The Tattooed Poets Project: Izzy Oneiric

Today's tattooed poet is Izzy Oneiric, who sends us this amazing shot of her sleeve:

I'll let Izzy take it from here:

"My sleeve took 11 years to complete. The figure in the center is Dream from the Sandman graphic novel. I first saw it when I was 14, and knew instantly I wanted it tattooed. I got it a few months after I turned 18 by Steve at the Lion's Den in Salem, New Hampshire. Eight years later I was living in San Francisco, and wanted to add to it. I knew it needed some sort of dream imagery, but it was difficult to narrow that down. I began interrogating the basic elements of dreams, and thought one day: 'If DNA is the basis for all human life, could it also be the basis of dream life? What would a strand of dream DNA look like?' Using the work of Patrica Garfield, a clinical psychologist who's identified 12 universal dream themes that transcend age, location, gender, etc. I started designing the double helix; quickly realizing not all 12 would fit on my arm. On my shoulder is a blue moon; in a double-helix pattern around my arm are Royal typewriter keys with hobo symbols (representing communication/ miscommunication), weaving into a peacock from the Russian Tarot of St Petersburg (representing mythical creatures/animal friends). This was done by Natalie Chandler, at the time working at Black and Blue Tattoo. 

I wanted to fill in the background, but didn't want to disrupt the double-helix shape. I couldn't figure out how to do that, so I left it alone. A few years later, I was working at Cold Steel Tattoo & Piercing. On a whim one evening I googled 'double helix,' and one of the results was the image of a nebula in the shape of a DNA strand!

The colors and the shape were perfect. I brought it to my friend Vincent Weiner who was tattooing there, and we worked on it in bits and pieces. I tried to pay him, but he refused my money. I asked how I could compensate him for several thousand dollars worth of work. He was waiting for his wife to get her green card, so he said 'Nobody's baking for me right now. I'd really love some chocolate-chip cookies.' For every session I brought cookies, banana bread, cranberry muffins, some weird chocolate-coconut drops... 

I'd always dreamed of having stars on the piece, and in Morpheus' eyes. I'd tried surface piercings with PTFE bars, but they all rejected, so I was greatly excited when people began experimenting with dermal anchors and reporting success. About a year later I was living in New Orleans and learned that Adam at Electric Ladyland (now at Slave to the Needle in Seattle) was doing them. 

We 'bedazzled' my arm with six Swarovski crystals. They healed nicely until I moved to Chicago, when they suddenly all rejected. Now that I'm back in New Orleans, I'd like to get them reinstalled."

This is definitely the first time we've highlighted body art which included dermal anchors. Very cool!

Izzy sent along this prose poem to accompany her contribution:

Blue Roses are Blooming in Safeway

Oracle asses were tickled by gas plumes. We know now—what of it? Ethylene case closed diminished returned to sender . . . send her Erato Echo Glossalalia babble bury shovel stop. I. I. I. Decline. To state. To play. So there. Repeat. Blue roses are blooming in Safeway. Champagne ruby is slang for magnum. Artaud’s black crucifix pupils ablaze in golden eyes I plagiarized because I want to see so badly but I gotta walk past flooded lottos, plainclothes Cutlasses, Dinner, Linner, 4th meal, Dunch—neologisms like I am a woman, half eaten mosquitoes and Teardrop Mike wanting guilty date, a guilty beer, because all American women drink and don’t have any Mexican friends.

Animist, manimal, my keys do not break. There are escalators in my head watering flowerbeds with ropes of crystal spit, burping readymade Rubbermaid green baby coffins, smoking Christmas in a jaundiced sky. 

Over beef tea and sheepish mirrors, defective alexandrines tell me it gets easier with practice, hurts a little less each time. Like so much decapitated obsidian, we know not now how high the ledge is very high, this crisis not of poetry but concrete and well, since Pythia choked on the geyser she’s gone now, my hair caught on fire, please tune my viola, I know a few songs from when I was a child. Stardust Memories—yes, I can play that piece quite well.

~ ~ ~

Izzy Oneiric's writing has appeared in publications such as Wheelhouse Magazine, Source Material, and Phantom Limb.  A series of visual collages were published in Plath Profiles. She is the author of the chapbooks Dabbling in Babylon, and From the Bombshell Shelter.  For several years she was the poetry editor of other magazine. She holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the California Institute of Integral Studies and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago. She currently lives in New Orleans with her loving partner and their spazzy black cat.

Thanks to Izzy for her contribution to the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2012 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Bianca Stone

Today's poet is Bianca Stone, who I met last year at the Best American Poetry 2011 launch reading. I spoke to her about contributing then and, true to her word, she was the first poet to confirm her participation this year.

Bianca sent me this photo:

She explains:

"At first this was just a tattoo of Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket. The drawings was based on the original drawings from the book by Carlo Collodi. I was 20 years old and at Antioch College at the time. There was an aspiring tattoo artist who studied there and had a tattoo gun and a make-shift studio and he did it for me as practice...(NOT one of my brightest ideas, since it's poorly done. People always ask me 'what is that supposed to be?') The idea had been in homage to my twin brother, Walter, whose nickname is Jiminy/Jimmy, and my mother used to read us the book when we were young. 

