drugs & deadlines

put myself back on & fly.

[drugs-and-deadlines]

which leaves cling to the trees

in the last moments they don’t let go their identity one of another time when the temperature wasn’t 16 degrees how do they hold on brown and shriveled past the last five weeks of freezing temperatures do they have a strange gift we should praise or is it a tragedy the friend who does not acknowledge how the world has changed the elder whose nails grip onThe person stuck on who they used to be instead of the swelling orchid they are now

[amare-habeo]

Suad Al-Attar (Iraqi, 1942)

Visions from Gardens of Eden I, 2021

Oil on canvass

[drugs-and-deadlines]

multi-dimensional knot

Marriage is never quite a describeable thing as they make it out to be; all those toasts and their cute distillations / as if one turn of phrase could push the fizzy buzzing years of fermentation and growing all the earth that had to be filled and abandoned before the growing began could be held in just one hand of your life. No, marriage is a two-dimension word hiding a fourth dimension experience; When the walk home to you also feels like the first walk away from you, 11 years ago; disorientation heady – am I coming home to dinner of boiled artichokes and ground turkey in Brooklyn, the sidewalk springtime wind whipping at the children and my coast and my excitement to tell you all I learned or am I leaving you in the collegiate February air, avoiding Ice with a vice grip around my taco takeout box, a little embarrassed that I caught myself smiling at what I thought would be a one time lay? may 1 2025

[drugs-and-deadlines]

7am train ride to javits center, may

you tend to learn a lot from a person's unkindness their tendency to whip you for each rest you take and small moment they sneer; they don't know about the mush and crush of your butterfly dreams, the composers and restaurants and grant deadlines that you rubbed from your eyes to get on the train. my husband once said that even while working blue collar jobs I always acted like I didn't belong, like there was another dream around the bend I was flittering and flickering out of view for, the truth was I was holding my gossamer and my imaginal discs inside my compressed chrysallis lungs and squeezing hard in fear that somehow I'd let it all go; a swinging kitchen door enough to unhinge me from a branch as I metamorphosized, a quota like a hungry animal to interrupt me right before I'd let my wings develop and just before I'd had the grace to dry them out. maybe all that bracing and squeezing and rearranging of my future wings stopped me from seeing the people in front of me. What would it be if I listened for longer and didn't stall before making the personal connection; to say that I lived somwhere or once dreamed something? my days have become the discarded coke bottles in the backyard; the wings lodged so deep inside me that I rifle through the days searching for them, I dream of sculpture, of pollination, of other lands I wonder about tall grasses, of what other dancers in walled gardens got to drink up, the sweetness satiating their need, what my attenae were meant to pick up, but then get distracted by the train that runs through. How do others keep their focus front and center with all this balled-up longing? someone I once had a crush on once said I enjoyed having a husband, a fact I remember every time I see an engagement ring. What is the whole rock for? What should I do with those lost earrings bought in the acute time when total transformation felt possible a half of pair that now sits stranded? oh those butterfly earrings that curved around the bottom of my earlobe with a technicolor and gold-veined glow. perhaps now it's time to let them go, time to see what other dreams I might cook up that leave me less fragile but more present and kind. three months later resilience is the goop a whole new parachute some still compare colors while now I mix my own

[nevver]

Into the woods, Adrian Cox (because)

[drugs-and-deadlines]

:she/hers:

a circle back, as if seven years were one big ice rink: here are all the flips and axles the way my muscles grew and bulged but only now has the routine run its course i have outgrown this femininity, reacquainted myself with my combat boots and dyed hair. 

i’ll admit it was a remarkable number, one we practiced many days of the week it was full of gymnastics! the kind in which I pretend it’s okay you evaluate women on weight the kind in which we both pretend you don’t see me that way      but sideeye bigger women on the street the one in which you say you could never be with a woman who        “let herself go” and         expect me to work “hard to be strong” after pregnancy the kind in which you look at each body hair and want to pluck it the kind in which you misgender my friends or colleagues in the privacy of our own home but never to their face leaving me to silently wonder what you would say about the “they” inside me

this routine had great tricks - it allowed for the pressure of children and the biological clock; it allowed for  you questioning every piece of dykish clothing. it even twirled when you thought a woman would never make you jealous, only a man. the best trick of all is how much more likely you were to like me in a skirt  than me at my most comfortable. what magic! what discipline I had! my mother had taught me well and virginia had schooled me even better. i smiled and told you it was not your fault that society had this toxic edge that made men cruel, and you were learning so fast for a man like you that i was proud, and beautiful, and enchanting never letting effort cross my face. I arched carefully.  I avoided all the topics I should to protect your insecurity. but now I am done looking perfect, making it look effortless, I have built these great hamstrings and quadriceps. after years of balancing on a knife’s edge I will not pretend that it is not athleticism that I have not been panting and exhausted  all this time. 

[drugs-and-deadlines]

governor’s island 9/10/2022

voices rise and mingle up from the island / an offering /  with no incense lit   as dispatches from cancer journeys mingle with queer divinity / with covid anger rising; I have sketched my neglect of texture and rhythm; instead let specificity become a pumpkin rotting in a newly November field -- the season turned, I am late to the       patch of myself, the home I made in these bones, the first way I ever knew how to write that wasn’t a myth. but the generosity of words carve similes; there is still a jack-o-lantern to make of me yet; where is the tatoo plan? what should a professor promise to a student? i ask for nothing but this late summer abundance a meeting of cultures and corners of boroughs all in one stange verdant place

[special-lucky-chosen-one]

Emerson College asked famous alumni to video speeches for the class of 2020, and Jennifer Coolidge delivered.

