For a month and two days, my finger-tongues have been latent. I tied my blog-mouth shut, and oh, I could tell you why (I could tell you about the book I’m writing, the album I’m finishing, the interview I’m giving, the daily slog that gives me a placebic nausea each morning), but instead, I’ll speak to you of storms.
A beautiful, giant of a storm wreaked its way through Missoula today. Clouds with bellies full of half-digested sunset leaking through seam-split stomachs. Clouds gorged on sun and impending nightfall, both.
And then the wind. A visible wind, and not just because of the rain and stolen petals that rode it.
I stepped out, abandoning my 72k word story that needs to be finished by the 23rd, and stood in this storm because vulnerability is love. Exposure is commitment.
To frogspawn
an egg is all
(together, a raft of universes)
A fox reads poetry
licks kanji till they stick to her tongue
(as any human would)
The wasp makes her nest as soft as ash
a glue of whiskers adhere the layers
(without whiskers the cat cannot measure
herself
her home
the twin bowls her paws make in the snow that is
nothing more than tears
vaporizing from cheeks
polished smooth as blue mirrors
or silk with a spider’s web motif
ice bones beneath).
Under a winter’s harvest moon
your twisted maple lashes caught the snow
(and sometimes my reflection)
At the end of our wedding night
your body, a crescent
your hair a bloom of fox tail.
***
This is it. My last ekphrastic. Only probably not. But it’s the last one I’ll probably ever write on a schedule (not that I adhered to that schedule very well. My timeline existed conceptually, but not actually). Anyway, this particular poem was written for the book The Fox Woman by Kij Johnson, who wrote my favorite novel of last year, Fudoki (which I also wrote an ekphrastic for).
I love this book for the sex. It’s different because it’s familiar. Familiar not because my partner tells me stories while we fuck (he doesn’t), like Raymond does for Aurora in this novel, but because this narrative sex feels real to me. It’s not just a string of sentences describing a series of stereotypical actions (kiss, disrobe, penetrate–in case you were wondering what those were). Instead, it’s a convergence. The meeting of two individuals. The stories they tell in bed are no less than their shared emotional depth made vocal.
And yes, there’s plenty of licking/nipping/biting/thrusting etc–which is fine. I’ve no complaints. But those verbs are not all there is to the sex. The love-making here is all human, no mechanics.
Anyway, I should note: this book isn’t erotica. It’s erotic, I guess. But at its core, it’s literary fiction. A delicate (and often indelicate) tale about being Chinese, and Japanese, in America–about the nuances of race, culture and identity, about individuals choosing where they fit (and wondering whether or not they have a choice as to where that niche is). It’s about humans falling in and out of love, with humor, grace and failure.
I read American Knees in preparation for MFA application season (still far off, I know, but there’s a lot of preparing to do). The UW is one of my top schools and Shawn Wong, the author of American Knees teaches there. I’ll soon be reading more of his work, but after this book’s humor, and quirky, intimate human interaction, I’ve no doubt he’s someone worth studying with.
And apparently, it’s a film. Guess I’ll have to look into that.
This is the way of the world: you get what you want and you’re just left wanting more. My first professionally published poem is now available through Strange Horizons. Needless to say, I am QUITE excited. Even so, it’s a quiet excitement. A spontaneous black hole excitement. At random points in the day, I’ll remember: someone gave me money for my words. My blog is no longer the only place that publishes me. That says something! Justification! I’m REAL. And then, after the blip of joy that inevitably follows such thoughts, I think moremoremore. Getting published is good incentive to keep trying to get published. It’s some sort of drug, I guess.
So. The poem. TATTERTONGUE:
Where have you been, Tattertongue? lying with pelvis and ribcage wanting want old. old. reading the mouth for sugared ginger for blood sausage
Speaking of more, not long after this poem was released, I received another acceptance for another poem. Won’t say much about it now, except alien vampires.
I’m learning to love failure. I’m learning to eye it with hunger. I’m learning to break it into kindling-sized pieces small enough to pile in my belly for whenever I need a fire. I’m learning to thrive off of failure, I’m–
I’m learning that this thing I’ve named failure isn’t failure.
It’s a crag. An ocean. The space between planets, stars. But nothing that can stop me. Anyway, it’s not like any of my many rejection letters are telling me to stop (not that STOP would ever actually stop me). Sometimes they don’t care whether I write or not: form rejections that start with thank you for and end with no thanks. Often, they’re personalized notes that ask for more (which is good, encouraging–a little extra air in my tank so my lungs don’t starve as I thrash along towards the far end of the Milky Way). Maybe they don’t want my story, but not a single one has yet told me what shit I am (though I once thoroughly confused a slush reader at Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine).
But maybe they think it. Or maybe they know I hear it from myself plenty already and don’t need the encouragement, or that they just can’t be bothered. Or, more likely, they’re just decent human beings with giant slush piles. I’m not a failure to them, or anyone else–I just didn’t fit or I wasn’t good enough.
But again–not failure. What is it, then? Pushing my limits, ignoring them. Breaking my thinking bones so they can re-grow in new illogical ways, so I can use them in new, illogical ways.
And then, after all that, sometimes I win.
Sometimes I get a poem published. Sometimes I get two.
Today, Strange Horizons is publishing Tattertongue. (Link to be posted when the poem is.)
The day before yesterday, I got good news about another poem.