The 'Ex Libris' was added three years ago when I was studying poetry at NYU's MFA program, to honor my love of books and antique book-plates. It means 'In the Library Of' and in theory should have my name under it. It was done at Fineline Tattoo in the East Village, by a very nice guy who I guess doesn't work there anymore...I can't remember his name. I do remember he went by one word."

By way of a poem, Bianca shared this poem, which originally appeared in Post Road Magazine:

Someone Will Have to Tell You

Someday soon you will let your hair grow
and look like everyone else. And let there be a kingdom
alongside the kingdom and a forsythia alongside you.
Your mother has walked out of all her pictures


into the ether. There is hair in envelopes and the hair
in lockets and the hair growing
in graves. Saints are kneeling over your portrait.
The stratocumulus clouds are forming
in your chest. Fog around your feet.


You’ll have to listen to the bananas peeling.
Listen to your books on tape. Little by little
your face will float away
from your other face.


Someday you won’t know what to eat. Someone
will have to tell you. Someone will have to carry you
into the back yard so you can hear the Canadian geese
rise hysterically from the river.

~ ~ ~

Bianca Stone is the author of several chapbooks, most recently Someone Else's Wedding Vows (Argos Books), and I Want To Open The Mouth God Gave You, Beautiful Mutant (Factory Hollow Press). Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2011, Conduit, and Crazyhorse. Her collaboration with Anne Carson, Antigonick, a new kind of comic book and translation, will be published in spring of 2012 by New Directions. She lives in Brooklyn.

Thanks so much to Bianca for sharing her tattoo and poem with us here on the Tattooed Poets Project!

 This entry is ©2012 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission. 

 If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Cohen - Finished a Few

www.cohenfloch.com

The Tattooed Poets Project: Michael Henry Lee

Beginning in the second year of the Tattooed Poets Project, we experienced the thrill of having poets from previous years return to share more ink.

This year is no exception, and the first of two repeat contributors is Michael Henry Lee.

Last year, he contributed "work inspired by his spiritual convictions, with work spanning three decades by three artists in three very distinct parts of the country."

"This year" he informs us, "reveals a more earthy side; with work again spanning three decades by two artists from the heart of America and the sunshine state."

Photo by Chris Bodor 

Michael Henry Lee explains:

"The piece began with the oh so typical heart and initials by [his] then girlfriend and now wife of over thirty years. Gradually several butterflies, stars, comets, clouds, and lightning were all added by a Kansas City Missouri artist named John. Fast forward to Saint Augustine, Florida, and a great shop called Tattoo Garden, owned and operated by a super artist Tattoo Mike. He re-colored and revitalized the original piece on [my] last birthday and soon after the kanji for poet and the cherry blossoms were added."

Mr. Lee got the kanji to remind him "of the gift he has been given to pursue and ... the cherry blossoms celebrate the beauty and brevity of the life in which he has to pursue it."

Mr. Lee provided us with the following poems, which originally appeared in Haiku News in response to various news stories. They are the sole property of Mr. Lee and may not be used without his explicit permission.

~ ~ ~

sobriety checkpoint
the nation’s oldest city
comes of age

buyer’s market-
the realtor kept insisting
till the bitter end
in less time than it took
to say we’re sorry
you were gone

consulting the stars
all the laws of probability
contained on a pinhead

parent teacher day-
the class turtle
fends for itself

mother’s day
something inside us
can’t let go

~ ~ ~

Thanks to Michael Henry Lee for contributing again to the Tattooed Poets Project! Be sure to check out his contribution from last year, as well, in case you missed it.

This entry is ©2012 Tattoosday. The poems and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's explicit permission. 

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Laura Goode

Today's tattooed poet is Laura Goode.

I had the distinct pleasure of recommending a shop to Laura back in January when she was planning on getting a new tattoo in Los Angeles. Knowing she was going to be near Pasadena, a lovely city I once called home, I suggested Resurrection Tattoo and she was very happy with the experience. This is what she got: 

"My newest tattoo, a peacock feather, is an homage of sorts to my friend Jon, who died of cancer on January 20, 2011. Jon’s middle name was Skanda; Skanda is a Hindu god associated with the sword, symbolizing his protection, and the peacock, symbolizing his destruction of the ego. Skanda is often depicted riding around on a magic peacock, and I like to picture Jon doing that now.

The particularity of Jon, and the shape and singularity of the hole his absence leaves in my life, was that he was not just friend to me, but more than that, sometimes transcendently, he was collaborator. Our relationship was marked by fervent bursts of art. He starred in, and photographed, the first play I ever wrote. He art-directed my second. He took the author photo for the jacket of my first novel. He was my colleague, my interlocutor, in innumerable conversations about queer theory and Chinese propaganda art and writing and Aphex Twin and, eventually, cancer. He called the Facebook album of my author photos 'Portrait of An Author As A Young Author’s Portrait.' He told me that if there were ever a Lifetime movie made about my life, it would be titled 'Laura Goode: Heart of Gold, Womb of Steel.' During a period of time in our lives marked by wild, leaping growth, Jon wove so many fibers into the fabric of my initiation as an artist. I hope I did the same in his, but I don’t have the luxury of asking him.

