a quote from Maria Popova over at Brain Pickings: “To name a thing is to acknowledge its existence as separate from everything else that has a name; to confer upon it the dignity of autonomy while at the same time affirming its belonging with the rest of the namable world; to transform its strangeness into familiarity, which is the root of empathy. To name is to pay attention; to name is to love.”

The painting is one of my earlier abstracts. I think it looks a little like an imploring dolphin, surrounded by an overwhelming world. Fittingly, it's drowned under layers and layers of other paint, becoming a (hidden) palimpsest.

Rose Window, Notre Dame de Paris

images via wikimedia - click for wikimedia page

Paris.
I was there.
The rain-sleeked
streets never dried,
staining the city steel.

(When the rain silvered more,
you could have taken it for
Granite. Glinting in the street lamps,
glittering through the fogged
net where cigarette smoke
settles to socialize and sense
the dull sharpening of the world.)

I loved steel.
I loved the streets,
small dog shits and all.
I loved fumbling through
Desolees and Parlez-vous Anglais?
I really loved the way the
lined, lean men gobbled me up
with famished eyes. Nobody owned me;
I braced, I softened.
Brazened.

The rose window of Notre Dame
watched me come and go. Watched the men,
the dogs, the rain, the streets, blanketing us
with shards of appraisal. Rainbows.
They gave me the creeps. Guilt, or something.
I hid from her, sliding round the curves
of the beetle-green Metra pole,
down into the absinthe hole,
I hid from her, my Rose. I hid from her in Paris,
from her glances there, from all shades of them.
Green.

Later, I would find salvation jaune at
Notre Dame de la Garde. But that is an
otro conversation, altogether, one for
the sun-burnt squeaky café tables
tucked round the docks in Marseilles,
between the abandon of Paris and the peacocks of Barcelona.

Stick to the story – C’est la vie.



Inspired by Phoenix Rising Poetry Guild's prompt and my own trip(s) to Paris.

Wee Things: Dueling Poem and Wuthering Heights Mini-Book

“Intellect vs. Art: The Duel”

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.” -Charles Bukowski

Does each have a sword, then?
The eye of the mind, the claws
of the heart?

Sometimes, the brain is a shield,
only (.) fiery hearts assault.

(jotted down today and passed along to Real Toads' Tuesday Platform)




Wee Wuthering

“I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.” -Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

I have been obsessed with miniature things for a long time. As a kid, I'd pass the time making paper Polly Pocket-like structures with characters from my favorite books. Fairy (or dollhouse, I suppose) sized books particularly captured my imagination and still do. I've been watching a ton of them, especially from this shop on etsy. Since I really, really wanted to buy some but have no job and thus am pretty much broke, I decided to make one, purely for myself, with no intent to sell.

I found a few different tutorials, but this one was my favorite. (Just like with recipes, I draw inspiration but never follow directions. Good thing, cuz that tutorial's in Russian.) After glancing at 'em, I shrugged and surveyed my art corner. I had cardstock and glue and a printer... everything I needed. Then I searched Online for Wuthering Heights covers, picking a Fritz Eichenberg cover. I used some of my favorite quotes. I also found various images Online that were fitting, including some Kate Bush stuff and some The Gaslight Anthem lyrics that capture Wuthering Heights so well. All images in my book come from others; none are mine. If I were to make any mini-books to share in full with the blogosphere or to sell, I would use only my own images.

Here's the start of the project:


Anywho, after cutting the pieces to size, I added details like gold leafing the pages and adding textured lines to the spine:


Here she is!




I'm happy enough with the results that I'm contemplating making a few mini-books out of my own art and poems as table decorations for my wedding... What do you think?

flowers by the chapel by the sea

Thanks to Rock Rose - this image was taken by her, and captures what I imagine the landscape of my poem looks like. Check out her blog and her "Small Plants for the Sunken Garden" post.


My mind is a chapel
carved from rock meeting
tongue of the sea, licking
away the centuries.

The beach is sonorous dips
of prayers sung without words,
gut-uttered, offered to the wind,
the waves, the simple tides of
time. There are worlds within worlds.

From the belltower, I can see
three flowers. Each sings. Each
shines with the seams of Fate’s fickle
threads woven to Transpire.

Emerge the first flower. See?
Hugging the cliff, there to the left,
just beyond the sea spray, the wire fence
to fend off sheep. Look through the lace of
the reeds, there. Yes, focus on the purple head,
poking from beyond the fence, the single flower
in the mist of weeds. She is lovely, is she not?
She is the sharpest, melodramatic saccharine,
as such, she stings. Her name is If
Only. Pluck her, and bleed.

