New chapbook, DARK WHITE, published this week

MY MARY

Does the rain have a mother?

Who made the drops of dew?

Out of whose womb came the ice?

She is hardened against her young ones

As though they were not hers.

The face of the deep is frozen.

Cover photo: Anonymous photographer, Palermo, 1924. 

     Friends who do not fail us

     Mary in our hour of

     despair. Take not

     away from me the small fires

     I burn in the memory of love.

           -JOHN WIENERS

           

     The maiden language all over.

          -ZORA NEALE HURSTON

My chapbook, DARK WHITE, will be published by Omertà this month. This little book includes the title piece, "Dark White," "Small Square" (ars poetica), "Feminine," "My Mystic," "My Mary,"  "Begin in Blue," "Words Looking for a Street," and "In My Girlish Days" (all of which have been published in little magazines, some of which can be found elsewhere on this blog). "My Mary" is an erasure+ of pages from The Book of Job (from a wet Bible I found in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, two years after Hurricane Katrina). 

I doubt that Omertà ("Omertà, as practiced by the Mafia: A Code of silence about criminal activity and a refusal to give evidence to the authorities") has ever published a book more relevant to its name. Thanks to Les Gottesman for adding my work to a list that includes chapbooks by Joanne Kyger, Diane di Prima, Donna De La Perriere, Denise Newman, and many other writers I admire. 

DARK WHITE is a small sampler of work from the full-length memoir with poems, WITE OUT, that Hanging Loose Press will publish in the spring of 2020. I’m extremely grateful to Robert Hershon, Mark Pawlak, Dick Lourie, and Donna Brook for making a home for a manuscript that was orphaned after the death of our friend and my first publisher, Bill Corbett.

"Liberty and Luxury" essay at SFMoMA's Open Space

Last week SFMoMA's Open Space published my essay, 

Liberty and Luxury, in their Interwoven special issue.

You can read it here. 

Thanks to Gordon Faylor and Claudia La Rocco 

for brilliant collaboration, editing, and design.

 "She tells me what happens to fabric when you put it in your mouth (saliva dissolves rayon, but strengthens linen). Says that if you’re cutting and sewing sequined fabric, be sure to wear goggles to protect your eyes. And never set polyester on fire. Once, she says, a customer came into the store and asked for silk orgasma. You can see how that would happen here — this place inspires lust."

Quadragesima

 

Holy Week

      A song of degrees, of pilgrimage, as in the Psalms of David

My brothers all have died,

the boys I held when they were small,

when I was small,

the boys I fed and shoved.

Should I lie down with them and keep them warm

or step over them to live?

Or should I crawl across their bodies in pilgrimage

the way my grandmother climbed the concrete steps to the shrine

on her knees, with me one step behind her at her elbow,

her pocketbook swinging at my face

every time she took a step—

In the parlor of her apartment she had a tapestry of the Roman Colosseum

and a crucifix and a picture of Pope John the 23rd

and houseplants in coffee cans on the windowsills—

marvetta, coleus, basilico.

One year after her death at 92, I went to Rome for the first time.

It was Holy Week and all the stores were closed—chiuso, chiuso, chiuso.

I was six weeks pregnant.

At the Colosseum I kept stumbling over imaginary statuary,

petrified feet and hands in the grass.

Who died here?

I kneeled to vomit in the weeds. 

Fata da forta, my grandmother used to say. Make yourself strong.

I walk around the bodies of my brothers,

arranging their limbs, tracing the contours of their faces

I will remember the clean smell of the grass that grew at the Colosseum

and in the cracks in the steps to the shrine

and I will write about it in a book.

_________________________________________________________________________

Today, April 7th, is my brother Joseph Norton's birthday. He died of AIDS in New York City on October 2, 1986. He was twenty-four. He would have been 57 if he had lived. It's also Billie Holiday's birthday. 

This poem is from my 2011 book, The Public Gardens: Poems and History. In Lent I always think of my grandmother and the crosses she'd weave from palms every year on the Sunday before Easter. And I think of my brother. 

@AIDSMemorial kindly reposted my tribute to Joseph today. You may read it here. And you may visit his memorial at the National AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, a beautiful place.