In the Cut

I live in a little house in Brooklyn

around the corner from a sleepy barbershop.

Occasionally a wrinkled Italian will sit, having

his pate shaved by a bored, doughy thirty-something.

But most days, through the floor-to-ceiling windows

are visible the backs of barbers – a pair -

their hands maneuvering not tools but controllers,

and gaping up at a screen unreasonably wide,

alive with fluorescent activity.

I walk past, hands clutching the day’s bills, newspapers,

and receive a small nod, a wink. I wonder at what age will

do to small charms. Today, the sight of grown men whittling

away days upon which I struggle to keep my grasp

is almost more than I can bear.

I sit in my townhouse and read of your travels on a screen.
Morning sound of jack hammers, distant pigeons,
children shooting water guns in unlikely backyards.
I remember your legs splayed over my embroidered bedspread
tittering over some temporary man or insufferable woman.
Not long ago. The secret snark of girlfriends.

I imagine you now, heels traded for flat rubber,
alone on a dirt path, digesting a first rare silence.
Kutaisi. Not a trivial place. No time, no hinges.
Stripped of all but its name, truths lost amidst detritus,
history books half-written. Nobody won.

The cool orbs of a languid cow meet yours as it
pastures alone.  Slow. Labored. Tiny gray women,
faces thatched with unspeakables, skin like beaten leather.
They gesture at you, hesitant.
For the American they shape stories
through the hot air with crow-footed hands.

Your irrepressible ache, patron saint of lost souls simulcast
on news reports, features in the Times that jar
over morning coffee. Friend, steel your heart,
I whisper. Yours is not the stuff of flavored lattes.

Soon I will sit, fingers drumming, in some sticky downtown bar
recalling dirt paths of my own. Distant. A confused pain
through jagged memory. I expect you will breeze in,
back in stilettos, flustered, ten minutes late,
apology half-launched, back
from saving the world.

I will take your ivory hands in mine,
those of the girl with the beam of ideals,
heedless zeal and laughter,
and squeeze them between my rough palms,
hoping to glimpse some small fleck of dirt
still sunken beneath your fingernails.

]]> http://tricontinentalism.wordpress.com/2010/08/26/for-jasmine-with-love-2/feed/ 1 tricontinentalism http://tricontinentalism.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/sweethearts/ http://tricontinentalism.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/sweethearts/#comments Mon, 16 Aug 2010 12:06:06 +0000 tricontinentalism http://tricontinentalism.wordpress.com/?p=148 ]]> I lopped off your head
and pushed it around in a pram.

You gestured above your stump, unaware,
scratching in the air where your beard
once was.

This, Darling, was our love affair.

Brunch.
This man is only a few feet away.
Everyone’s head lifts, scanning. Not very discreetly.

He has a line of curls running from chest to groin.
On an iPhone screen.
It’s like a bar where everyone is just a torso.

Let’s open it together, and
call it Guillotine.

By we I refer to my cohort, the early twenties, who are only at the very beginning of the long, gorgeous, and arduous process of battling with the philosophical leaps and bursts of emotional catharsis that come with age. Though still essentially a child, I have developed a fascination with the effects of growing histories on our relationships with ourselves and each other, and find the beauty of time’s distortions elegantly expressed in the Mary Meriam sonnet below. Enjoy.

The Romance of Middle Age

Now that I’m fifty, let me take my showers
at night, no light, eyes closed. And let me swim
in cover-ups. My skin’s tattooed with hours
and days and decades, head to foot, and slim
is just a faded photograph. It’s strange
how people look away who once would look.
I didn’t know I’d undergo this change
and be the unseen cover of a book
whose plot, though swift, just keeps on getting thicker.
One reaches for the pleasures of the mind
and heart to counteract the loss of quicker
knowledge. One feels old urgencies unwind,
although I still pluck chin hairs with a tweezer,
in case I might attract another geezer.

During the time that I was startlingly unemployed and desperate to not to think of my unlikely chances of getting into grad school, every idea I had to express an opinion or point out a fascination seemed staid or somehow too irrelevant to share. I had lost some faith in the validity of saying anything at all.