(this video only has like 15 views as of right now, which is nearly criminal)

[nevver]

Brad Neely (@bradneely)

[nevver]

it’s alright guys, he’s the antihero - Maisie Cowell

[drugs-and-deadlines]

no they’re more compelling anyways harm, what is harm? let’s just see how the narrative plays out no, i recognize that i get to do this while you have to apologize for making me feel fragile

[amare-habeo]

Roland Topor (French, 1938-1997)

Red shoe (nails on the insole), 1993 Gouache and india ink on paper, 65x 38,5 cm.

[drugs-and-deadlines]

ALL SPEAKING/ALL SINGING

I cannot promise you the dance will absolve you  It will not connect you with your ancestors For your ancestors also stole the dance, the land        Or at least some of them did Some of them stole the only culture you claim Others had it stolen from them

        It’s so complicated, I know. The transfer, the feelings, the reckoning. When you write poems in Spanish  They don’t translate ever really into English And vice versa. both colonial forked tongues and so a rhythm is lost/

an entire progression / the ancestors of the words cut off oh, and names! or resonances! forget it! You are not a very good acrostic.  But a dance may heal you You may be healed  And then you may dance up to others You may no longer Be pulsing in this freaky lonely  The landscape before you Once again a filling meal.

[drugs-and-deadlines]

lonely cubed

this is the only social media I have left (I suppose, in a weird way, LinkedIn counts). But I still feel the phantom limbs of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. They pull at me, ask me to refresh. They ask me what I think is happening in those little worlds instead of living in my own, which is the main reason I left them behind. 

I am trying to make more room for my writing and creativity every day, something that isn’t an inbox obsession. I am trying to be like those writers older than me who focus on turning a phrase well, observing succinctly, and living their life with breath instead of observing themselves.

So far, it’s mostly just anxiety inducing. My loneliness is exacerbated by recent or imminent events: my abuelo passed away on Sunday, and I am nowhere near the family I can grieve him with, nor are we in the country in which I would prefer to grieve him and help settle his affairs. I closed a show on Sunday that took every last little bit out of me, and I still feel like I haven’t been able to sleep or rest because of the many things I have overdue.

And the last, pulsing, stupid thing on the horizon: soon I will graduate with an MFA, with no clear idea of what’s happening past mid-June. So that’s resulted in a lot of lame checking my inbox hoping x-opportunity will have reached me with some sort of news. Or perhaps that’s just what closing a show is or losing someone who you can no longer text is. You spend over a month rehearsing with humans, seeing them five times a week, and suddenly you’re alone and you’re like, what other validation is there? You spend years thinking, oh, I will eventually be able to gather more stories and memories than the ones I can gather from here, but you actually won’t get another chance to see him in person ever again. And so you linger on the stupid shit you have no control over: have I gotten one of the very few things I applied for? Will someone resolve my post-MFA future which is quickly spiralling towards me with complete uncertainty? Theaters are still contracting, and no one is giving me money, and I can already hear myself lecturing myself not to be silly: even if it weren’t a pandemic, the calvary wouldn’t be coming anyway. And even if it did come, I have so many ways I’d prefer to be the architect of my own salvation that I don’t think any calvary could satisfy me. This is the life of a writer I am running at. Not knowing, but practicing my craft as much as I can in the hopes that my story will be sharp, incisive, or joyful enough to move forward.

There’s also, in a bigger way, an identity confusion that happens when you finish a program, a show, or lose a human. You’re like -- who will I be when I’m not a student? When I am no longer the nieta surrounded by unconditional love  I received whenever I reached out? When I’m not defined by the current jobs I have? Will I be the dysfunctional self I was the last time I was shot out of an educational canon, risky and rageful and resilient? Will I have learned how to end things better this time? Will I have learned boundaries better? 

I will still be writing. This is the only thing I guess I can promise myself in a pandemic world that still is a careening, confused mess. I will always be writing. And for now, there are many things to write about. Neocolonialism, my abuelo who passed this week, tweaking and reframing and rewriting the many stories I began with a great big heave during this time. Perhaps my writing will not always be led by dialogue. Perhaps some of the time, I’ll just be telling a story. Perhaps I will make many more mistakes. But what else would I want? Definitely not a straightforward life, definitely not one of modest ambitions or stories. So here’s to a bit of a commitment, I guess. Something here, just to break the ice. Something here, especially because I don’t think people check it. 

[drugs-and-deadlines]

montevideo ←→ washington, dc

in this city of corners i always find myself blindly the phantom voices give me the only break from the silence that follows me one can always escape to Río for a honeymoon until the moon becomes rotten cheese so i don't eat anything that isn't meat with bloody teeth i learn to bark until they pay me in dollars i return from the jungle to the city missing another decade, different aches but one gets used to concrete and i dress myself like a man that only wants to celebrate a good deal today I call him & we meet in Matrix Plaza we talk of stupidities he tells me that only a beast could keep eating

[the-greenrose]

Most human talk is an evasion; a desperate rearguard attempt to keep ourselves to ourselves.

Harold Pinter (via the-greenrose)

[huariqueje]

Sleepless Night   -  Hanno Karlhuber

German, b.1946-

Oil tempera on wood ,70 x 80 cm.

[drugs-and-deadlines]

ambition is such a slippery drug you need a good amount to get you going but when you overshoot it’s pretty hard to get work done