Come visit me in my new space :)

Hi dear friends and readers,

Since graduating with my MLIS degree, I've decided to build a new website aiming to consolidate my poet and librarian leanings. If you come check it out, I promise you'll find:

Poems
My new Blog 
Essays on Librarianship
Learning Module for Bookmarking Tools to facilitate new tech knowledge
One LibGuide to Women of the SF Bay Area Poetry Community
CV and recent Talks

I hope you'll come join me in my new space:apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com! 

Until then,
xoxo
Melissa

in the forest

in the forest

new shades of gnarled

curling, the trees

shape their wounds

wrap around

each other

like comfort

false translation exercise – Day 16 catchup

I thought it would be fun to practice doing false translations, so I took the writing prompt from NaPoWriMo as a jumping off point for Day 16, But, I’m posting it today because life. Since I first learned about this exercise while studying with Diane di Prima, I’ve become more compelled by this idea of the vagaries of translation: from language to language, from perspective to perspective, from identity construct to identity construct. How all we are and see and do alters our translation and perception so that really, everything becomes a translation filtered through our human, our animal skins.

I do not especially like this poem. In fact, it irritates me and I almost feel shamed by it. I’m posting it anyway because fuckit. (original poem follows)

Bimbo, nestled placenta

Bimbo, in cup of media

Morbid curtain of Pele

Enduring the putana

Rose red, flame of what disgrace

Red of your bloody body tongue

Appending the fat

Bimbo, ladled out there.

Bimba nella

placenta, bimba

sotto coperta,

nella corteccia

morbida di pelle,

indurita dal

bosco, rossa

come scottata,

rossa che nuoti nel

tuo sangue,

appena fatta, bimba

qui scodellata.

© Elisa Biagini

From: Cappuccio Rosso

Publisher: Einaudi

Dictionary Poem

Cleavage appears first

Any member a mouth

Developing indeterminate isotopes

The sea squirts, the fish in layers

A penetration of epithelial

A substance of killing

To draw in water

A baby, a cloud

The edentate

Colorless material relating

Latitudes for the sidereal

Established for the treelike

Used furs a number of ornamental loops

Haunt of the ferocious

Armor from the splinters

I made my own scaffold

Deracinated

Granular anthems the shrub of a genus

Sometimes used as a gemstone

Married, transparent, from rendered fats

Dinner with Phoenix and Aphrodite

My son (6) asked: “where do people go when they die?” I explained that no one really knows, but that people have different theories - sometimes based on which religion they believe in, and whether or not they believe in God. He quickly maintained that he does not believe in God, which he’s mentioned before. So, I asked him what he believes in.  He replied: “I believe in you. I believe in love. I believe in the goddesses.”

The mother of love says go on give it open up

The crown heart thrush rises – to overlook precipice

Take aim, glowing out light embers

Cicatrix phosphenes in the fire radial

Belly was the boulder belly the chasm

Upright stone slab – a storm of grey wanting

She lifts, fragments:

Membrane wing,

two breath,                         flesh devour

Spiny,                                     comb bearer,                                                 little ring

Ungulates

Love says: look and I am you.

Hereditament

I.
In the garden

I water                        I watch

The lace-winged labor of play
The animals loll and swat at plants

Fur rubs the sidewalk
Camouflaged skins burrow inside
Fur lines the flesh light

II.
In the gnawing chew             of sidewalk hum
I played street games

The sun a vector                                     I hid in the cool dark

Aimed cue ball at bruised knuckles
My father taught me

How to hurt
How to be pennies

III.
On the fire escape             I grew like a dandelion
Greedy for pigeon talk and flowered skirts

I wanted to be a garden
So I doused myself with hosewater

Painted my arms with thorns
In the wandering dusk

How to be a fortress
Tenement of my red mouth

How to be quiet
Dig under the belly
Lift the stone slab

(from a writing prompt by Elizabeth Treadwell and anthologized in “Hereditament”: http://secretmint.blogspot.com/2013/04/hereditament-flash-anthology-no-2.html)

Gloria (for Elizabeth Treadwell)

To you in the highest
Comestible sunset
A celestial body outlaw
Close enough to dump material
on that other star

Mad math of the prism
Mother of light
Helios – mouth of the annelid
Of invertebrate starts
Maw of the under beyond
Pineal subways, circulatory systems, sudden moon phases
Pumping vessels flowering ganglia

Gloria, fair
Gloria, olive
Gloria, midnight
Ejecting plasma



(anthologized in Elizabeth's flash anthology: http://secretmint.blogspot.com/2013/04/gloria-flash-anthology-no-1.html)

Light: NaPoWriMo Day Ten

When light sticks inside bodies

The viscous imaginary

A protective sheath, a plastic coating, a waterfall

Orbital schema – an awkward grinding

Grey over buoyant grey, a rainbow scrape

When light sticks inside bodies

Bug jelly maths

Porifera make new hydras

Give Zeus the finger

A parthenogenetic hum

stuns the ocean floor

Leaves shoot duodenal refuse

A vein of cellular debris

But, to chop it -

A clutch of pearls through the stained glass

A pawing at the branches

When light is a family of bones

When light deviates

to hear birds and insects in conversation: napowrimo day nine

Common, common, uncommon
Distinguished from other wrens
Distinguished from the loon

The daily biology of the yield
Grey matter on a micro slide
Rub hind legs against

Females of a few species produce soft noises
Both pairs of wings sometimes small or absent
Note the inconspicuous jerking of its long tail

The song higher
Feeding mainly on bright buffy underparts
Feeding mainly with bright scolding rattles

Wings stalked at base
Washed off abdomen
Spend an ocean attached

The carapace of haunt
A sound-producing apparatus
Restless, resemble, raptorial hind feet
Archery of a heart plucked back – its steel reverb, Listen.

apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com

NaPoWriMo Day Eight

 I.

There is a fur in making

Scratches markings on its dorsal side

Spins irregular – is disorderly – chances

II.

Danger: Keep arms and legs inside

Covers abdomen, swallows pill, depresses tongue

A mother rat after the maternal heart

III.

Torn from its parietal (parent)

Sponges and other invertebrates

Stand motionless with pedipalps raised

NaPoWriMo Day Seven

The thin connective tissue a wedding song

Outside, an organism –

Gregarious leaping from branches

            A dull musical hum

            All coordinates marry distance

Measure hostility of an old heart

Slowly – a meat snap

Asymmetrical

A stitched wedding dress

The heart now feathers for plucking

NaPoWriMo Day Six

-->

Gallop, gastrointestinal heart cavity

The ridge just beyond

Horizon membrane

Pink, lavender, blood orange

A disarray of muteds

Lungs, give it all you got

*Today, I wrote poems in the bathroom and at the dinner table.  Writing on the weekends is tricky business! 

NaPoWriMo Day Five

The body met with an alter of the image of the body

What we see when we seek reflection

The ever a whisper an incandescent eye droop

Gravity seeking its own breasts cupped so the light can laugh too

How time makes us empathic for women we once reviled

Neglect and its chambers of dropped infants

The insouciance of stubbed cigarettes as woman spooned the creamed peas

Time is making my ankles heavy where I ripped and ripped out my roots

Extirpated that woman in the kitchen smock

Extirpated that idea of seeking permission

NaPoWriMo Day Four

There is no need to emerge
The general body plan is
solar, systemic, cnidarian

The mouth stings
Take your flea meds
Live above the float
Somersault tentacles

A separate free-swimming phylum
It's whole body reacts
Shake out the hydra's head