For all these reasons, it felt appropriate to mark Jon’s impact on my life, as well as the impact of his departure from it, with a work of art. I got the feather at Resurrection in Pasadena with one of my and Jon’s best friends, Meera Menon, who got her own feather for Jon. Afterwards, Meera and I talked about how we experienced the pain of paying homage to him in a skin-abrading way: it doesn’t hurt as much as losing him, I told her I had been thinking. We confided that we both thought the pain brought us somehow closer to Jon, closer to how much pain he had experienced himself.

I look at Jon’s feather now, knowing it will walk with me always, and its splashes of wild color, its heady plumage, bring me some of the joy that Jon himself once brought me. As Skanda’s paradoxical peacock illuminates, death destroys the ego, and both the pain of losing Jon and the more literal pain of memorializing him physically have humbled me. In life Jon raised me up to the rafters of the imagination, and in death he brought me back down to earth. The below poem, I think, celebrates both contributions."

What The Body Becomes 

Look up in wonder: the recluse
& the moors have come in.

The garden’s elegant logic, a mystic
event, greening. A return, if one

is willing, to the fine dark clay
earth. A channel somehow

open; another closed irrevocably.
I have so much still to say.

The rite of production
is one, too, of consumption—

the coal, wood, even peat
of day. Of life. Renewable

resources. The fact
of heat. We, miners

exhorting the earth
to give us back the dead.

This is what the body becomes:
the sustenance of another.

~ ~ ~

Laura Goode's interracial gay hip-hop love story for teens, Sister Mischief, was released by Candlewick Press in 2011. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Feministing, The Faster Times, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Dossier, Slope, Fawlt, and other publications. She is currently producing her first feature film, FARAH GOES BANG, co-written with the filmmaker Meera Menon. Laura was raised outside Minneapolis, received her BA and MFA from Columbia University, and now lives in San Francisco; you can follow her on Twitter @lauragoode.


Thanks to Laura for sharing her tattoo and poem with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2012 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission. 


If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Fred Schmalz

Today's tattooed poet, Fred Schmalz, resides in Germany, a first for the Tattooed Poets Project.

As you can see, he is also heavily-tattooed and, lucky for us, he sent us a lot of photos, so let's not waste any more time and take a look at his ink.

I'll let Fred explain:

"...a right arm upper half-sleeve related to a poem of mine ('I am here to tell you where I slept last night') which originally appeared in 6x6 - containing a lily with a naked lady petal, a sleeping figure, and a text excerpt from the poem.

This is intersected by half of a two-arm text strip (down the backs of both upper arms) with the first line of Charles Olson's The Kingfishers - What does not change / is the will to change. (the / which appears in the poem sits on the back of my neck).   

My right arm has the Harry Smith foot-of-the-Buddah three fish image which adorns all the later Allen Ginsberg collections,

and several staghorn sumac branches with fruit.

All except the three fish were inked by Stephanie Tamez at Saved Tattoo in Brooklyn."

Stephanie Tamez is an amazing artist, and she is especially renown for her "type" tattoos. I know that I, if I was getting a tattoo with a lot of words, would put Stephanie at the top of my wish list.By way of bio:

The following poem from Fred appeared originally in 6x6 issue 14 from Ugly Duckling Presse.

WHERE I SLEPT LAST NIGHT

A woman who shared
half my last name
gave me the bed below our bed.
Ask me to explain.
Etude. A green field.
Mat inflated with lung air.
Smoke screen for privacy. Privy.
A thin door and three thin walls.

The bed hidden below our bed is our last bed.
Count back and beds become impossible
retrievals:
I may have slept
one summer in an Ohio hotel, my Saturdays
a fuck-fit carnage, dried palms
woven into the holy cross
you Polish Catholic

you denial of love.
Bed deemed worthy of our backs.
Bed along with the rest of our loneliness.
Bed born of necessary grammar.
Bed requested by a shirtless man.
Robbed in this bed.

My struggle is the struggle of men
and their otherness,
men without shame, men who are only
their small rooms.
Touch a hole in me and I seep water,
palms saffron and swollen–
my arms are ashen
and tremble like ivy.

I told myself
this would only marginally be
about fucking, that so many
beds are entered and left alone,
that my love is a maker and I am a man
who leaves and returns to a bed
as he finds it, who sleeps as continuance,
who clothes in pillowcases
an ongoing occasion: our bodies’
natural destination.

Patient once. Stained. I shove
lover. Shovel over. It all ruptures,

the groan where we come to rest,
one leg’s shudder before passing out.
Trap door clap.
Conception’s sudden pinch.
Meet mother.
Meet father.
It wasn’t supposed to
happen this way, but ten years earlier,
when the notion held a romance,

you flew and I shattered a little
Blue vial in the sink.
What will my body do?
My replaceable body…
Tornado, be quick and pass.
We have spoken of the surfaces of things
but not their natural environment.
Morning’s minor reflections pass
without elucidation. We maze

the new route home, resting as relatives.
Red hair, red socks, for miles
you draft the come-back of good news,
clean living, moon creeping into a skylight.
Who washes over me?
Your hip joints

loosen like rain clouds over mountains.
That pair of lost slippers–the furry pink ones
I see under the door or peeking
through laundry at me.
I guessed the light, which was
our old apartment two in the morning
after a heavy snow.
I suffer no physical realignment
and thus lack chemicals to warn me of fatherhood.
No hemorrhaging in the spoils of joints.
But I find that I am unusually hungry.

