collage on special paper

Christmas NYC, 2005







And what Christmas is complete without a rotting mermaid?

Ye-haw!!! (Cartwheels to the left, Cartwheels to the right, bumps into a wall and falls on her head) It is out! The Salt Daughter is live! Buyt it here.

And you get a nearly life-sized front and back preview --






I feel like I just had a baby. Without the vomit and blood and everything. I just had an "immaculate" baby.

When it was snowing.

THAT'S what I'm talking about.

On the outskirts of Astoria

Sorry I haven't had time (yet) to respond to all the comments and "tags"; I just took the GRE general test this weekend and the subject test the weekend before that and I interviewed with the head of the English Dept. at Fordham to see what a PhD there would be like. She wasn't very encouraging, kept repeating that admission is "very competitive" and staring down at me, but nonetheless I'm going to give it a try.

In other news, I'm thinking of changing the title of The Transparent Dinner to Begin at the Mouth, with this being the title poem:

Begin at the Mouth

not at the feet
those pretty pale turtles

or the belly
opalescent and soft 
           as a banana slug

not the hands
quick worker ants

or the hair
baring its throat
        to the scissors each spring
shining like a doe

but the mouth,
mobile, scarred, full of sharp
                        clicking
a crab with long red tongs
who pulls from my esophagus
dark bees  stinging marks in the air 
               these words

What do you think?

On this day, 41 years ago, Christine Hamm was pushed out of the womb, fell plop! on the floor on to her head, slid into the hallway, was kicked accidentally by a nursing running to a trauma victim, rolled down some very steep stairs and somehow ended up in a snow drift.

And I've been making up stories ever since.

(slightly off merry-go-round music playing)










(the laughter of midgets, scattering)

To the woman who googled "how fast are slugs?" and came up with my page: the answer is, pretty damn fast.

Since I have been freaking out so much about getting a book deal, I have been experimenting with covers. Let me know what you think.