graffiti street

Chinatown, NYC

Re-Purpose

Jars and tins, scarves washed by hand.

Ice Smile

LISE, Cambridge, MA

LISE, Cambridge, MA

Now Empty #42

In NYC shops have always closed and we would mourn them for a week, then a month later we would patronize the new place and be all happy about it. But now, everything is empty. Stores go down, nothing comes up. More stores go down, still nothing. This store is next to 45 West 8th Street, which is a well-known street to buy shoes. In two blocks, there were 6 empty storefronts. What will we become, NYC?

Bird's World, Franklin Park Zoo, Boston, MA

Bird's World, Franklin Park Zoo, Boston, MA

broken things

Today,Topanga State Beach, CA

Yesterday's kitchen Floor, Los Feliz

combat and ballet

marilyn (feather ceiling)

Marilyn's face would have kids lassoing around her, wide loops of wide and not so wide kids, the fat or bones dancing on their bodies as they whooped up and down, taunting Marilyn with weird constructions. "Helium buttons, balloon skin!" "Frosty the Snow Bitch!" "Baby woman, go home on the range!" "Knotty tree cranium, sick, sick!" "Scareilyn bear face!"

Marilyn opted out of caring. "It's a coping mechanism," the doctors (specialists, all) would tell her father, who loved her very much, and her mother, who buried her shame in thick, boastful gradients of pride. It wasn't that at all, the reason Marilyn more or less sealed her lips shut for anything other than to eat and drink the things she liked.

She'd kick down the country roads that lead like a cross from her house. She'd walk until long after her knees were sore and her shoes started to slope from outward pronation.

As she walked those roads, she'd listen to the wind scrape the leaves on the trees and the nearly blond wild grass until it all rattled, and tried to align cadences with the shuttering cicadas.

She'd take it all in. She'd gulp it down like it was lemonade. Predators swooping out of the sky to swiftly murder prey, the patter of chipmunks on mud, a branch smacking down, roaring. She'd reach up to her horrific face (they said that and she agreed so it must be fact) while continuing to walk and wipe away bits of sweat that the humidity of late August pulled from her.

The reason she blocked it out, all the theories and taunts, was this. This was all that really mattered, she knew, was all that was real. And the falseness of the rest of it terrified her.

these are my friends and this is what we do

Reach Out (I'll Be There)

every muscle sore

On the battlefield of words, all soldiers are asleep, having dreams like whispers about the way things might have been if they hadn't ended up as they have.

It happens, just does. Night arches its back and they assail each other like a hailstorm. There's a wicked hardness to the pellet of each utterance. It's as difficult to stand as it is to stand up to.

So they sleep again tonight like men who have almost died.

Eventually they'll wake, their smallest muscles jousted through with soreness, coughing up fog. They'll agree and say for not the last time that this change, now that it has finally come, is more than good and that it will last nearly as long as forever.

where were the breadcrumbs now?

HoodRich, 2009

Original photograph that I also embroidered.

For the love of February...

Romancing the winter...

Yup.

Found in NYC, Wooster Street Between Grand and Canal.

a particle through

I'm cutting the shapes of all my concerns into folded sheets of white paper of a standard dimension. I have dilations of apprehension and contractions of doubt, tonight. The moon is cutting through with a cocky grace you can't really be sure of.

For now, the sun's absent from the scene, totally blotted by an opposing meridian.

Here's the crux of my problem: I'm terrified that the bulb up there has popped and is forever gone; that it won't ever buoy up again.

It's love, I guess. One that bubbles up your skin, makes you recoil from even gentle touch, and then makes it come off dead in layers. It's a love that impregnates itself in your pores, latches to your tissue and metastasizes.

It's something to love in beaches and parks, bringing stained glass to life, cleaving through dastardly gray clouds, breaking up the dull eave of woe that overhangs winter. It's something to pray for, or beg for if your prayers aren't answered quick enough.

I keep cutting and the scissors start to dull from my constant snips. The result of my work is piling up around me. I'm like the jut of a mountain whose foot has been erased.

Somehow, cutting helps balance the scales of my worry.

There's a pattern that's starting to emerge.

The house is waking up. Slippers scrape softly from all of the rooms and converge in the kitchen. There's drowsy, bad-breathed laughter and the acidic threat of caffeine. There's the dry tumbling sound cereal makes as it gets dumped into a ceramic bowl.

And footsteps once again. Predatory footsteps this time. Many feet gently swarm outside my door. A hand encroaches upon the long brass doorknob.

The door opens without any kind of plea.

Mom shakes me. Dad shakes me. Sister and brother shake me. They take what I've done in handfuls and let it fall over me, laughing.

And the edges of the windows warm with the first indication that there will be another day.

paper kisses

Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, CA. December 2008.

Plastic Prisoners

Maybe today we can go out to play?

Put Your Tiny Hand in Mine

Corner of Houston and Avenue A