I could have gone on loving
without my shirt, could have
asked that your hand warm
my skin, heat radiation, radiance.
You stood in the kitchen and told me you love me
more today, that it grows in you–


pause of a woman
lost between synapses–
idea derailed on the stretch to dinner.
The coarse fabric you knit drops stitches.

The bed borrowed from the landlord
is almost too small for one,
or too narrow, the length
sufficing since neither of us is long.
Beds turn on us.
We sicken of comfort.
Homebound, practicing loneliness,
six hands surround me. They pin me
in my fever. They hold the sheet.
Modesty, honestly.

The room we’re offered is a fuckless marble hull.
The fireplace only works
if I break up the furniture.
The television works.
The refrigerator does not work.
The stove works.
The blankets work.
The rug underfoot doubles as a bed–

already it has been rolled up.
We are alive with our calcium deposits.
Our chipped plates
returned to the top cupboard
breathe out a scent
I associate with you, the meal
fed me from that part-life
where we camped in the front room
of a condemned house,
lauding our insomnia, how morning
never seemed so remote. But here

rules loosen: run in snow and melt our feet.
Wake in a semi-truck state
full of chocolate milk and headlamp,
full of typhus. Mingle
among loves and recall a swallow
asleep on what I took to be a bed,
the broken hour set like a table
tracing the road’s curve.
Ground beneath us heaves east,

incandescent, the motions my hands make
grotesque, sanctimonious. Your
desire to feed me.
I eat a pear,
take a drink of water.

The sun outweighs us. It has no recollection,
blue in a tall shank of light.
This greets me
upon entering the house.
And the vinegar waft of the staircase.
Carpet pile flattened by feet
headed to bed ten thousand times. Or twenty thousand
feet knocking off at once:

here are my feet, ashen relics.
Tied to each arch is a bent branch,
the wood still warm. I walk with them
to the back door.
Then a dial turns and tiny notches align
with the moon. Resistance
attaches to every object in the house.
Our curtains haven’t kept the ocean out.
We are the peninsula’s only hum.

~ ~ ~

Fred Schmalz's first collection, Some Animals, is forthcoming in 2014 from Jackleg Press. His work has appeared in A Public Space, 1111, Zoland Poetry, LUNGFULL!, Spinning Jenny, Conduit, jubilat, Handsome, The Blue Letter, We are so happy to know something and The Bedazzler from Wave Books. His poems were included in La Familia Americana, a bilingual anthology of new American poets published in Spain by Cosmopoetica in 2010. An exhibition of contemporary German illustrators responding to his poems will be staged at Rotopol Press in 2012. He is founding editor of swerve magazine. He lives in Kassel, Germany.

Thanks to Fred for sharing his awesome tattoos and poetry with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

This entry is ©2012 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoos are reprinted with the poet's permission.

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Amy Rafferty

Today's tattooed poet is Amy Rafferty.

Amy narrates her history of getting tattooed:

 "I've never been that sure why I got my tattoos and to be honest I'd probably put it down to poor impulse control.

I got my first when I was seventeen. Me and my friend Suzy were wondering around bored one day and we found ourselves looking in the window at Terry's Tattoo Studio. We could see all the big, hard men in there, grimacing and posing, with their arms covered in thistles and doves and black panthers.

To us it looked dead exciting and grown up and 'cool' and so we snuck in for a closer look.
An hour later we came out, all red-faced and tearfuI, me with a butterfly on my stomach and Suzy with a flaming heart on her shoulder.

We thought we were pure rock 'n' roll but we were too scared to tell our parents what we'd done. We both left it at that but then, ten years later, I got a Chinese good luck symbol on my back, ostensibly to bring me good luck but mostly it was to impress a sailor I was keen on.

My dragon was next and that was to show I was brave (or getting braver) and the flowers on my leg started off as a single bud from when my friend Polly and I went to get tattoos together and over the years the bud has grown. I think there's some meaning in that.

In 2007 my Dad died suddenly and I had this strange instinct to let him know that I was okay, that I was coping, and so I think that's why my flower grew as it did. 

And if somehow my Dad was aware of all this? Well he'd probably be shaking his head and saying ruefully "daft lassie, what are ye up to now?"

I love the idea of that. He thought when it came to making big, life-changing decisions that I was an idiot and yes, he was probably right but he also showed a grudging and loving admiration for my impulsive side. 

For now, I think I'm done with tattoos, but you never can tell when I'll take a wee notion for another."

It's cool seeing the evolution of this, Amy's floral tattoo, that has grown along with her.

She sent us this lovely poem:


Directions.

What you remember of them most is

that they could not stop talking,
and that the road from Inverardran veered left,
and took you from the kirk by the Toll
of Atholl to the Shoulder’s Choke
where you heard them both,
heralding their own as the worst.

Then by Stob Binnien,
shrouded in cloud and the eldest,
who sucked black mints,
black-tongued, bright-eyed and spry.
She picked at stitches and thought aloud
if it had been made in ‘Ehberdeen’
then it would have been made fitter
for its own purposes.

