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a writing blog w/some photos

[imitationlizard]

this is an art blog devoted to celebrating & discovering female artists

another endeavor

[imitationlizard]

(i am both seeing and believing) you ask the girls when they first realized they were girls and everyone is immediately confused. do you mean, they say, what does it mean to look like this, they say, do you mean what it meant when we were told to change (and it was julie's fault julie with the long thick hair and the tendency to tye it back with her whole stomach out in the open you had to walk the girls back to change after that and your mouth was twisted into a grimace masquerading as patience the tiny man who demanded the change bounding off unfettered ) you ask the girls when they first realized they were girls and it's like a fire pit beneath a sleepy town the way they give way the way they rise up (i am both breathing and defying)

both seeing and believing 

[imitationlizard]

(fill my lungs until finally full) she whispered. i have a photo of her on a hostel bed in the same pose as la maja desnuda but with an eyeliner in her hand and a compact mirror in the other.  she traced my mouth with burgundy. here is the uneven line towards the bottom left corner. a nighttime city  sleeping in soft predawn hours. we get each other. we revisit each other's ghosts again and again. in a kitchen we sit on the tiled floor promise imminent summer and eat with our fingers.

quick doodle

[imitationlizard]

collecting feather debris/                did she make you feel safe reclaiming the mundane/                 did she make you feel safe peeling skin off of a guinea pig/        did she make you feel safe who the fuck is Kierkegaard/               did she make you feel safe spiral staircases are erotic/                     did she make you feel safe lovely art in a rude city/                           did she make you feel safe pipes as painterly lines/                            did she make you feel safe a circle fitting a square/                              did she make you feel safe lovers without cars/                                       did   she  make  you  feel

log of thoughts i had today

[imitationlizard]

Does it make you feel safe Does it make you feel safe Does it make you feel safe (yes ma it's dark outside but my skin is warm) (yes ma it's dark outside and the stars are far away) (yes ma it's dark outside and my skin is warm) the last time I called you you said my voice sounded strange the last time I called you you said my voice was a stranger's the last time I called you I said ma I feel so very alone  (I am a far way from home I am a far way from home I am a far way from home)  I am so sorry that you are in need of healing.

safety

[imitationlizard]

can you hear me// can you hear me// can you hear me over                                                                                                                                         the sound of your                                      can you hear me over the sound of your                                                                                              body can you hear me pulsating urgent spangled blue                                                                                                                                     UFO's tracing your skin once you held my hand and it felt                                                           so real so brave so heart shaped so haunted                                                    SHE DOES NOT WANT TO BE TOUCHED the hand he kisses cold and responsive will you tell me  what happened in the silent hours before dawn will you tell me what it felt like to fall and what it felt like to falter and what it felt like to flutter can you hear me she says. can you hear me over the sound of your beautiful body containing the text of only this life and none of the ones before and none of the ones to follow it can you hear me she says can you hear me can you hear me she says over the sound of your  (and so whispering, we the women say) i can                hear you.                                                i can                     see you. ( i am both  seeing and believing.)

hearing as believing

[imitationlizard]

it was good                                              to hold you   it was good                                                                   to be held it felt nice                  your                     touch                                  your tentative                                                                  holding this trembling felt good it was nice                                                               to hold you and to be tentative and to touch it felt                                                it                                                                               trembled

touch

[imitationlizard]

i want to remember the way //                                                                                   the light falls. I want to remember us                                         as a bird might remember us                            flying by on a southbound migration.                                                                                      the light is horizontal                                                                               we are horizontal                                                                                 braided bread exhaling                                                                                 warmth and flour dust                                                                                          i slipped into                                                                 your bed at 1130 pm i slipped into                                                                                                                                   the crook of your                                                                                         body                                                                                                 at 1130 pm slipped into church slipped into the heavenly choir                                                        i want to remember the way the light falls i want to remember                                                    the way our bodies are bathed                                                                 in it the way our bodies                                                                         baked in it yeast and                     a golden rising

bread

[imitationlizard]

i speak of love in cannibalistic terms. i say                      eat me                                                                                  alive                                                                                                    eat me                                                                                    out i say//            tell me i'm pretty//                but more so make me believe                                          that i am more than      these bones, so full of mud  (rich and dark, cake on your upper lip)                                                      (cake cake) i wanna make love in this tub// i say. These insitutional stark white// walls can't deflect ur smoke and the bread i eat with both hands. eat me out// leave me a husk (like a corn husk like a dark wet cave )                                                            sometimes people pronounce objects of resonance                             and it frightens us sometimes I see you //               and it frightens me please resurrect my collapsible                                  lungs please resurrect my cannibalistic                                  lungs

cannibal

[imitationlizard]

how to get ready for a threesome

1. shave a leg

2.order chinese food

3. don’t eat the chinese food. leave one box of rice in ur room, and put a box of vegetables in the fridge of someone you hate (an enemy, a fake friend)

4. ask your mom to send you the slutty halloween costume you wore in 2013

5. she will refuse (it’s inconvenient, why do you never call home)

6. pray to the moon goddess, ask her to bring in a luscious tide over the beach where u once compared water to velvet and sang shrill and hopeful and very young (unafraid)

7. leave a tube of deep burgundy lipstick at his door, with written instructions to use said lipstick to darken his areolas (instructions written on the torn out edge of the chinese food receipt)

8. order 500 roses to be delivered outside her window the following morning

9. apply a perfume which smells like jasmine and ghosts, and descend a staircase slowly.