Since then, the fates have smiled upon me broadly. Not only have I been working a fairly enjoyable job, but I got a very attractive offer for a full ride, a stipend, and health insurance at CUNY Graduate Center for a PhD in Comparative Literature – an offer that I have accepted and am happy and proud for the opportunity. I will be officially be living, studying, working and teaching in New York for the next five years, at least. After a month or so of simply basking in my delight and wondering at my absurd luck, I am finally coming down from the intoxication of my joy and assessing the questions that these developments force to a head.

One of them is the nature of my work and the direction I would like it to take – namely, what am I writing, whom for, and when and how do I believe my ideas are important?

This blog had originally been designed to force me to share my writing because more often than not, I work in a vacuum. Yet, only a few times have I managed to push even slightly below the surface and allow the personal – and by this I do not mean my personal or social life per se, but the issues that lie closest to my heart and that I intend to devote much of my continuing academic and creative life toward – to slowly come up through the seams. The need to push out from underneath the journalistic front was a discovery made as my senior year of college came to a close and a small team of mentors whom I am fortunate enough to still call my friends helped me understand that this is where I am at my best.

I continue to stay largely reserved in my writing – a trait that I oddly do not have out in the world. The voice inside of my head (metaphorically, kids) has remained determined to speak in a whisper despite the unflapping loquaciousness of my social self. After having a discussion about the halting effect this has on my productivity with several other writers of late, it has become clear that my anxiety surrounding exposure must be combated or my work will stall, or fail completely. A devotion to writing, I believe, must lend itself to enough love for one’s reader to stop keeping him/her at arm’s length. Whether or not one’s reader bites is besides the question, or a different problem altogether.

This is not to say I will refrain from posting random crap I find funny on the internet, or regaling you with context-less quotes that I cannot help but share. What I hope it means, is that from here on in I will make a concentrated effort to share more of myself than that. I invite those of you who have an interest in extending or creating a community around peer readership and collaboration to step forward if you would like my participation, because my projects could use a few more sets of eyes and my work some fresh ideas to ponder. In the mean time, here’s to coming out from under my literary rock.

- TriCon

- from Franny and Zooey

“I wonder if we haven’t entered into a period of what should be called “adjustment” feminism. The women’s movement is having to adjust to the realities of life in our culture, where many of its basic goals — including the very basic liberation of women from their pop culture status as a “mindless-boob-girlie symbol,” to borrow a phrase again from Robin Morgan — have stalled or are even backsliding. This week, for example, not only brought a public statement by the head of NOW acknowledging that the fight to have women valued for their inner beauty is essentially a wash; it also found NOW in the very bizarre position of urging senators to preserve the dictates of the Hyde Amendment, which for over 30 years has guaranteed that Medicaid funds would not be used to pay for most abortions for poor women. The House of Representatives’ recently-passed the Stupak amendment, which effectively prohibits both private health insurance plans participating in the future-envisioned insurance “exchange” and whatever public option may come into being, from offering abortion coverage to any woman, and the Stupak-like proposals currently circulating in the Senate are so much worse, after all. Hyde suddenly seems bearable.”

Happy happy happy.

- TriCon

The following excerpt is from a New York Times article called “A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity.” This is the tail end of the article, but one that even read alone should reveal an argument about the human nature’s relationship with media and art that, in our times, could be used as an interesting point of departure for ways to think about our current communication technologies.

” As Dr. Bailey wrote in the exhibition catalog, the figurines should perhaps be defined only in terms of their actual appearance: miniature, representational depictions of the human form. He thus “assumed (as is justified by our knowledge of human evolution) that the ability to make, use and understand symbolic objects such as figurines is an ability that is shared by all modern humans and thus is a capability that connects you, me, Neolithic men, women and children, and the Paleolithic painters in caves.”

Or else the “Thinker,” for instance, is the image of you, me, the archaeologists and historians confronted and perplexed by a “lost” culture in southeastern Europe that had quite a go with life back before a single word was written or a wheel turned.”

- TriCon