And the younger, the witcher,
the one you loved,
all hook-eyed and pleasure driven,
passing the pretty lace between them.
She pulled it through but worse
this time, tighter, the threads biting.
She winked at you, slowly, dropping a lid
and said “it just depends who you know”

And then Ben More and the great pools,
the flooded lights of Saint Fillan,
patron saint of the mad and the over-bound

and between them, a circle of pretty white lace,
holding them both together.

~ ~ ~

Amy Rafferty is a Glaswegian living in the West Midlands. Her poetry and prose can be found in several anthologies and publications, both on-line and off.

In 2009 she received a highly-commended mention for her poetry collection, Pétursdóttir and the Land of Tiny Voices and in 2010, two of her poems were short listed for the international Fish poetry prize. Amy is a postgraduate student of Creative Writing at Glasgow University and sings with the cult, Glasgow band, The Recovery Club. She is also the baby in the graveyard scene of the original Wicker Man movie but she doesn't like to talk about it. 

If you should wish, you can hear Amy singing here.

Thanks to Amy for sharing her words and ink with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2012 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoos are reprinted with the poet's permission. 


 If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Iris Cushing

Today's tattooed poet is Iris Cushing. Iris sent us this photo:

Iris explains:

"This is a drawing by the poet Elizabeth Bishop, which I found in her Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, edited by Alice Quinn. It illustrates a dream that Bishop had while she was at Yaddo in 1950, about an owl riding on the back of a rabbit. I love that Bishop was a poet who drew, who rendered her inner and out experiences in diverse ways. I was reading a ton of her work when I got this tattoo in 2009. There were a lot of barn owls and jack rabbits in the country where I grew up in Northern California. Reclusive, mysterious creatures. I wanted to have the image in my life always--it's something I decided to live with, those animals, her simple drawing. I got it done at Inkstop Tattoo in the East Village." 

Iris sent us this poem:

Sequence

Together, we identify
a single tendril of smoke
above the prairie
and follow it to a teepee
disguised as a wedding gown.
Two puffed-sleeve
chimneys and a satin
bodice catch wind.
The white tulle train
is full of spiders.
You circle the teepee
six times before lifting
its hem from the long grass.
When you turn your face
to nod me under, your eyes
reflect a fire.

Inside, we find
a medicine man who can
transform AA batteries
into AAA batteries.
We empty our flashlight
for a demo.
He wears a spangled robe.
Says he sews a single sequin
on his garment every time
something important happens.
He calls it the Sequins of Events.
He can see we were born
under the sign of Michael
Jackson’s hair in flames.
Each hair on your head,
he says, is a little circuit,
a limp lightning rod.
He strums a ukulele
strung with copper wire.
But when asked
if our visit this evening
will merit a new sequin
on his sleeve,
or even on his collar,
he hands us our batteries
and stares into the fire.

 ~ ~ ~

Iris Marble Cushing was born in Tarzana, California in 1983. She is an editor for Argos Books and for Circumference: A Journal of Poetry in Translation, both based in Brooklyn. In 2011, Iris was a writer-in-residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Her work has appeared in the Boston Review and other places.

Thanks to Iris for her contribution to the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2012 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission. 


If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Ira Sukrungruang

Today's tattooed poet is Ira Sukrungruang. Before checking out his tattoo, here’s what Ira had to say about ink:

"I thought if I held off until I was thirty, it meant I really wanted a tattoo. It meant that I’ve been thinking about getting a tattoo since I was fifteen and waited nearly fifteen years to finally have one done. I’m a guy who wants things, and sometimes my wants are fleeting, like a child with a new toy; after an hour of play, I’m bored.

But after that one tattoo—an enormous dragon on my right calf—I’ve been getting a tattoo done every year, and I love every one of them. 

My tattoos are a way to call attention to my body on my own terms. For most of my life, I was fat. When I got my first tattoo, I was close to four-hundred pounds, and I wanted people to look at me because of my tattoo, not because I was enormous. I think long and hard about my tattoos. I have a total of five, and I’m thinking about getting another one done soon. All my tattoos have stories, and because they have stories, I wanted a tattoo artist who I not only trusted, but was a close friend, a person who would do what I wanted, and share in my life. My artist is the poet Ruth Awad, and I can say with certainty, she is the best. 

I don’t give Ruth easy tattoos. On average, my tattoos take about 4-10 hours to complete. Because I am Thai-American, my tattoos reflect my dual life. It is my way of paying homage to my culture, my parents, my life as a Buddhist. There is one tattoo, however, I love most. It was the simplest one. It took only two hours to complete. It is the image of Buddha on my chest. 

I used to wear a Buddha around my neck at all times. I was never without him. When I was nervous, I chewed on him. When I was scared, I’d grasp him tight in my hand. My mother gave me my Buddha. She said to keep him close to my heart. He would protect me. For most of my life, I had. Suddenly, I developed a skin allergy. I broke out in hives and rashes. I was allergic to Buddha! To fix this, to always have him with me, I decided to have Buddha tattooed on my chest. He is the first thing I see every morning and the last thing every night. There is a comfort in that. Seeing him there, in a jungle of chest hair, makes me feel lighter."

Ira shared this poem with us, which first appeared in Mead Magazine, under the title "In the Keeping of Men":

Sleeping Venus

               “To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space,                                              into the keeping of men.” –John Berger, Ways of Seeing

I am learning to see, letting light dance
within my retinas, letting it slosh
around orbed-pupils, like an aerating wine.

