Sunday at Alemany Flea Market

Bernal Heights, sunlit morning
up early, I wander in & out of stalls
sprawled across a parking lot
set aside for the weekly farmer’s

market, vendors offer old VHS tapes,
saw bits & rusted blades, postcards,
an elbow patch in the likeness
of a heart, bound paper calendar

from four years back, printed
with wood block yantras,
a pinky ring bezeled with
the image of MLK who’s

birth the city remembers
tomorrow, objects of intimate
worth, talismans to the past,
transmitted in the remnants of

what other lives have treasured
a hawker bemoans struggling
sales in the new year, higher
fees for space rentals scaling

back to fewer days,
I listen to an exchange
take place in Chinese
reminded of my dad haggling

for his kid’s attire at the Colton
Swap Meet, my mother anxious to
go home, ready to walk away saw
only cheap goods, someone else’s junk

emergency poem

“After hundred of times of similar thunderstorms approaching…
you see them pass, you kind of get jaundiced about the warnings
and tend not to give them the weight you probably should”
– Jeff Lehr, reporter at The Joplin Globe

first week on campus an air horn
sounds at noon – the screech & wail of
an angry warning that can’t be ignored –
commonplace as earthquake drills
interrupting my youth (duck & cover on cue)

if it were real, an email
would have confirmed it;
I forego making phone calls
every Wednesday at lunch,
fall into an uneasy routine

so that when funnels do touch
down in Greenbrier, I don’t bat
an eye about showing up to meet
my coach at the rec center across
the road, the health club emptied

of all activity, when we find each other
he fingers a mass of swirling clouds
heading south towards town on a flatscreen
– all events on hold he’s been charged
with gathering up stray students, gym rats

huddled in the hall until the storm blows over
but I’d rather be crushed in my own home
with the one I love then be caught
dead remote tweeting about tree fall
or power outage – common sense

says the safest place in a storm
is on a highway, never mind
the part about lightning vs. tornado
strike – “I’m not responsible”
my trainer says outright – having made

one ill-founded decision to shift
from Lone Star to Razorback State,
what’s one more calculated risk?
given the gamble to escape Oz and
find a way back to Kansas –

wouldn’t we all take our chances?

swine

outside a sandwich shop
the boy with a scarlet dyed
Mohawk herds close to

his teenage brothers, shaved scalps
a tribal affiliation, I cannot
look beyond their bald heads

to see the red & white jerseys
emblazoned w/ wrathful ridge-
backed peccaries – an identity

formed around shirts not skin,
college football, plays games
with the mind hearing dogs

behind every chain-link fence
yap at me, as stray cats
present mice & hantavirus,

I have always been scared
witless of wildlife

Chitchat at the superstore

the cashier catches me
off guard when she wonders
aloud – I’m emptying out a cart
full of moving supplies: polymer totes,
packing tape, solvents to scrub
down a greasy stove, glass cleaner
for a bathroom mirror trying to see
things from her view, no polish,
I ask her to repeat the question
to make sure I hear her right:
Do you do nails?

I look down
at my own ragged cuticles,
gnawed nail folds feeling how
the heart wants to hammer down
the nail that sticks out, put her
in her place – this is not
my immigration story but why do I turn away –
thinking of Asian nail parlors in any town across America,
ubiquitous in Conway, there’s nothing at stake
I leave next week so choose
to state what’s obvious to my own mind
moving away from Arkansas – sorting
my bling into storage boxes

satisfied I speak English
she says she sees it
all the time at Wal-Mart
salon techs stocking up
on acrylic nail forms & fake tips,
organized into the same plastic cases

the tension dissolves between us
into recognizable decorum
bet the weather will be good
where you’re headed – bless
your heart, you live a good life

The Volta has a video poem piece that I created for them here. Poet-scholar Kimberly Alidio was kind enough to write about the poem here.

Kathleen Flenniken, the Washington State Poet Laureate, was kind enough to feature my work on The Far Field recently.

I would love to see more cities create object-based histories of where they've come from.

