baby_donut

I've been semi-dead for a while and now I feel like I am waking back up. I am trying to finish school at Southern and am doing fabulously well in my classes. I have become the bookworm I have always wanted to be. I guess I kind of killed the stripper inside me and she has resurfaced as a weird kind of study butt. I am writing writing writing. I have formed a poetry group outside of my poetry class witha few girls (one is a pretty and amazingly sharp girl from Trinidad) and the other is a rad Bohemian lady in her 50s. She is who i'd like to be in like 32 years. She writes poems about having sex in cheap hotels and goes on wonderfully feminist rants. Plus she rocks the "double thumbs up" when she likes something and does the "double thumbs down" and makes the fart noise when she hates something.
I've been accepted to attend the CSU student writing conference in May and will be workshopped by the poet laureate of CT, Marilyn Nelson.
I've been cooking. I made eggplant and red pepper souflee and I have been reading Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides. I am studying Sexuality and Ethics and rocking my class with As. I have a job interview for a paid internship in the Public Relations department of Enterprise-Rent-a-car on Monday. How awfully corporate of me. Tommorrow I am going to an art type fashion show in Norwalk where my friend interns. My friend Brian burnt me the new Rainer-Maria album right before it actually came out, because his band plays shows with them. It is called, Catastrophe Keeps Us Together and it is neat. Have you heard it? I am hopeful as of now.
I shall post pictures soon, because word entries can be boring. Here is a poem I am working on now:

Red Maps

That one room with
Lolas tennis shoe shoved in
the screen door like a stop,
the sunlight would
spill in like juice
a burgundy, like wine.

In that room I could be anyone.
I could make up my own
sad stories about losing in a love
where the maiden always
slits her throat or wrists, a raspberry
sheen, its so beautiful you almost forget its dying.

That room, it was a treasure trove
of stale cigarettes, musty perfume,
five-finger-discounts, cotton gauze
and all the stories were tragedies
about arson and beautiful girls
dying in car crashes and floods.

Lola, she was the real movie star
in the sunlight from the window, her skin,
a golden brown and she could always play
the sad parts, because she could cry on cue
and she wasnt scared of the twelve
pink Bic razors by the side of the bed.

Lola was the secret, her vodka voice through the door
said Be a good girl and keep a secret
but I wasnt the actress, I was the scribe
and I made a real good mummy in twelve different strips
of toilet paper but red kept on seeping through
and it was my secret, because we all had plenty of those.

She always said not to worry
when the car swerved toward the curb
and we jostled around and she said
Baby girl smell my breath
and it was the whisky bottle voice,
not the sharp one, or the sober one.

The year of the perfectly magical room
was the year of mommy sleeping for days
and me sneaking out late to sneak down
his pants in the back of a rusty Buick in
some abandoned parking lot, the radio crying,
I thought it was him crying or perhaps me.

What he didnt know was that
I was the heroine in my story
I was the beautiful vixen saving
a poor boy from a terrible monster
and what he didnt know was
that I had my heart in my stomach

And a movie star in my bed
that under my sleeves there
were red trails, red maps to somewhere
else and I would make more
and I would travel to all those places;
in my head, on the page, in my car.


I am still in the process of revision. it's virginal...be gentle.