There walked a woman today, at the grocery
store, who turned the heads of the meat men behind
refrigerated steaks. How they devoured
her elegant stride. How her presence was body
without mind. They will remember her—only
briefly—as the one with long legs, the one with gracious
hips, and she will be catalogued
away with infinite others, a forever list
of parts.

Giorgione, when you painted Venus, reclined,
her hand seductively positioned above her groin,
what dreams did you give her? Did you fill
her head with the scent of olives and Tuscan
suns? Does painter and subject occupy
the same breath?

My wife sits alone
in her room, the night air
laden with grief,
a guitar on her lap. How do I paint
her voice and the sound of pluck chords? How do I
capture the beating within her chest,
the sad song singing in her heart?

I am learning to see.
First, I close my eyes.

 ~ ~ ~

Ira Sukrungruang is the author of the memoir Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy.  His poems have been published in North American Review, Witness, River Styx, and many other journals. He teaches in the MFA program at University of South Florida and is the editor of Sweet: A Literary Confection. For more information about him, visit: www.sukrungruang.com.

Thanks to Ira for sharing his tattoo and poetry with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2012 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission. 


If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Erica Mena

Among this year's Tattooed Poets' submissions, this is one of my favorite photos:

Photograph by Julie Chen

This was submitted by the poet Erica Mena, whose tattoo was inspired by the great Pablo Neruda.

Erica gives us the detail behind these wonderful tattoos:

 "This is my most intimate tattoo, my Neruda tattoo: 'Love is so short, forgetting is so long.' It's a full line (punctuation included) from Poem XX of Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair in translation by W.S. Merwin. The fish in concentric circles is the symbol printed on all of Neruda's books from mid-way through his career, and was drawn from the bronze statue at his most famous house in Isla Negra. The other two images were drawn by the tattoo artist, in response to two other lines from the same poem: 'The same night whitening the same trees. / We of that time are no longer the same.' and 'Write, for example: the night is shattered / and stars shiver blue in the distance.' The design and work were done by Ram at Fat Ram's Pumpkin Tattoo in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. 

I read Merwin's translation of Neruda's Twenty Love Poems when I was fifteen, and had that conversion experience, the moment when you realize this is what you want your life to be about. Not the sentiment, but the poetry. These poems, and this line in particular, convinced me that poetry can move between languages, times and places, freely and with no loss, when put into the right hands. When getting the tattoo, I considered getting the Spanish line: 'El amor es tan corto, el olvido es tan largo,' but chose the English because that was how I first encountered it. Out of all my tattoos it also hurt the most to get, fittingly I suppose--there was a moment where Ram was outlining the circles where it felt like my entire leg was on fire. Totally worth it."

I would add that I concur with Erica completely and offer up, as proof, my post over on BillyBlog in April 2008 here. I was running down my favorite poems for National Poetry Month and #28 was any of the poems in the book, and it just so happens I pointed to Poem XX as one shining example. The original edition translated by Merwin and illustrated by Jan Thompson is a must-have in anyone's library. But, I digress.

Erica offered us two poems, one of her own and one she translated. We'll share both:

(no subject) (spam poem #3)

good evening websit
Stop being a nervous wreck

I will like you to accept this token
So hard you can break an egg

hoping you will understand my point
this is not a myth

Every person dreams about meeting someone

~ ~ ~ 

Deus ex Machina

Throw the dice, Lord, your turn has come and it is winter. The trident is cornered, the mountains covered with a skin of ash. Lord, behold light’s song here, your due, in the stillness of the sea and the pure discretion of the endless night. Behold your son, Fire, burning the whole surface with his touch and seducing the water with his gilded tongue. Look here, Lord, his stepsister Dawn, liquid hierophant, maker of shape. In their terrible language they tell of celebrations, obedience, sin. This time, Lord, throw to us the seed and the male of the healthier species. Don’t announce him by chance, because he will become a cry and rise up with the warm murmur of pavement, and once again be lost to us, punished, denied. Let none but you, oh Lord, wield the butcher’s knife this time; mature a chord when life ceases and rain unexpectedly cleanses the lovers’ yoked hips. Throw the dice, Lord, your turn has inevitably come. Cast them without fear from your wide hand, because luck’s twelve sides won’t wait, and the sky points towards multitudes and disaster. Throw them, Lord, your turn has come and it is burning summer.

Translation of “Deus ex machina.” From La invención del día [The Invention of the Day]. © José Mármol. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2011 by Erica Mena. All rights reserved.
Published in Words Without Borders, November, 2011


Erica Mena is a poet, translator and print designer, not necessarily in that order. Her poetry and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Vanitas, The Dos Passos Review, Pressed Wafer, Arrowsmith Press, Words Without Borders, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, PEN America, Asymptote, Two Lines and others. She is the coordinator and co-host of Reading the World Podcast, a monthly conversation about literary translation. She is the founding editor of Anomalous Press.

Thanks to Erica for contributing this wonderful entry of the tattooed Poets project on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2012 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission. 


