Visual
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Visual
Woman Too
I never thought I was beautiful growing up. Not in the way the starlets in the movies do, tears running down hollowed cheeks staining the satin piece of fabric they are passing off as a gown. No, I did not think I was beautiful because it was true. From its conception there were no black faces in Hollywood unless they were men or servant girls. We were not allowed to partake in the glamour. Not where anyone could see anyway. Though isn’t exhibition the point? I am an actor. I am an American. I am a woman. What am I if not desirable, if not an object for consumption?
Prose
On That of Which the Patient Complains
In August there is a forehead hematoma. My long-term house guest and I anxiously await the start of the fall season and the coolest days of the summer have forgotten to drop themselves in temperature. We reminisce on July days when we would disobey the signs that said otherwise and seat ourselves on the rocks just where the Hudson breaks. He would regularly request a Genevieve on the rocks, a nod to my being next in line to train as a bartender in the restaurant where I worked and where he too would end up working later in the summer. Then we did not know anything other than that it was beautiful to be at the center of someone’s world…
Poetry
Things you must know if ever you are to love me
I am an unusual creature
I find ease in complication
I will not set the clocks back
I live in warm weather time
And in the spring I will write a note above the oven that reads “this is the hour”
I will eat the platanitos on the way home from the market
or the grapes if I want something sweet
or the chocolate (dark) if I‘m in need of indulgence
I love the resounding silence of the morning…
Poetry
An Antithetical Ode to 20
And so I keep singing the same song over and
over
Hoping that at some point it will cause
my mother’s eyes to light up the way they did upon my initiation into the ivy league
Or the talented tenth
For the way my underdeveloped mind could dance circles around the grown-ups in gowns at galas
For my string playing, phonetically obeying, strategic displaying of everything that can fit inside a box
For every time I managed to outperform myself or be more of a
doll…
Visual
Forms
The body as storyteller
Prose
Bordered Love
March 1949
My dearest Nelke,
I do hope that this letter finds you well and that I have not been forgotten in Berlin. I write to you now from Heidelberg where I have returned to finish my schooling. I apologize for the inconsistency of my correspondence. The last few months I found myself a captive of war in Soviet Russia. I hope you understand the difficulty in communicating with the outside world under these circumstances…
Visual