Mapparium

earth turns to a projection
of the world taken from

the Rand McNally atlas, 1935
West Fr. Africa, Siam, Taihoku –

colonial names for partitioned places,
all the oceans that blanket the planet

elements that are outside of &
interior to our own forms

***

inside the glass map
under a domed vault

my father hidden amongst
a sea of tourists, on opposite

poles of a crystal bridge,
standing thirty feet apart,

a gallery whispers,
the room’s vibration

thick w/ New England
accents my father’s voice

***

alien eye travels straight
to the shape he knows as home,

index finger pointing
skywards one glass section

exists distinct from
six hundred and seven

other hand-painted parcels,
the archipelago of origination

I gaze towards the Bible Belt
remotely sensing my present residence

***

here in the Colony of Massachusetts
Bay, I trace my own displacement

thinking back to former times,
when access to the glass globe

was unregulated – a long outing spent
with a sweetheart I visualized spending

a life w/ – free to come
& go, how we revisit past

geographies w/ those that
we love to form new impressions

of demilitarized zones,
to bring the past with us

the primary school
in my father’s hometown:

Kyo Mizu - Ching Shui - Clear Water

the reflection pool in Boston
echoing old & new

Roadtrip haiku found in my phone

"second best yarn store in
the universe" outside Salina,
wondering where's the first

*

"God sees all evildoers"
posted next to the interstate one sign
after the adult megastore exit

*

herd of cows huddled
in shade beneath a billboard ad
of the golden arches

Dirt

last June store security
at the Super Wal-Mart
bust a school teacher

from Vilonia School District
for shooting footage w/
his i-pod of the view

up shopper’s skirts –
a neighbor on Simms St.
is ousted from editorship

at the OA for kissing
interns & serving them
drinks, at the university

Pres. Meadors resigns over
a gift to fund a facelift for
his house in exchange for

re-upping a major
deal, my boss, a math
teacher swears

people are the same
wherever you go

baby bird

sleepless one more night
thinking about the tiny fledgling
stock-still as sculpture
planted on our sidewalk

around midnight slightly
stunned from its fall to earth
a vacant stare skyward
towards the gingko

it tumbled from when
no one was watching
pulls at my imagination
while Kort tracked the jay

across the front yard
trying to entice it to perch
atop a broken branch
to avoid shedding

his scent talking all
the while about the survival
of the fittest until I wake him
up to say “feral cats”;

he pulls on pants & work
gloves to recover the animal
where we left it beneath
the front stairs the bird

makes no noise when
he picks it up with both
hands to place it up high
safe where we hope

it has a fair advantage

OZARKS

the state I was in
that first / last trip to
Petit Jean covered
head to toe in insect bites

hiking in the stifling
heat of summer to make out
pictographs in the rock “cave” –
a humble stone shelter

roofing the glyphs of early
civilization, all efforts to
discern the shapes of
horse & man from more

recent graffiti as fruitful
as the imaginative act of
cloud gazing, remembering
the rockfaces of Chaco

Canyon & Neah Bay where
we walked out w/out seeing
even one of the forty-four
carvings, no map to mark

the territory – it’s the trappings
right under the nose that
don’t go missed: the Flatirons
of Bear Peak, the snow-

capped dome of
Mt. Rainier, mountains
I have regarded from
safe distances, two years

living in the foothills
of central Arkansas, I see
the Ozarks, become one
w/ the summits when decamping

Back home in the PNW

After a long and exhausting 5-day drive across the country (Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington) with a 22-foot Uhaul truck and auto transporter in tow, Kort and I made it back to Seattle. In our final days, it really felt like Arkansas was conspiring to keep us there - from Wheaton moving falling through on us 24 hours before the pick-up of our belongings for move to contracting with a Uhaul agent who was unable to help up secure our car on the auto transporter. I seriously lost my mind more then once, and saw my partner do the same.

The good news is that we are here. We are renting a condo in Ballard, just three blocks from downtown Ballard on Market Street.

And the even better news is that I am writing again, after a long dry spell. As we were crossing through Fayetteville, and I saw signs for the "Aux Arcs" (Ozarks) - I realized what had been missing in the poetry manuscript that I just drafted together of poems produced in the last few years. The poems that are explicitly about the experience of living and working in Arkansas were absent. Unspoken. Topics that I was not able to approach for many reasons. So the book is no longer called "Six Persimmons" (after one of the poems in the collection) - its new name is "Aux Arcs" - the historical term for "of or at Arkansas" but also the "arc" or bend, as in a river, as in the trajectory of my life which took me into the Deep South for three years and away from the West Coast. It is the book in my oeuvre that is most definitively about a specific geography, as well as busting out of its tiny boundaries. The poems on food and animals will take a back seat to the new theme of self-exile and estrangement in Dixie. This is not to say that Arkansas was a complete and total bardo zone - we found a community of friends and collaborators inside and outside of our workplaces and made deep connections. But as a whole, I could not see myself giving birth to or raising children in small-town Arkansas. Coming back to Seattle was about choosing a specific community. And a life.

I also found a painting in the collections of Arkansas' Crystal Bridges Museum that is an appropriate representation of my experiences in the South - "The Island" by Walton Ford. It is an image of savagery and survival. Note: The breed of Tasmanian wolf depicted in the painting is now extinct.