If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Shannon Phillips

Today's tattooed poet is Shannon Phillips. She has five tattoos, none of which are in color. All of them are on her back. She sent us a few photos so we could appreciate them:

I'll let Shannon tell their stories:

"I knew I wanted a tattoo, but the commitment to one idea was freaking me out.  However, I took an Art of Mexico class and when I learned the term 'Nepantla' I knew that was it. Nepantla is a term in Nahuatl that roughly means 'on the border' or 'in between.' It seemed perfect. I got the tattoo done at a place off Pacific Coast Highway in Sunset Beach, California. It was a birthday gift from an ex that I was still friends with.

The next tattoo I got was of a coyote ouroboros. I love the coyote as a trickster symbol in Native American myth and I was also very drawn to the symbolism behind the ouroboros, the life-death-life cycle. I did not relate to the more classic ouroboros images of a dragon or a snake so I asked a young artist named Natalie Robles to design the coyote ouroboros for me. The tattoo was done at Atomic Tattoo off Hollywood Boulevard [in Los Angeles].

On the drive to a wedding in Arizona, my friend and I decided to get almost-matching tattoos. It seemed that since we were both people who had tattoos that we should have at least one on a whim. It had to be something simple since we didn't have a chance to research the tattoo shop. We settled on cat silhouettes.

The next tattoo I had done [seen at the bottom of the back in the top photo above] was at a shop in Lake Forest, California.  While walking to class one day at Cal State Long Beach, a flyer grabbed my attention – it depicted an awareness ribbon designed to resemble an Asian character. I saw it and I simply knew.

My quid pro quo\ tattoo was done at Wicked Ink in Knoxville, Tennessee.  I had heard the phrase literally translated to 'what for whom' and I had known for some time I wanted a tattoo that embodied my fascination with the structure of power. Again, I wanted something simple because I hadn't researched the tattoo shop – I was on another trip. I chose a female tattoo artist because it occurred to me that all my previous tattoos had been done by men."

Shannon sent us three poems to consider and I selected this one:

To My Stretchmarks

Fossilized jelly fish tendrils.

Moon-colored veins,
chalk-scrawled tree roots,
icicle milk.

On my hips,
Nature tattoos lightning.

--originally published in RipRap #30, 2008

~ ~ ~

Shannon Phillips earned an MFA in creative writing from Cal State University Long Beach. Her work has been published in Pearl, Verdad, RipRap, Rectangle, and her poem “Plum” placed second in Beyond Baroque's First Ever Poetry Contest. She previously taught ESL for two years and now edits Carnival, an online literary magazine.

Thanks to Shannon for sharing her poem and all of her tattoos with us on Tattoosday. I'd also like to thank her for referring us to Eric Morago, who appeared on the Tattooed Poets Project here, earlier this month.

This entry is ©2012 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoos are reprinted with the poet's permission.


If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise

The Tattooed Poets Project: Chris Siteman

Today's chapter of the Tattooed Poet's Project features the work of Chris Siteman.

Chris sent in this poem featuring these literature-based tattoos :

Chris explains:

"The pieces on my chest were my first two tattoos. I got them when I was twenty, and was working as a doorman at The Rathskeller, Boston’s now defunct rock bar better known as The Rat. The pieces were originally inked by Jason Sexton (Patience) and another tattoo artist (LABOR) whose name I do not recall, but who was then best known around the scene for the fact that he taught himself to tattoo by inking his own arm in a rendering of robotics from shoulder to fingertips. The work on the tattoos was performed before the legalization of tattooing in Massachusetts, and so the work on the word 'LABOR' was performed across the street from Fenway Park in an acquaintance’s apartment, and the work on the word 'Patience' was performed in the apartment I then rented with another doorman and a bartender who both also worked at The Rat.

The tattoo was inspired by something my older brother, William O’Keefe (the painter better known as W.O’K.), said to me often throughout my upbringing. He would repeat the phrase, 'learn to labor and to wait' at various moments during my childhood when I experienced some kind of setback or difficulty. As I entered my early teens it came to my knowledge that the line was from the last stanza of a poem, titled 'A Psalm of Life, or What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist,' by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. As I came to find out, our cousin (Richard Chetwynd, also a professor and a writer of poems) shared the poem with my brother years before. Some time in the year or so before the choice to get the words inked on my chest, a period of my life that seemed to be particularly lacking in answers of any kind, I came to the realization my brother had been whispering the 'answer' in my ear since I was very young."

The last stanza of Longfellow's poem proclaims:

Let us, then, be up and doing,
     With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
     Learn to labor and to wait.
          ~H.W. Longfellow (1838)

Chris offers us the following poem, "The Father of All Lies," which was originally published in Consequence Magazine Vol. II, and then subsequently published in Ditch Poetry in September of 2011:

The Father of All Lies

1.
the murder

My father ghosts onto the trail, moon-lit sand—

                                                                         Darkness the distance he hears them yell,
but he glides, burns in moon fire, & her old woman eyes open wide, shrink at the same time;
her tracheal cartilage fractures the air.

After he drinks so he cannot feel her last breath against his cheek, his grip
on her boney neck, can’t hear her gurgle.

Taut as strings on a lyre, he sees our mother’s silhouette in green
alarmclock light. Arm’s distance, she gasps—

She walks where the moon woman died. He’s a young man, her throat under his hand.