Back to our safe stone, hewn from the cliff, the peace
full place of worship crafted for the sake of sanctity,
sanity. From here, look to the sand path, worn, its border:
skeletal shells, wily bracken, and the pale white flower,
petals like pointed rays of moonlit beams, whispering their
secrets like stars to the far corners of the universe.
Whispers because they haven’t found their voice.
The blossom must look deep, but it is proud and frightened.
Try to pluck, it will recede. Oh, and mind the bees.
Guardians of all that Is.

But there is one other flower this old chapel
sees, one other flower that calls to me. This one is
yellow and big as a bowl, follows the sun, swallows me
whole. She is so bright that she almost blinds, hers is the
flower that captures my dreams. She holds in her petals
the paint of delight, the plan for the future, the Want
to Be, the seductive howl of a new-moon night.

Together, they set my chapel
humming, fan my skin aquiver,
a breeze skimming the smoothest
pool of my neck, my flesh
set aflame even as it freezes,
the pleasure and the pain, weathered
in the crumbling call of the chapel bell.

The world I know
I will only know
the way a child knows a beach:
bucket by bucket, she builds a sandcastle,
then mourns when the wave clears the slate clean.
Propelled by unknown forces, she plucks and leaves
a flower in her wake.



Inspired by and written for Real Toads' Play It Again, Toads #18. I glimpsed at Writing the Inside, Out, but mostly used the pictures of the three flowers for this one. Thanks for the fun prompt!

mother tongue

Inspired by and written for Imaginary Garden with Real Toads' Word Count with Mama Zen.

Here's the poem, by itself:

The worm is the mother tongue,
the origin of Man. The hiss that spits
our enemies, sets our fears aflame. Through fire
we rise, the power of ash in our fists.

This is what we have to give: a hand
with a knife, ill-hid.



And here's the painting, by itself:

The painting was my way of dealing with an insane finals week... I felt as if I were trapped in a burning room watching my own skin sizzle away while just off in a corner, beyond the blinds, was a world that might still be untouched. As with most of my work, it contains some found objects/mixed media elements. The curtain hanger is a chopstick, held in place by a few bolts I found. The window is framed by pieces of rusted metal. The blinds are words I tore out of an old, decrepit, almost unsalvageable book. The twisty device and the frame are tea packets, and a small mushroom bead acts as the pully thing. I then painted over it with the frenetic madness of a hummingbird on crack. (& I kinda like the results!)

Original Omen: Familiar Estuary

There is a Nowhere,
the meeting of the wet trickle of the rainbow line
of our stream and the north fork of
Massie’s Creek, the beat of the water rushing
against itself. Nothing escapes the Scylla
of self entrapment, backwatered estuary.

While not the sea, Massie’s Creek is
bigger, faster, fuller, less slicked
with neon-hued oils from the roots of
clicking gangly reeds. The stream,
though, is less touched by Man. Clear, cold.
From the fields past the Creek, the pipes
poke up, spew currents of planting and reaping.
The Creek is deer-scat
colored sludge, the stream
is the mist of a waking dream.

In the dips where they dare
to meet, watch how they
change… without changing at all.
Welcome to Nowhere,
original omen,
the crash before
the desperate fall.



-for Real Toads' Tuesday Platform

How 6 months went by: a poem, a note, and a personal elucidation

A Poem

“From the Beyond”

A year sliced in half, with the six months askew:
days spanning many suns and spilling into many moons.
Weeks like hours and months like moments, waves consume,
Retreat, return; sand dripping and creeping
Until the glorious night soothes. Beneath the calming
Dark, the crickets chirp, the fireflies blink,
The ones and zeros lie asleep, the wires tripped
Over themselves, a clear free path revealed,
At risk of being overgrown.



A Note

Greetings, friends of the blogosphere,

It’s been awhile, eh?

In the last six months, I didn't really exist. Well, I did, but it didn't feel like me, really. It felt like a big robot brain, Face of Boe style. There was grad school, teaching, volunteering, student leadership, state lobbying, job applications, dissertation proposal writing, conferences, and many little trials and triumphs. It was a time my heart felt overly full and I knew I was where I needed to be, but I am happy to move on to the next phase in my life – writing and defending my dissertation.

What’s my dissertation? You ask.

Called “The Squall of the Wind Farms,” it’s an exploration of the policies and clashes among entrepreneurs, politicians, and various community interests in the development of wind farms. Nerdy, but I love it.