I can’t review this book. How can I review something that’s embedded itself into me–like an axe that’s gone through my belly and bisected my spine–how can I review my self? Myself/my self. I write it like they’re separate things, my and self–but the whole point is that they aren’t separate, that I’m myself, and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (by Caitlin Kiernan) is now a part of me.
First, my attempt at a book review: Imp is a girl who is crazy, as was her mother and her mother’s mother and (maybe) so was her mother’s mother’s mother’s sister “who kept dead birds and mice in stoppered glass jars lined up on all her windowsills.”* Imp’s story is a love story and a ghost story–which is the same thing, you’ll learn. She falls in love with Eva Canning, the drowning girl she finds naked on the side of the road in July (or was it November? Imp doesn’t know; she met Eva twice for the first) and finds a haunting for herself–a haunting that I found for myself.
And this memoir’s haunting is alive, because it sprawls beyond its own pages, saturates the world–its world, my world (the squid in the butcher’s display today at work made me think of a mermaid with marine life in her hair). As I read, I constantly wanted to look into all these painters and writers Imp constantly refers to and collects clippings of–did Caitlin Kiernan fashion them for Imp’s haunting? In part? Completely? I still want to look them up, but I can’t. Because whether or not this novel is factual, it is true. Maybe Kiernan did craft these people, but now that they’re a part of my own haunting, they are true and real. The factual doesn’t matter to me, right now.
So, Imp has her haunting–Eva, the girl who was left on the shore when her mother and her mother’s cult stepped into the water and drowned themselves (Eva’s own haunting). And I have mine–my ghost: my empty stomach, my (old) anorexia. But is this really what drew me to the book? Sometimes I think that’s not it at all, sometimes I know it’s not it. There’s the way Imp plays with, and dissects, and rebuilds and separates words and numbers in just the way I do, but it’s not that either.
It’s this:
A couple years back: I’m trying to redefine myself–or at least, the way I see myself. Coming to terms with mybody, mybelly, myskin myflesh. Sometimes, I’ll read the word slender, or phrases like her legs like reeds rattling and think I can make myself that. I think so don’t eat that. Wait, wait. Skip a meal. I use words to define myself, shape myself. But they were all the same words (different-same)–so I decided: why not choose a new word. I chose wild. I chose feral. Canine. Strong. I began to think of my body as something that could survive apocalypses. A body that can feed itself for a bit while it goes out hunting.
This relates because the Eva Canning that Imp met (for the first time) in November was a wolf. As a kid, I never wanted a pony. I wanted a wolf. I don’t have a totem or a spirit animal, but sometimes, I am a wolf. Not always. But when I want to eat, I am.
Should you read this book? Yes. Yes yes yes. That is, if you want to face the bone saw in your hand. Like how I’m looking at my anorexia. How we once were, how we sometimes (all too often) still are.
Grit vs. Grim. Learning to cope with annihilation (a.k.a. book writing). On realizing that ‘half-breed’ is never a good descriptor for a human being. Baby animal gifs. More on all this below:
That Crafty Feeling (Zadie Smith on making a book, and why novel writing is a terrible-wonderful thing. Self-destruction in action–this is good. I know. I write to take myself apart and put me back together again.)
Coverage of Women on SF/F Blogs (2012) (A project about “about the visibility of women in science fiction and fantasy reviews” with a preface that discusses the difficulty of trying to have “a conversation about gender in SF/F fandom involving people outside your social group.” Bascially, “it’s like inviting six angry poltergeists into your home filled with handcrafted family heirlooms passed down for multiple generations: everything gets broken, including your capacity to discuss anything more mentally taxing than adorable gifs of baby animals for weeks.”)
I love a Good Tragedy as Much as the Next Guy (Elizabeth Bear on grittiness verses grimdark. “…the best of the current wave of gritty fantasy…embraces a balance closer to reality:…the world is arbitrary and unfair, and that sometimes even well-meaning people do awful things: desperate, vicious things.”)
Revising “Weaving Dreams” (In which an author screws up and attempts to rectify the disaster. First read about this short story over at Requires Hate. It’s good to see writers who are open and sensitive to the world. Also, a nice unfurling of the editing process.)
When it comes to food, sex and traffic lights, I’m patient. I don’t get road rage, except in the context of environmental mauling. But when it comes to art, food, and sex, I’m impatient. I’ve been working on a shirt design for Moss of Moonlight’s upcoming album, Winterwheel. This was the first design:
***
Yeah, I know: meh. The rosehip works great for the album cover, especially since it’s a photo. What lies above was the result of me riffing on said photo. I’ll be honest: it’s kind of shiit. And definitely not something I’d ask people to pay for and wear. I should have known this before I put it in ink. But sometimes I get patience and impatience confused with obsession.
So I got as far as the above, even scanned it into Paint Tool Sai, started digitizing the lineart–and woke up. Got my hand to stop, because I knew all along what I was doing was wrong. I had to start over.
I slept on it, woke up again, knowing that what I really needed was an elk. Or elk-inspired, at any rate. Because Winterwheel has a song about the goddess Hretha, her elkling, and the course of life and death they traverse and make together.
What follows is the lineart for the piece I developed. The one that, once in hue, will be printed on cloth and worn by real human beings.
Feral Cascadian metalhead and wordcrafter. Drums for Moss of Moonlight, Gundabad and other artists. Writes about alien earth goddesses, sex and self-destruction.
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