2.
complicity

I remember a black trunk at the foot of my parents’ bed, five stacks of letters tied with red
string, black & white photographs scattered in the removable drawer
where a short sword, flat across the toes of his boots, shone.

How the glint of steel caught my eye—

Running a finger along the edge, I sensed that blade deep in my marrow.
I heard steps on the stairs, but burned with the image of a young man standing like a cross,
smiling, head dangling from each hair-clenched fist—

Their two faces looked asleep forever.


3.
childhood

A seven-year-old I saw a hero in my father, though I didn’t know his name, & my father bound
his life to lies, a story-line, ideas how that hero’s name should sound—

Home, a mother who didn’t send him to a workfarm at eight, a life where he escaped sentencing,
where he never hung on the corner of Somerville Ave. in Winter Hill, never—

He attended Saint Mary’s for boys run by Jesuits & nuns who measured Christ’s love
with yardstick & ruler edges, & Father Mike’s marred knuckles
dealt penance enough.


4.
his whole life

At dances, my father kissed girls in plaid skirts until the Holy Ghost gave way to canned beer
fistfights with public school boys from Cambridge.

His father lay dying as they held hands in a disinfected hospital room.

He played guard for his high school’s basketball team, before that book binder’s job
to support his mother, before friends died for God & Country,

rather than having skulls caved in with a sixty-five pound barbell in the yard mid-day
over smokes, a fuck, skin color, a look—


5.
elegy for a fallen comrade

He died there, same as we all did. His dying just showed more, killed him faster.
Sure as I speak now, saying this: in a field of fear & steel, fists clenched in mud,
writhing through stench, through mortar-churned graves, more bullets than bees
in spring, poppies everywhere, larks sang for sunset—

His body lies under grass, while brambles of razor-wire, forgotten toe poppers & I persist,
unholy love poems to those who died for reasons of which they spoke
no knowledge.


6.
inertia

A cold lung of air strikes me how close one never gets to a man whose shadow stands that tall;
there’s a black & white photograph from which my father grimaces.

When I was a child at the kitchen table we laughed together over funnies,
his steel bones softened & he turned his face away from his stone face—
Sometimes I see his crook-tooth smile, still hear him laugh,

                                                                                               but then a memory— Him breaking
a boy’s knee with a bat in front of our house; the boy crawls, blubbers; father whispers
before each blow: Time to pay the piper, kid. Time to pay.


7.
the long stare

My father told lies to soften his stare, to frighten me less & help me remember—
A black trunk of war memorabilia & other lies I wanted to be true.

He never told the shape of his loneliness:

Hatcheting heads from geese under January’s granite skies, hanging their little corpses on hooks
to bleed out, tenderness named the ache in the old farmer’s bones on the bitterest of days,

and the streets of Winter Hill before he killed.

~ ~ ~

Born in Boston, Chris Siteman grew up in a blue collar, predominantly Irish-Catholic, family. He’s traveled widely in the US and Europe, and worked extensively in the trades. In 2007 Chris received his MFA from Emerson College. Since August of 2010 he’s been pursuing his JD at Suffolk Law. He has taught in Boston University’s undergraduate writing program, Lesley University’s Humanities Department, and currently teaches in Suffolk University’s English Department. While the poem here was originally published in Consequence Magazine Vol. II, and subsequently in Ditch Poetry in September of 2011, his work has otherwise most recently appeared in Anomalous, The Fiddleback, Borderline and Poetry Quarterly.

Thanks to Chris for his contribution to the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2012 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.


If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Emily Harrison

Today we have another tattooed poet from "across the Pond".

Emily Harrison sent us this lovely tattoo from the United Kingdom:

Emily explains:

"It was the first appointment of the day on my 18th birthday at Sinking The Ink in Swindon and I finally got to get the tattoo. I ignored friends and family warning me not to commit to such a lifelong commitment at such a 'young and impressionable age' and, being quite the goody-two-shoes for most of my life, went for it. My inspiration is Ted Hughes' collection of work, Crow (sometimes I can bend the truth slightly and give a nod if anyone asks Edgar Allen Poe) and I now have a perching taxidermy crow to match it."

By way of poetry, Emily has offered up this item for our enjoyment:

Instantly Your Biggest Fan

I want to hear you describe my look
as blood in the sugar bowl
my attitude as the paddling pool
blown onto the M4 causing a pile up
you don’t
love me
you should
when we go to the seaside
I wont even moan
when I drop my ice cream
and when you offer me yours
I wont accept
I’ll make your tongue ache
until its like you’ve been
sucking on fudge
you’ll have dreams
where you save me
from wreckages
burning freak accidents
the one you love
and the one who loves you
are never ever the same person
now fall in love with me
as if I were a French girl
on a postcard

~ ~ ~

I generally don't comment on the poems, but I like this one very much and am thankful Emily sent it our way.

Emily Harrison won the Christopher Tower Poetry Prize in 2010 and is set to be published in the April edition of Popshot Magazine. Her poetry is scarlet, penetrating, funny and honest. Emily does beautiful, stark and memorable words. She has red hair, perpetual lipstick and high heels. She adds, "I find inspiration from the men in my life; some painfully thin, most aggressively passionate, all with strange hair cuts."

Thanks to Emily for her contribution to the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2012 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.