I did not have my dissertation in mind when I created this blog, but I delight that its title (Through the Wind Winding) so accurately captures the dissertation process. I feel a little like a ribbon that’s been blown around for months, finally caught in a tree, waving limply as the sun sets in a bright burst.

Cheers,
Dianne


A Personal Elucidation

Someone asked me why I don’t post about politics on Facebook or my blog. (After all, I am a political science doctoral student.) My choice not to post my political opinions here stems from a few interconnected reasons.

1. The older I get, the more I see values and pitfalls, benefits and detriments, from multiple perspectives, and the less sure I am about my own opinions.

2. In each of my various professional roles as teacher, academic, journalist, and political scientist, I deal in the presentation of facts and perceptions. These are just as variable as opinions. Show me a study with one result, and I will dig up another study with a contrary result. Methodology is only part of these differences; we all want to be heard so badly that we speak past each other, asserting others are wrong before we try to understand how their perspectives actually compare to our own.

3. In a world where so many voices seem to shout, I genuinely want to listen. I want to know what each person means by the words they use. Political differences seem slightly less insurmountable when we peel back emotional rhetoric to look at substance: who, what, when, where, why, and how.

4. Every single person has something to teach me, and it’s not my place to shout over these potential learning opportunities. You won’t see me posting much about police brutality, race, or the 2016 election campaigns, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care. I care very deeply, which is why I spend so much time pushing these issues from multiple angles, particularly in the classroom. (Boy, am I excited to teach American Politics this fall!)

5. Finally, everyone needs an outlet. I love my job and my field, but I also love literature and poetry and silly pictures of cats and dogs… I use social media to fill these gaps. Politics is present in almost every aspect of my daily, face-to-face life; it is, after all, my career. I relish having a tiny little corner free of it.

First and Last Darkness

The light dims, a cigarette
end ground into glossy old-glass,
Navy ashtray of sky –
stars caught popping, air bubbles
racing from
long dimmed
creation fires.

This moment is a relic,
a museum hum
drum, passed by with a
shrug; visitors
crave electric.

What’s an old sunset
gathering dust?

As if from ghostly measure,
then, the tray is rocked
and balance hung -

Slow shattering, like tinkling water
rushed, screaming
steroided out on megaphones.
The noise wakens the eyes,
first and last awareness:

Darkness.


Posted for Real Toads' Open Link Monday.

Happy news!
I am ridiculously excited that a short story from my Welsh ghost/archaeological novel was chosen as a runner up in the AmeriCymru - West Coast Eisteddfod! Congrats to winner Sally Spedding for "The Fold," an eerie story of rural Welsh life that left me with goose bumps. Kudos to all entrants; the competition was fierce, engaging, and filled with talent. Thanks especially to judge Mike Jenkins (a writer I've long admired) and to Americymru's Ceri Shaw. Diolch!

"What Shadows Follow the Souls of Men?"

Where you walk,
you stretch behind yourself,
shrinking from the light.

When you walk into the light,
you leave some of yourself
behind. What part is that?

Is it your doubts about
moments being connected,
a life of pictures
instead of films?

Will your breath
pull through?

Your need to fidget,
avoid silence?

The way you picture
your own shape and
measure it against
the puzzle you make
of the world?

The way the images
flame,
leaving dark snow.
Even that blows away.


-

Hello, all. Merry meet again. How have 20 days gone by since my last post? Well, it was dissertation proposal crunch time, end of semester grading, holiday traveling among Illinois, Ohio, and Virginia... and some minor crises to deal with. All of these things have been excellent fodder for writing, so keep checking back. I hope your 2014 has been inspiring and enriching, complete with holidays packed with good cheer and company. Stay warm and safe, friends!

Bad Vibes & Things Discarded: 55 Worded Works

A Series of 55-Word Shorts & A Poem for Real Toad's Flash - 55 word challenge.


“Other Worlds”

“I have a bad feeling about this.”

You should, I think, watching you roll your thumbs on the joysticks and your Barbarian character simultaneously turn a corner in the dwarf-hewn cave. From the deep, a fiery balrog tears out of the earth, shaking your controller. You drop it.

In your shriek, the virtual becomes real.


-

“Experimentation”

Vibrations aren’t always good, she frowned, regretting answering the buzzing phone. She returned to the white linened table, heels clicking on the wood floor, and proffered an apology to her date on the way out, “Gotta go clean up a mess at the lab.” She felt a flash of guilt, but, hey, Bloody rampages qualify.

