Coming soon:

after helping the giant
spider back outside, I lock
the kitchen door

discards

(after viewing Deborah Luster’s unpublished tintypes from One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana)

a question of sentence:
events marked w/
occasioned images
happy holiday
happy Mardi Gras
happy Easter
happy Samhain

a question of locution:
OG Bump
Lone Outlaw
Thug Life
In Memory of Mom
a question of surface:
tattoo-scrawled torso
torched surfaces
dodging & burn
seared cicatrix

a question of constitution:
St. Andrew’s cross modeled
after hoe & rake, art historical
sigils to civil wars
Christ’s Last Supper
his final meal

a question of value:
dull blacks, faded whites
flattened tiers of grey

This blog was silent for a few months and now that I am out of Texas, I feel that I can put the last few months behind me. In March, I received a death threat email at my inbox at the Wittliff Collections. Though it was sent anonymously, the content of the message aligned itself with our confederate neighbors in our apartment complex, with the stars and bars on their balcony next door. The message was sent to make sure that we would move out at the end of May when our lease term expired.

We were out of town traveling when the threat came in and returned to Texas to file a police report. An investigation ensued which tracked the offending email down to a public computer terminal at UCLA, in the School of Management. The trail went cold there and our local dick, "Poorboy," announced to me via voice mail message that he was closing the case. The details of the email revealed too much to be just a random threat - it knew too much about the specifics of the situation and created a tenuous living situation where I wasn't sure if I was being cyberstalked or followed to work. I took down this blog temporarily and started thinking much more carefully about my own personal privacy and safety.

So when what appears to be a fantastic job opportunity came open in Arkansas and we had a chance to leave Texas - we accepted. I am spending June and July writing and traveling and start work in August.

Adamantine is moving along with production. Ran into some trouble with the art work I'd originally chosen for the cover - a Keith Carter image which he graciously agreed to have reproduced for the book. Unfortunately, Christian Wiman published a Copper Canyon book of essays in 2008 which used the same image, which I discovered while walking around the AWP bookfair in Denver last month. So I hunted around for alternatives and discovered the work of Chinese-Canadian photographer Elaine Ling and felt myself drawn to her photograph of the Atacama stone - the same subject that Carter photographed, but with a different spin. The presence of the graffiti on the desert sculpture makes the piece feel less ancient, more modern... which brings an interesting and perhaps more accurate framing of the poems within the book.

unused condom
litters LBJ - aborted
assault or un-"lucky"?

thinking about how
over generations an artery
changes its name

from Nathan Forrest to MLK

"coming Fall 09"
Concho Commons Spring 2010:
still an overgrown lot

choose your battles

the half hour it took
the peasant-skirted protestor
to chalk a hundred library
stairs with missives
re: atrocities in Gaza,
this morning's major
clean-up task for minimum-
wage earners, sweepers
from groundskeeping
& maintenance

Earth day in Seattle:
make a papier-mache piñata
in the shape of a globe

use recycled copies of
The Stranger
& club it to a pulp

Earth day: TxState –
Ride your bike to work & get
a free bottle of water

"some people have difficulty getting numb"

off of SSRIs for one week
Dr. Dean tells me
how the oral health
of a mother affects
the weight of an unborn
child, why treating
an abscessed tooth
can lead to complications
when novocaine must be
traded for lidocaine

"sometimes it is not enough"

to take the metal probe
to recognize what hurts

Some notes on vulgarity:

"In Victorian fiction, to show excessive distaste for vulgarity is to betray a fatal character flaw: a concern for style and class at the expense of ethics.... to value social distinction over moral discrimination- is to prove onself not just a bad reader but effectively illiterate, father beneath the community of fellow-feeling that every Victorian novel summons into being than a monkey is beneath a margrave." - Joseph Litvak in "Vulgarity, Stupidity, and Worldliness in Middlemarch"

"The quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity lest we die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence" - Middlemarch

after she announces
the break-up, I think twice about
her third dislocated shoulder

country mouse: neck deep
a cow eating its way through
five-foot tall haystack

New educational Isabella Rossellini videos at the Sundance Channel!

White Pine Press has updated their 2010 titles to now reflect Adamantine. Preorder the book here!

The Chinati Foundation is looking for a new director, as is the Dallas Contemporary. And Jeff Koons is curating at the New Museum.

This weekend, I am travelling to Little Rock.

Where can I see these Gonzales-Torres billboards?

Photo essay on our old 'hood in Seattle. But where is India Palace and Whole Foods and SIOM and Dream Clinic?

Filmmaker Jonathan Yi is making a mini-doc about Asian American stories. This is my submission for the casting call: