Watching my father crush a black widow on my last day in California

when the laborer
fell through on finishing
the job, my father

left the trunk
to dry in the front
yard, eighty pounds

of amputated wood
to hack away at
slowly – when I

see him walk
outside, machete
in one hand &

log in the other
I follow, sensing
there will be violence –

maybe a dismembered
finger, or wood
chip to the eye –

he orders me to
stack sticks &
leaves in the plastic

waste receptacle
where I discover
the black widow

inverted upside
down, a red
hourglass marking

her abdomen,
the insect we were
all conditioned

to fear, as children,
a mature specimen
in webbed suspension

is hard to ignore
but I do, stacking
wood around her

habitat; my father
tells me to kill it
with a stick &

when I keep stacking
saying silent mantras
to will the widow away,

he takes a stick &
stabs until he’s pinned her
to the plastic wall

I watched how
she never fought
back & then

I covered her body
beneath a mountain
of dead branches.

Around us, life
grows wild – the algae
in the swimming pool

weeds sprouted
through concrete
the lilies in

the sun-bleached koi
pond, gophers tearing
up the lawn that

my father cuts back
with the rusted mower
blades dulled by

sticks & wood that
he intends to bury
beneath the ground

once all life has
drained away
beyond any

possibility of
regeneration
I think of

the stump that
is my older brother,
the mother that

escaped w/ her life,
the girl that grew up
afraid of spiders

learning that
it was kill
or be killed.

funeral procession
down 35th marked by black
sedans, white headbands

Tomorrow

Shin Yu Pai Reading
Riverside Public Library
3581 Mission Inn Ave.
Riverside, CA
6:30 pm

After Toshiko Takaezu

Bell (e)

in centuries
past, sunk
beneath soil

to receive earth’s
vital force, inert
vessel of

sound + light,
conserved

in a garden
of curing plants
the moment of

stillness &
gathering before
the shudder

of first note

imagining,
hum, chime &
g o n g

Renga update

Far-off deer cry
a whistling October ideogram
not found in the sutras

a script for simple living
the balm that wakens the world

he gestures angrily
at Dakshina Kali
creek crescent moon creek

knotting the tsutsumi cloth
before arriving at her home

he follows the black
throated jay with sad eyes
vague clouds icy ravines

painting in the pupil of daruma
wish for a smooth migration

on the hill-god masks
spooky silver eyes --
we bathe them in June

the freshly washed corpse with
flowers braided in his beard

lit with a blue sheen
where two granite rocks narrow
the rough creek

ruptures of earth, the shift
of fault lines, cleaving of loam

Kalidasa saw
sub-aquatic fires erupt from the
gods' love-making

the closing of roadways, sharp
rubber melt of goodyear tires

what year was it
under the coke-smudged moon
oil on the mallard's wings

Next Wednesday, I am reading from Works on Paper in Riverside at the downtown library on Main Street (now Mission Inn Avenue). Convivio Bookworks is sending my contributor's copies so I'll have a few books for the RPL reading and available in general for purchase. If you're interested in a copy, email me.

I turned in my papers and spent all of Wednesday and Thursday relaxing by reading poetry. Lisa Gill sent her newest book Mortar & Pestle. I loved her first book Red as a Lotus, it was just so damn wonderful - poems written to Thomas Merton. Mortar & Pestle does not disappoint - it is a clear extension of the voice and sensibility in Red as a Lotus, an amazing series of materia medica poems on healing plants and herbs that reflect the poet's relationship to them in the light of her experience with MS. Rick B sent his manuscript Passing Love which is a masterpiece waiting to be published. I read poems from my writing group with my Naropa friends, Chinworth and Marcus M, as well as from a Seattle poet and activist Eden Trenor. And then I read the work of a friend at the UW Law School, and rereading her manuscript for the 3rd time, I discovered new openings. How would I make it through my current situation without poetry? It was perhaps misconceived to think that I could leave poetry behind, by turning to anthropology. If anything, I think I am turning more deeply to poetry, while turning away from Poets and Poetry Inc.

Nico Vassilakis and Robert Mittenthal both read at Open Books last night. What I like about Open Books - it's a very white-box minimalist space, lit by flourescent bulbs and decorated with vinyl text on the walls, that make it very reminiscent of a poem emporium or gallery. White bookcases, white walls, white light. It stands in stark contrast to every other used bookstore that I have ever walked into with overstuffed chairs, Oriental rugs and dark-stained wood shelving. It would be fun to do a reading at Open Books dressed all in white. The camouflage effect. Mittenthal wore all black and a handsome pair of spectacles that looked very German. Nico read from his new ManyPenny book produced by Crag Hill. The SubText people seem to have a distinct sensibility - postmodern, political, theoretical, and intellectual. The name Morton Feldman came up a lot. A tight group of poets that reminded me briefly of the Boston scene five years ago.

dozens of spring
flower buds
erect in trees

In my inbox arrived this note:

Congratulations! Your poems were chosen as winners of the 2008 Jeanne Lohmann Poetry Prize sponsored by the Olympia Poetry Network:

"Otaka the Cat" by Sean Brendan-Brown (Olympia)
"Footprint" by Shin Yu Pai (Seattle)
"emergence" by David Rizzi (Seattle)

Having had a sluggish start to getting involved in the Washington poetry scene, I now feel officially welcomed into the fold. Thank you, Olympia!

Due to a change in design staff at Booklyn, Haiku Not Bombs has been bumped back to a June release.

Thanks to Karla Kelsey for the review of Sightings in the new issue of Octopus.

I'm going back to Cali in three weeks. In preparation for the time travel back to my youth, a heavy diet of The Smiths and liberal doses of talk therapy. I've been chatting with my friend Randy about growing up in Riverside - a city that prides itself on being within an hour of L.A., San Diego, the beaches, the mountains, the dessert, and skiing. An identity based on what it isn't, and what it is in relation to. That makes it begin to sound like a border site. If Riverside was a sundown town, what might have been it's sister city where the Chinese, Blacks, Jews and Native Americans were expelled? Could that have been Rubidoux, or even Colton?

Until final papers are written (Poetry and the Political; The Problematization of Hikikomori), I think this blog is going to become a blog about how much I love The Smiths. Though the exhibition at the DMA is getting rave reviews from visitors, some on staff are not swayed by the charms of The Smiths. I cannot believe it!

Unfortunately, no Youtube videos of Jakarta karaoke sessions were available.

Shoplifters of the World

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I Wear Black on the Outside...

More from the Phil Collins show

From the Phil Collins show in Dallas, "Oscillate Wildly." The boy in this video reminds me of my college boyfriend JC.

What I loved about the various renditions of the Smiths songs - the subtle subversion of lyrics. "Is there any point in every having children? Yes, definitely," completed one of the singers from Istanbul.