-

“Cosmic Mockery”

Vibrations aren’t always good, she frowned, immediately regretting answering the buzzing phone. It was her bank: someone had stolen her credit card. They’d bought $1,000 of baby items: diapers, food, and a crib. She sank to the ground, breath catching in her throat, next to the trash can that still held the pregnancy test, negative.

-

“Resonance”

Red balloon stretches thin -
pinprick, needle-scar puncture.
air escapes slowly, roundness
retains through shrinking
till shriveled it gives up.

In the trash, it meets discarded
apple core, once round and red, too,
now thin, bowed from depletion of
seeds and apple-meat.

Whether one lost
more than the other
they both ended up
the same.

The Flasher and the Fissure

October was a month like me,
a month smoked with wild dreams
welded shut with loss of leaves.
A blazing month that dropped its cloak.
Naked,
thus filled with gaping holes.

(How time flies! It hardly seems right to welcome November without bidding October adieu. October was a tough month. It brought death. It held lots of stress. But it also knew joy. And now I greet November the only way I can: one breath at a time, with a commitment to appreciate my blessings.)

November cuts into the ground,
cold and sharp and deeper down.
Therein lies the treasure here: cold claws
remove the gold, oil, smoldering belly of fire.
Rise, repeat; hurry! The snaggle-toothed Snow King is coming.
We must draw up what he will covet. Pull it up! Higher! Higher!

Autumn Undone

Falling for Autumn

"Sole Cicada"

(One of my newer shadow boxes, called "Sweeping of Dreams")

Sunlight
straddled
morning
and
evening,
flickering
both ways.

The trees clicked,
whispered,
and I thought if I
could just listen
hard enough
I might
discern
some archetypal
tongue.

I found it at my feet,
the poor cicada,
between death and life

trembling,
the rippling
camouflage
beneath
the ambered
shell
ready to
emerge.

Those claws like pincers
tiring, desperate
grappling hooks pulling
up, up, over, down
up - anywhere,
because all the climbing is
about is
escaping
oneself.

Must hold on
to let go.

There must have been
a RIPping noise
but I only saw
a giant
hanging
from a
sandy shell,
black mirror eyes
no longer writhing

and then, there! growing, stretching
shuffling wet green wings
sailing in the wind.

The shell remains,
clinging,
until

They are fallen

leaves.

In the new-found silence,
autumn has come.


(This poem may be a repost, I'm not sure. If it is, it's been a while! I found this old poem recently. As I read it through, connecting with its transformative crunch, I remember disliking it for a very long time. It didn't flow right, it didn't sit right... You know how it goes. Funny how different poems resonate at different times. This one has me almost-smiling now. My next post will also be transformation themed - but much more visual. Enjoy!)

"The Imps of St. Martin's Land"

Ah, yes, they tell me I was green
when they found me, me and my brother,
down by the wolfpit. We had passed our
tenth years, mangled as that hole in the ground,
thorny and worn and hungry. Ravenous.
Well, me (and my brother)
had brown hair and ten toes, ten little fingers
and buttony noses. We were perfect

…except for our skin.
Green, green as sin.

“Imps!” they called us,
but we didn’t know. Back then,
our tongues were still our own.
I can’t remember any of that old, sweet
language now, just the new harsh words,
their meaning forced down our lobes.
We heard the worst things, then.

Imps and devils, spirits, elves,
bringers of bad fortune, foes,
bad omens, groans. Angry glares.
Or worse, the pointed silence
the absence of kindness,
meanness, any –ness at all.

The stillness stretches
into a column, rising,
a column of shadows, moving:
a million moths whispering up,
up to the roof, domed stone. A
real place. A place I’ve been. My
fingertips trace the pillar, dimpled cold.
St. Martin’s Land. My home. My home!

My brother and I grew up there,
our walls the womb of earth itself.
We all lived here, my brother, my
mother, my father, the others.
We lit fires in those pits, and went swimming
down that cavern. We sang each other
stories, danced, filled the village with laugh-
ter, laughter, laughter so we never saw the sun, so
we never had a day. We had our own
soothing words, language of touch, each other’s hands
crafting nets, weaving baskets, scavenging,
cooking herb pies, catching fish, healing, hunting
courage. Were we green? I don’t remember.
I remember the glow of the fungus at night
and the glint of the cavepearls in the fire’s
dying light. I remember the smell of the fur
that’s my bed. I remember my brother,
his woolly head, his dank brown breath
wisps, his smile a crooked line of bright.

Of course, he’s dead. They took away
his dancing, then his song, then his smile.
They took away the words that painted
his world. How could he go on?
As the green drained from his skin,
he clutched my hand, pink on pink,
and in usurper’s tongue exhaled:
“Back to St. Martin’s Land!”



(This is from a prompt over at Imaginary Garden with Real Toads; looking at images of caves, I was reminded of the 12th century old tale I read about today: two green children are found near Woolpit, UK, speaking a language no one can understand. They are raised, and they turn pink, and the brother dies. Later, the girl tells of the great, underground St. Martin's Land, where everyone was green. Wikipedia mentions some interesting theories of why children inspiring the story might have been green.)

Closing the Divide

The end of times
is inevitable,
but I was not expecting
it to stop.

The clock.

It wasn’t just my heart,
breath clinging
half within – half without.
It was the glinty green fly
diving toward the patch of grass.
It was the styro coffee cup
cast down, about to clash with
a skateboarder – whose eyes
were scrunched mid-sneeze.
It was the cloud passing the sun,
the shadow, sudden
sick purple as a prune.

Oh!

My ears.
How loud the heartbeats,
like sirens, the sudden breaking
of barriers,

the flash of blue between our
eyes, the call of the ordinary wild:

the scrunch and buzz,
the splash between the
darkest end of time
and the blistering breach
of the beginning.



(And so ends Splashing the Divide.)

Running Away, Storybook Style

“Spinning Callouses”

Here nor there,
the music hangs,
notes nailed to
thin air. The road
connects two ends,
I sit at home with
my spinning wheel.

Frayed and spun
like bloodstained
straw, I wĪnd my
wheel and weave
my will…

I weave my will
and wĪnd my mind
around the steeled
walls and climb
the turrets
to the naked wind,
castle high and current fixed.

I leave behind
wild eyes, whispered prayers,
sacred notes of silence. Fire!
Shrieks, the helling of the holy – smoke.

I twill steel and iron words
into a bridge of shallow shadows.
Washed, unraveled, threads of ash and green.

Spin the gown and in it
find the doorway through
the floor, well worn, that
leads to silver, gold, and song

– bring the dance shoes you don’t love;
they’ll be dead by dawn.

Dance the weaver’s age old
thrum, tie the threads together,
write the floor you’re dancing on,
move your ankles faster, feel the floor
grow steam and swell, a bursting of
the underwell. Move through you,
move through me, the motions
not our own but pulled by well-stung
strings of ecstasy.

Purged
in the
morning
I look out
at the club with bouncing walls, take in
the church with chiming bells. There is
nothing new, nothing old, nothing
but sweat and prayer.

Nothing but calloused feet and hands,
and a closet short shoes, one pair.



(This poem is a re-imagining of a different poem from last year. It seemed to fit this collage, a musing on the world and escape, from Splashing the Divide. It's one of the last pages of this collage book. But that's OK. I have a lot of poems, short stories, and artwork to post.

As always, thanks for dropping by, and I hope you enjoyed these little snippets of my mind's wanderings.)

Smoked to Perfection

("Smoked to Perfection" from my Splashing the Divide collage book)

Welcome to Wonderland! This tribute to my childhood favorites - Alice, the caterpillar, and good ol' Chessie (whose smile I drew on with Sharpie) - comes alongside a whole summer of my returning to Alice. There was American McGee's twisted Alice game, Tim Burton's film version and the TV movie Alice (with my favorite Mad Hatter portrayed by Andrew Lee Potts), AG Howard's Splintered and Unhinged, and the classic itself. For the last year, I've been developing my own reimagined Alice, in a nightmare world of archaeology and world mythology... And, of course, Alice art surrounds me in my home.


(One of my favorite artists, Robert Walker, made this print that's hanging in my hallway)

Alice may surround me, but she is a fitful muse. When she inspires, I tend to like the work, like this one:

“Wrinkled Path to Wonderland”

She wore blue silk
the night the sky bled
red as dawn, she walked
among the stones, the grass. The wind
chimed in her wake.

It was a wrinkled path
to the Unknown, only in darkness
shaped, and the absence of sound.
A thought was sewn
into impressionable
pre-sleep crevices. The moon fell,
a branded tear, unfinished tune,
haunting the edges of slate lake
where she painted rainbows
with her toes
in the salted water.

From there, she chased
crooked kittens, caught blue
caterpillars, grew-shrank/
ate two-sided mushrooms,
and swept delicate tea sets askew.

She woke facing herself,
a rippling mirror
taunting the sinews of
memory, stroking them
to sleep. Settling in,
the darkness black,
the walls thick,
the world a box
again.