This is a cool meme. Made me think a lot.

I just got a chapbook accepted by Dancing Girl Press!

I'm so happy and shocked I'm practically having a stroke, you know, the kind where the chunks of happiness break up into your blood stream and enter your brain, blocking all other thoughts.

New painting! First time in a looong time.

Random Bragging

If you go here and look at the upper right hand corner, you might see someone you recognize.

And again! The punishment just never stops.

We Go to Get

the grocery store is so freezing  coming out of the sun  
  i love the ringing of the automatic door  how the glass opens 
when you step on the blank rubber  i love to run in and out 
       in my pink flip-flops with the daisy on top  in and out  
   too young to even have under arm hair or smell like anything 
      but grass    my hair matted brushing my shoulders brittle
 and chlorine green
  tied back with two red plastic balls on a rubber band  
              my face shiny brown  
                  my teeth broken white white  
                      i am smiling in all these photos

Breakfast, Lunch

Nougat with flecks of grain, white
 bread with swiss
.
in the morning the air on the porch 
 smells of blood but it is only
  the roses stretching towards
  the sun over the limbs of the dying
  in the garden
.
"I like to go barefoot in my sheer white 
    nightgown, my hair swept 
back with a scorpion"
.
  she was always hungry but never liked to admit it
.
 she preferred to chew
    toilet paper in the safety of her
  own closet
.
"I’m not a morning person"
.
  "If you keep me
waiting  one more minute 
 I’m going to take your sister
  and leave you here"
.
 sobbing so hard it sounds 
like a meat bell
            tolling            
        face like a lost red shoe
.
 clinging to the door knob despite the tugs
at the back   of his collar           until the seams
ripped      until the tag with his name sewn on 
  pulled free
.
 "Look closer, I want to tell you everything I know
about dead dogs 
revived with injections
   of sea water"
.
  they lived close enough
 to the water to be a rest stop
   for gulls
.
 sometimes they would drop tiny crabs
   on her head
   it was so shiny and hard like a rock
.
Who doesn’t like cotton candy?
  when applied directly it acts
 just like an ace bandage

The director of the SMUT reading series just asked me back to read again. He sent me this email:

"Can you do 8/22 at 8pm? By the way, I reeeeeally liked the stuff you read last time. It was really dark and twisted, personal, obtuse, and surreal at the same time. Oh yeah, and funny as hell, too! Hit me in all the right places. I know Desiree loved your stuff, too. We both were sitting there with our jaws on the floor in shock and awe."

I love the "obtuse and surreal"! I am so flattered!

(BTW, my obnoxious plea for cash has not even raised 50 cents. I don't get it. Being an ass works for so many people!)

Hey, if anyone's ever enjoyed my poetry, or perhaps, my witty and insightful comments on your own blog, you might want to give me some money. You know, just for being your friend, you might want to pay me. Or you may want to pay just to see the world's most obnoxious plea for money.
Just a thought.

So, as many of you know, about a month ago I became the acting director of writing at the Women's Studio Center, and I now have a lot to do. Whew. One of my new projects is starting a reading series in the fall centering around women writers.

I just got Daphne Gottlieb to agree to be one the readers! I'm so blown away. I have admired her for ages.

I'm going to be doing my nerdish happy dance all day now.

How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction

this tinfoil hat is not the way
        gluing your feet to the bed each night
is not going to save you from the sucking 
woosh
.
some say a green paint on the belly distracts them
       so their machines malfunction
.
and also some books suggest smearing rotten
boysenberries at the windowsill
.
but I know substituting myself 
with an identical
          robot under the covers, at the breakfast table
and in front of the class room 
when asked to solve
                    for Y
.
has worked very well for me as long as 
you don't turn round and I stay right here 
     in the corner behind you 

Who found me by googling the phrase "I am the bestest," will find that it's true. I am the bestest. At grammar.

Furniture
for mama

all day Saturday your hands
have been at this
...
a crooked roll-top desk in the driveway
expensive wood
poorly kept
...
hard nailing and the saw
has humped your shoulders
wrenched your collar off-key
...
your knuckles shine with blisters
like the marks of kisses
...
for this you leave your wedding ring
on the top porch step
...
stray hairs from your ponytail get caught
in the varnish pot
then waver in the wind, catch the light like
starbursts
...
even as the dust from sanding paints
a halo around you two on the asphalt
...
I have never so envied wood

I think I've found a new publisher!

And Shanna has a cool new blog about DIY publishing (not at all connected to above link.)

This is a sort of riff on a previous poem:

A Natural History of Thumbs

          my first kiss, a sea lion, sloppy,
slack lips against trembling 
fish-colored tongues,
...

saliva sliding over our chins until my electric
blue tube top is wet, a slick between my white
ten year-old breasts, so new they still ache with being born, 
riven with blue veins
...

me laying on top of the sea lion during recess 
in the center lawn of the school, 
    not caring if anyone saw,
not caring if the principal came and tore me
off him, everything gone warm and gone black
...

only this wormy mess of teeth clicking
against teeth, his whiskers in my mouth,
          fast as slugs
on speed and a burning 
...

           in my cunt, I grind against the sea lion trying to feel 
through the 16 layers of my panties, jeans, apron 
        and lead skirt, grinding so hard the sea lion whimpers
in pain, grinding to grind out the burning
between my legs, it is the strangest fucking
...

I've ever felt and I can't stop,            I can't, 
                 I hold the sea lion down by his flippers,
push his head far into the earth with my mouth
...

he’s trying to squirm free, the lawn churning into
wet mud,                    I’m pushing, moving,
the sun so bright I can see it behind 
     my closed lids,  a small planet
               spinning in my pelvis
...

then he slips from beneath me, 
wipes his mouth on the grass, waddles away fast and 
...

that’s the first time I know it, that to love
       is to be left wet and holding
                               

Today I finally got rejected from the New Hampshire Review. They held a poem for 5 months because they were toying with me (trying to decide if it fit with the other pieces, blah, blah, :PPPP)

And then I got an email from Mayapple Press with the headline, Poetry Book Submission. Holy crap. I stopped breathing while I clicked on it, and waited, waited for the email to load. They just wanted to let me know that they were backlogged with submissions, and wouldn't get back to me until Sept. Ah well.

Hey! But I updated my CV, and now you can go here and see the omniscent, omnipotent and omnicorpuscules that is CHRISTINE. Try to avoid stalking me through the contact info, K?