So if you read this blog and are curious about the new writings that I am posting - they will reference the experiences of the last three years. The Osaka poem, Main Street, etc.

Main Street

out front of
the Conway post office
fresh from mailing

notes to a college
search committee, I turn over
the last question asked

snap back
to earth when
sputum lands

inches from
my leather dress shoes
three teenage

white boys parked,
the one in the passenger seat
who watched me walk

up; timed his throat
clearing just so spitting towards
isn’t no crime

this ain’t China w/
some government
ban on discharging

in public the veil
between town &
gown stripped bare

I climb inside the rental
car where my husband
asks if everything’s okay

confused I am careful
when I describe spit coming
in my direction, thinking

of our next-door neighbors
in an even smaller town,
good ol' boys who proudly

fly the southern cross

Domoyaki Osaka

After inputting my order,
the Korean-born cook
shapes rice balls

behind the stainless-steel counter;
Kort recalling his days
waiting tables at Sushi Tora

on Pearl Street, how
only male chefs prepared
the premium cuts

of fish laid over
seasoned rice b/c
the core temperature

of a woman’s
palms aren’t quite fitted
to sushi production

post-Fukushima, I read
in the NYTimes of the shift
in Japanese rice loyalty

the rise in imported grain
how we reorient our bodies &
minds to what’s at hand

Road Trip Haiku

outside Mrs. Baird's
a man scatters hunks of bread
in car park, no birds for miles

*

in Kansas the roadside sign:
"fill-in the gap" dental - the class
gulf, the tooth void

*

"EAT GAS"

My poem "Milk Crime" appears in the new issue/anthology of Magnolia Journal.

Some last impressions of the Deep South

scanning the yard sale
sign & stumbling on whether
its maker scribed "chrap" or cheap

*

busted toilet bowl
seat doubles as a side table
for frontyard smokers

(w/ additional ashtray function)

New poems are recently published in Spoon River Poetry Review and Kadar Koli's special issue on "Violence."

Ayurvedic adventures

I recently spent seven days living in a yoga ashram (Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's Art of Living Center) outside of Montreal in La Mauricie. During that week, I went on a 2-day liquid fast, had detoxifying Ayurvedic treatments involving heavy oils poured onto the body, and consumed almost nothing but steamed vegetables and various grain-based porridges for five days. The whole thing was overseen by a vaidya (doctor) from India who diagnosed my basic constitution and gave me some tips for staying in balance. In between treatments, we meditated, chanted "om nama shivaya" and learned about guruji's teachings. I am not a convert. He seems like a happy enough teacher with a positive message, but I could not relate to the perspective. That could be attributed to that I haven't learned his sudarshan kriya (tm) which is only transmittable via a living teacher. On the other hand, I signed up for a panchakarma wellness retreat and that is what my mind was prepared for.

The highlights of the retreat were the Ayurvedic treatments. Abhyanga, marma, netra basti, and karna purna. The netra basti involves having a dam of dough built up around the eye, which is then filled with warm, melted ghee. You open your eye in a lake of ghee and practice a series of eye strengthening exercises. The result is that the treatment clears the visual image bank. For me, the experience on the table was profound and lent itself to literal visions. Also, netra basti is like conditioning your eyelashes and eye tissues. Deeply nourishing.

The karna purna involves having warm ghee poured into the ear canal until the ear is filled with butter. I noticed some tinnitus in my left ear which was a little bit distracting, but my relationship to hearing and sound also felt altered after the treatment. Excess vata accumulates in the ear, and the karna purna is a good treatment for soothing the mind.

I am attracted to taking health vacations to get back in balance, particularly after three years of excess stress and living out of harmony. But the new lifestyle habits will be a challenge to integrate. Ayurvedic guidelines are many and strict - no onions or garlic, no food that is older then 4 hours old, no dairy, no/minimal gluten, no excessive salt, no excessive sugar, no excessive processed foods, nothing fermented, eat sitting down, eat in silence, eat between certain hours, eat fruit first, eat sweets/dessert first, etc., oh yes, and no alcohol.

My challenge is to be a little more flexible with myself, knowing that I am a lay person, usually work excessive hours, and don't have a personal chef. Plus, I have a husband with a different prakriti. Going off of the cleanse and then traveling to DC to wrap up a leadership program while trying to maintain my diet caused some serious distress. Back at home now, the fridge is stuffed with fresh vegetables and though I have some protein cravings, I am going hardcore. Which of course is the fastest way to hit the wall...