the shadow self is but a shadow

but the doubleself is help. I've let the one slip inside another, hoping for a respite. Today, I've taken to my bed. All this wondering about being ill, all this...hoping for an explanation. I'm letting myself sleep as much as I want, and it is ... a lot. hours upon hours. I have no desire to go outside. yes the sun is lovely and I notice the bees now at the lavender and the birds trilling in the hedges, but it's like looking at everything through a window -- this fatigue. I write but the letters look alternately like bones harvested from an owl pellet or temperamental metal filings arranging and rearranging themselves around frenetic and rhizomatic poles. I can't help thinking "who cares?"

I'm not telling anyone, except myself, in a code I'll call latin, though most of the vernacular is language I've stolen from the dog. I cannot take credit for it.

Fur Birds

You can now get your very own copy of Fur Birds over at Insert Press. Yay!

If you are interested in reviewing, please let me know so I can help you get a complimentary copy. Thanks!

Puppy Love

Meet our Sarah

MY NEW BLOG PROJECT IS A JOKE

http://whatshouldwecallpoets.tumblr.com/

What I've been up to

LA Times book fest w/ Smokin' Hot Indie Lit Lounge
LA Times book blog: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2012/04/festival-of-books-dice-poetry.html (nice shout out to my dice and plastic animals poetry activity)
Eohippus labs at bookfest: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mdetorie/sets/72157629518623444/

Poetry Booth Coverage from April
KCSB: http://www.kcsb.org/news/kcsb-news-friday-april-20-2012
Daily Nexus: http://www.dailynexus.com/2012-04-26/clas-celebrates-poetry/
City 2.0 http://sb.city2.org/blogs/amybou/blog_entries/3142-literary-sb-visit-the-poetry-booth-during-1st-thursday
City 2.0 http://sb.city2.org/blogs/lemonjelly/blog_entries/3150-mobile-post-make-a-poem-at-the-poetry-booth-in-front-of-marshalls
Poetry Booth at UCSB: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mdetorie/sets/72157629861652617/with/7096977047/
Poetry Booth at First Thursday: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mdetorie/sets/72157629497156186/

Emergent Communities in Contemporary Experimental Writing
Presented my paper "Notes Toward a Feral Poetics"
http://www.ucscpoetrypolitics.com/2012-conference-emergent-communities-in-contemporary-experimental-writing.html
http://ucsccommunitypoetryconf.tumblr.com/

Also participated in and attended some great readings.

Also took some lovely walks.

Chores: dishes, laundry, finish spring cleaning, mail remaining dusie chaps
Personal: find a new doctor, make more time for fresh air and exercise, try to worry less, look for new place to live
Creative: work on havens/fur birds, draft text about imprinting/ferality (how it complicates moralizing rhetoric of environmentalism and challenges romantic notions of the pastoral)

1.) Where is the book?

2.) How is a room like a womb? like a book?

OR what kind of room will this book be?

a mouse lives in my breast

or is it a bird? better to be a bird if this is to be a proper poem -- form fitting -- bird to wing-bird, like a hanger, or hinge-broke. I brokered for a clean bill

of health, I know nothing, only that it's a quiet thing that glows and sputters

the x-rays made a map; we looked at it together

a broken bolt held under

not like water but a type of fluid, pinkly clear

a body is so much of something to hold

I almost let it get away from me

it began as a dream about a group of strong, sleek men in a field. In a circle. They were passing heavy reams of canvas -- unspooled from angular bolts -- between one another. Looking out at them in the field -- the way their skin gleamed -- I felt envious. "be careful what you wish for," said the dream.

In the next scene we are walking along a narrow stone path that borders the sea. The sea is black and held back with the help of a wall. We look down into the black sea, and like a cloche the ink night descends, staining our sheets. But we are sequined and lithe. We gleam along.

Now the numerous gold lights of night light up one by one -- pop! pop! pop! in the trees and along the wires. We make our way from the stony sea path to a stony, open air banquet hall of pink marble columns and luminous chandeliers of wax and iron. On the long table, enormous silver platters are heaped with heavy piles of meat -- mostly bird. Pheasant and quail and partridge. Though the meat is cooked, feather quills cling to the skin. Black feathers with green and white and iridescent spots. Folks grab a wing, feather meat, and proceed to have warbling, slow conversations about the political conditions of the government, about freedom.

And then those who have eaten the meat begin to experience a change. They shed all their rings. They retire to the stone benches where they rest and sweat profusely, fanning themselves before they acquiesce to the overwhelming desire to remove their drenched clothing.

Soon, in all of the prettily landscaped lounge areas, they are only wet bodies and piles of steaming, sopping clothes.

Somehow, with the sun-rise, this scene melts away, evaporates into the field of men passing the reams of cloth. Their sweat and nakedness a type of interminable clock. A sort of labor that never resolves.

At this point I want to awake, but cannot.

Already, it is December. How does this happen? The trees
know some things -- things we do not know. Already, my hair
has grown long, and dark. The windows fill with gray
clouds, the absence of missed things, like two hundred
versions of your childhood-self pressing the glass cold.

I'm never paying attention.
Instead, I'm following 8 red winter coats
punctuating the snowscape.
From here, their sojourn feels
impossibly slow.

I dreamed that I was in South Carolina, and all the pine trees turned red.

I dreamed of wires, connecting us.

I dreamed that the insides were all fur, nothing but.