Will we humans ever be able to read and predict the progression of seasons again, like the faces made by loved ones when their feelings change like wind-borne clouds?

I sincerely hope so, but I also equally sincerely doubt it. Come on, Ice Age, come on.

When, if not now? And why (or why not) and who with?

Now, always now. If not now, then when indeed?! Now, now, and now, and that other now too. And with good people who need no explanations for what you’re doing and/or why you’re doing it. I think it is crucial to learn how to recognize the various and varied members of your tribe before you die.

You are the pleasing smell of Chinese grease
I am the invisible motivation to frolic in the fountain

You are a stranger’s giggle &
an invitation to dance

I am a Cabaret Voltaire 12″
& half a clove cigarette

You are the diaphanous nature
of auburn clouds at twilight

I am the woman who raised you
but never dared speak your name

You are that familiar left shoe
abandoned on the roadway
never finding its twin

I am an expectant evening
after an expectant morning
spent talking on the phone


Hey, ready? Let’s do this. So my first— For the love of— get off your phone.

Oh, honey; it’s totally poet-related. Darrel Alejandro Holnes (here: read this while you’re at it) and I just covered a whole cosmos of how poetry can evolve the species, artists’ collective consciousness and, in particular, how to grapple with my familial spiritual spine that I share with my eldest uncle and my mother.

I was little more
than a bottle cap of whiskey
More than once
I was rebozo slung
over a sleepy mouthed junkie
for CK one
Mira the everyday people baby
Mira like opening fire with candy
Mira my matted hair so model
off duty
While others donned tiaras
worldpeace and bikinis
I was sizing up
cops and clergy

Why do you write poetry?

One reason I write poetry is that it is the truest artistic medium in which everything that compels my attention in the world can be included.  When you are writing a poem you are simultaneously a cinematographer, a drummer, a music conductor, a storyteller, a preacher, a lover, and an engineer (the list could go on).  These voices exist simultaneously in the mind as you are weighing and evaluating the relative merits of each word in a poem.  A poem welcomes an intensity of attention more so than any other art form I know.  What’s amazing about a poem is that all of these components are contrived from words.  Poems can be utterly unforgiving in the writing process because the materials are blameless.  In most other art forms, there is blame to go around—paint dries and hardens to a color you didn’t expect, a camera malfunctions and erases the film, the custodian accidentally turns off the heat to the kiln—but in poetry, any and every word is immediately and unfailingly available.  The pliability of language is both terrifying and thrilling.

The heat that simmered off the blacktop of the roads
and circled through my car (its windows down,

the air conditioner long broken) soaked my clothes
in sweat, my shirt so thin a strip four inches wide

revealed my spine as armpits dripped and swaths
released across my chest from neck to belly, pec to pec.

At work, I sat alone inside the walk-in freezer
as I waited for my shirt to dry, my body steaming

in a room so cold my skin felt like it tightened. Boxes full
of every cut of meat (from porterhouse to tenderloin)

surrounded me where I had spaced and stacked them
as a frigid throne. The freezer door was like a bank vault’s,

thicker than my chest. A knob some engineer designed
protruded from the inside of the door so that,

when pressed, the latch released (I often wondered
just how many men and women locked themselves

by accident into a freezer’s crypt before a knob
had been invented that would let them out).

Who are you?

I don’t know. I’ve been reading Martin Buber trying to figure it out. I’ve also been trying to spend more time with real people instead of hiding out with imaginary creatures. I have a list of what I am—but who I am seems far away at the moment.

I think who is better experienced than understood—who exists in its relationship to others—it is the space between the players. Take the film Cat Dancers example, here is a girl, a boy, a cat—who they are seems to exist in the area of that triangle.  I like to watch such areas take shape.

At the moment I’m trying really hard to be more of a player than a voyeur—to experience more—to be more who than what, but this is difficult.

Reborn for exposure, my body’s been redesigned for uncensored
feeling: a sneeze or hiccup comes as a sheet of ice or a bed on fire.

Eyes inverted, the optic nerves reach like roots beyond me. I under-
stand the unseen scars of invisible knives—those rodents’ teeth,

those crows’ bills; natural insertions. The red of it is raw; the surface
glistens like sap gnawed out from trees—wounds that outshine even

the sun— these wet lights are my earthbound constellations. What is
left of me, my son walks next to on his way to school. He tells me he’s

learned, Where rain and casino babies come from; he says, It’s all the same,
really. Inside. Outside. He doesn’t notice any difference. He says,

Race ya, and we run into a storm of babies—falling. Life absorbs
quickly as water into earth and all is an unstaged show of growth.

We will die, Mom, he says, But like star-matter we’ll regenerate. Why
do you think that is? I ask him. So we can find the joy in it, he tells me.

Our story will happen again.

When you write erotic poems which hand do you use? 

The dominant hand, of course!

Currently, what is your favorite word?

Ankle.

Who do you listen to when you write?

Glenn Gould’s Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Dexter Gordon’s Round Midnight. Anything Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Chet Baker, Billie Holliday, Booker Little. Or the dear sound of my husband’s breathing.

1. My father hated him.
2. So his best friend, J.R., picked me up. Shook my daddy’s hand at the door.
    Promised me back by midnight.
3. Daddy thought I was obedient, a good girl.
4. It was hot, even for August.
5. J.R.’s parents were in Vegas, so he loaned us their bedroom.
    5a) They had a king-sized bed.
6. Diana Ross and the Supremes were singing Baby Love.
7. J.R. watched cartoons in the den.

Those days I walked around the water
with no good way to describe it, but knowing
that nothing majestic simply flows
Native tribes replenished the west coast with media
when the animals left for good
& then everything was a pet
or a pet’s story
I was hungover constantly
Aching & enthusiastic
& I felt that very specific loneliness
of having no good parka
in a city where practical knowledge
flowers toward you like a fruit
& asks you to participate in its gift

I’d never seen that mountain as clear as I saw it today
Picking a house to buy, then buying it
Stacks of linens showing off
Three candles on the bathroom floor

If I lived in Seattle I’d be in love right now

Maybe I need to drop something into the lake

Years of walk made the path go here and here and not there
The mattresses and tents beside it

What kind of a bird—
oh. A human bird

You have referred to Dada in your writing. Why, after almost a century, does Dada matter?
Greil Marcus makes the great point that the Dadaists were the first Punks. They rejected the idea of the “professional artist” and embraced instead being radically playful “amateurs.” An amateur is literally a person who loves something. I resonate with that idea: I love to make writing but I try to refuse – in a hopefully humorous and termitic way — the verbiage of artistic “greatness.” Because I think that language has silenced a lot of creative people ––

For Alan Dann

A woman came up to me in Bloomingdales and said she liked my glasses and I told her where to get them and she said, “what do you think I am — a millionaire?” and stomped off.
A woman came up to me in grad school and said she wished she was as smart as I was and I told her where to find the good theory books at the library and she said “what do you think I am — stupid or something?” and threw down her copy of Derrida’s On Grammatology and stomped off.

But I’m a plant
                      you said

           bedewed
        in object drool

                Sometimes
                                 I was shoes

                      I looked down
                      into the earth
                  I saw

                            the feathered clouds

                                 I saw
                                 a rash of light:
                                       Heads ‘n’ Things,
                                                       The Nouns

                                      like when a head comes off
                             and light spreads across the room