[imitationlizard]

it was so gentle// it was so human it was so dark// it was so human it was so lovely// it was so human  heaving//human having//human baby turn the // lights out/                                                   watch                                                               this                                                                          quiet                                                                                    being                                                                                               (belonging)

human

[imitationlizard]

later they will have the audacity to ask you what it//            felt like.          they will have the audacity/ to assume/ you felt anything // at all.                                                      Here is my throat  you say. Here is my naked skin and the cold overwhelming              dawn which fills the bottom half of my lungs past                          //breathing. They will have the audacity to ask //               if you // felt it as if// it doesn't feel as if                                           you don't feel it                                                                                   still.

thru the woods

[imitationlizard]

you smell him before you see him and this probably speaks to how deeply and unfortunately in tune with his movements you've become. like this. like old cigarettes and sour spraypaint. you wish you understood why you have such a hard time differentiating between fear and attraction and watching him walk through the misting rain towards his studio you are reminded of a zoo you went to somewhere in canada, where you walked through a glass tunnel going through the habitats of predatory cats & a tiger went right up to the glass and you looked straight at each other and neither one of you could hurt the other and yet your mother still gasped with the thrill of an instinctual fear. you are not afraid of him, not in the daylight and not even in the night- but you should have been afraid sooner, when he smiled at you with gleaming white teeth and you thought you recognized kindness there. you are not afraid but you are feeling heavy. you know he saw you. he pretends he didn't, and you walk on.

tigers & cigarettes

[imitationlizard]

on a plane he disappears. this is how we foresaw our own ending and watching distant city lights makes me feel warm or cold depending on the day but in recent moments they make me imagine him walking into a crowded room and seeing a beautiful girl across it in the spangled lights and i imagine him smiling at her. once i flew on many planes with a golden girl who has become at once my truest lover and my truest rival and once in the heart of a loud city i sat at the edges of a plaza to see her rise up from the metro with a huge elated grin. certain places are marked up of memories of myself as i used to be and i miss him preemptively in a way that is full of a sweet anguish and false memories of playing chess in a sunlit cafe so that everyone could see the way we lean in towards each other over the tiny board.

casablanca pt 3

[imitationlizard]

This is how you learn to feel again. Feel good, that is- feel something other than a sinking dread. This is the world, and this is how large it is, and these are streets and cities intersecting like glowing electric veins thrumming in the vast primordial dark. This is where you are, in the dark. These are where your lungs have learned to expand, so improbably. These are your hands, touching lightly. These are your touching hands. This is how you touch. This is how you feel. This is how you feel good.

casablanca pt 2

[imitationlizard]

I leave the chess set out (the scattered pieces) so that maybe when I put it away, picking up the tiny figurines, for each piece tucked back into the box I can remember a memory you unveiled. Like the abandoned factory and the ladder and the music when you and your buddy swept dust off the smooth floors to skateboard and later sat in a window frame eating sandwiches and talking (and later you went back to pour our some sweet tea in his memory) and this was the song you posted on that girl's myspace page and later she held your hand and I tell Brenda i'm not tryna catch feelings and asked me whatever happened to my girlfriend and I'm humming a few bars from a song I never suspected you knew, a song you told me to keep as a secret just before you kissed me

casablanca

[imitationlizard]

Like a screenshot of a screenshot of a screenshot of sepia filtered breasts reduced ad absurdum to nothingness a panelist insists that he is not asserting a dichotomy while at the same time imploring us to understand the true magnetism of a brilliant public intellectual incorrectly translating Greek and there is a wistfulness to the way the panelist speaks of someone movingly immortalized on the department page of a prestigious university losing legitimacy because of his need to exist as an entity within his own work rather than because of his sloppy translations casually fed to the masses with the power of pedigree and none of it matters and this is a bullshit conference lacking so much as a marble table yet still you find a reason to feel inferior staring at a bizarre flower petal-esque red fragmented dangling sculpture that is part exploding vagina and part sparkly chandelier behind the shiny head of a man who insists on keeping you all for just a moment! and in the first two hours of a six hour journey here you stared for a vanishing train-window second at two boys leaping up and off of a cement block in the quieter trees at the fringe of a people-filled park where at the edge (again) of a large group of bodies a single individual stood to the side yet stepping closer as if by a magnetic pull and the cherry blossoms are blooming for you! the cherry blossoms are blooming for you! here is an arch to pause in here is an arch for you to dwell in for a second between two imaginary concentric overlapping realms where you are a student and where you are a teacher and here is a long mirror for you to stand before lining up your buttons while shocked at the luster of the pearlescent tiles and here is a different long mirror in the tapestry draped space of a girl with sparkly twenty-five cent earrings for you to sit comfortably before  and here is a red liquid lipstick entitled "whipped" and here you are tracing it onto your mouth transforming yourself into a truer version of yourself which is a slightly crooked mouthed femme fatale who is not afraid of anything and who crosses a bridge and feels happy in the wealthiest neighborhood of a quiet city where a father calls his little boy "Sasha" and speaks in your mother tongue and doesn't that mean this could all be yours just as on the rooftop with a girl you haven't seen for a while you wonder if she could still be yours and you won't know until a brief confused moment on a stairwell and then everything will manifest over and over again in the shape of your hopes and fears and here! is your internal world projected neatly onto the external one with edges so nicely lined up you could mistake the two and in both version nothing is ever enough nothing is ever and a man with a flat American accent will deign to educate you on the contemporary poets of Russia and he will know more than you but almost definitely not feel more than you and then in the quieter part of a night characterized by the violent color of your mouth your lover will send a photo of themselves wherein their dim surroundings form an inverse halo for their pearlescent skin and their eyes will be both a question and an answer and an uber driver and an Argentinian journalist will both give you matching advice and your mother said to chase all of this. Your mother, your anti-hero and your oracle, temporarily disguised by the color of your mouth, but later when you are tired and looking in yet another mirror you will see her in the soft and subtle creases at the corners of your eyes.

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