everything that’s happened since you’ve been in the ground
Mein zu Hause alt
Wo ich Fruchtkönigin war
Die Farben sind tot
a very south florida-specific analogy ………….……….....................................................7
diaper bag dystopia………………….........................................................................................9
Why I wanted to make Pickled Peppers and Pickled Eggplant………………….15
lasagna love ……………………………………………………………………………………….....16
for Monica……………………………………………….……………………………………….…...20
outer space dirty south ……….…………………………………..…………………………….21
raupen to(ten……………….……………………………………………………………….............23
cake day ………………………………………………..…………………………………………......27
celestial body dysmorphia ….………………….………………….............................29
I literally hate you right now. You’re so disgusting. You’re always picking up trash and it makes no sense.
-First Born
Well I like looking at the cigarette packs because I’m making a zine about yucky things too like dead animals and mans with no legs.
-Second Born
a very south florida-specific analogy
Every time I start to feel trapped, I want to talk to you and feel better. You can’t ever do anything about it, so I try not to say anything about it – I just enjoy your presence like the sun-starved pet store iguana I am, stuck in a climate where I don’t belong, waiting for this stupid fake winter to pass.
diaper bag dystopia
Maybe it’s dumb to hope. It’s been almost a year of COVID-19 shutdown and this is the third piece I’m writing about how much it sucks. Still no playdates, no preschool. No game nights or shows or parties. Lots of library books. Lots of TV, and tears. In May, we planted a garden. In July, we got a puppy. In November, I started taking psychiatric meds. My kids turned two, and four. By the time I publish this, they’ll be three and almost five. At the beginning of February, my mother-in-law tested positive. On Valentine’s Day, she was hospitalized. My partner put in his two weeks notice, leaving the stable, busy tattoo shop where we’ve both worked for the past eight years. On Tuesday, his mom was put on ventilaiton. We can’t see her, talk to her. We don’t know when we will.
We live in a cute, older neighborhood on the brink of complete gentrification. My house is mostly a mess, most of the time, and my head always feels like it’s filled with confetti. She visited us in November, sleeping on a big inflatable mattress in the living room, sharing candy krabby patties with the kids and making the coffee even though I’ve finally learned how to do it right. We watched a butterfly emerge from its cocoon and she took home a giant bag of Spanish moss to hang from her backyard trees. When we quit the shop, the owner threw an epic temper tantrum. He called us snakes. He also likes to call my partner and the other Latinx artist “lazy Mexicans.” We painted the front wall of the new shop a juicy pink called “hint of cherry.”
“How the fuck did we get here,” I asked him.
“I don’t know. Too dumb to know better, I guess.”
I was in grad school then, taking a class with a well-known performance artist who was really hard to work with. She told me stories about friends whose babies were injured by homebirth and vegan diets. She showed the film “The Winter Soldier,” and the work of Sanford Biggers, we read Sontag and Derrida. It was an evening class. I was always so tired. We discussed Kenneth Goldsmith’s reading of Michael Brown’s autopsy and for the first time, I saw the slaughter of black men by police through the eyes of a mother. I imagined how it would feel to identify my son’s body. A crime scene report diagramming the feet currently pressed against my ribs, their location relative to pavement and bullets and blood taken to trial and then having to hear about some asshole poet reading the autopsy onstage in a terrible jacket. And then some dumb white girl comparing her privileged struggle to that kind of pain.
Two or three of my old boyfriends talked about never wanting kids. I still keep up with them and they haven’t changed their minds. They didn’t want the responsibility, maybe the day-to-day drudgery of parenthood, but also of subjecting another human to the injustice and humiliation of modern life.
I’d heard about the misery of 2 am feeds and about how artists don’t get 401k’s or have human resource departments to complain to. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of how hard things would be or how easy they would be for me compared to other women and families. I knew breastfeeding was going to be hard. I knew diapers were gross. I didn’t imagine that my dog would pursue the ingestion of so much pee and poop, sometimes straight from the source. I didn’t foresee holding a hot but clean diaper on my nipple for hours to dislodge a blocked duct, basically a giant pimple in my tit. I didn’t imagine being woken up by screams of “HE HAS A WORM MAMA HE HAS A WORM IN THE HOUSE THERE’S A WORM” or catching kid puke in my bare hands on New Year’s Eve and having to leave the party early before anyone got to eat dinner. I didn’t realize that no one I worked with would care that it was almost 11 pm and my kids had only eaten lemonade and a handful of M&M’s.
I didn’t imagine spending my son’s first spring break making hundreds of masks instead of party favors, joining a squad of other women sharing patterns hacked to fit tiny toddler faces. I couldn’t have known that protecting them would be seen as a political stance, that we would have to wear them for so long, that when we finally went back to work and school it would be putting our whole family at risk. That our hearts would eventually break from COVID anyway. I knew that racism infests every element of American society. I knew that my kids would likely be very white-passing. I didn’t understand that talent and hard work still wouldn’t be enough to save their Dad from being treated like a farm animal. I didn’t know I’d fall in and out of love twenty-five times a week. I still can’t know that any of us are ever really safe. I didn’t know how much I’d hate myself under the weight of “every fucking decision I make might fuck these kids up forever.” I didn’t know how isolating motherhood would be, even before pandemic life forced us apart form everything we do to recharge. How it might feel to be far from home when someone is so sick. To be so utterly helpless. To always be awkwardly too much and not enough and feel so weird at parties, both kid ones and adult ones. That I’d feel like such a jerk for never being able to eat the cake. That things are always weirder and more dehumanizing than you expect when you’ve been raised to believe in land of the free and sky’s the limit.
Certain people love to blame others for their struggles to avoid taking responsibility for their own complicity. As if informed consent means you gotta enjoy all of the shit side effects.
“There’s plenty of help out there if they’d just look for it.”
“If you’re not breaking the law, you have nothing to worry about.”
“This is just a bad flu.”
“We’re all gonna die from something, right?”
Deciding to become a parent doesn’t mean you have to feel supported by suggestions to “take a Mommy timeout!!” or “hold a family dance party!!!” Earning a living as an artist – or a sex worker, farmer, surgeon or whatever the fuck – doesn’t mean you are any more or less entitled to respect, dignity, a safe workplace and time with your family. We deserve more than wine o’clock memes and mommy-daughter matching separates, the bare minimum always being written off as a handout. We deserve more than “You got this, Mama!” and “Pursue your dream!” because we fucking don’t, and this is not it. And none of it feels good if people are dying all around us because our society values individual rights over universal equity. None of it feels good, and yet I have so much. Where do I put those feelings? We owe our kids more than do-overs for all the Zoom birthdays. It’s not enough. It’s not okay. It’s not our goddamn fault.
Maybe it is dumb to not have known better. To expect more. To be opening a new business, to get a puppy, to be a vegan. To miss planning elaborate themed birthday parties and want the time off to do so. To plant a garden even though our soil is all full of gravel from the people that lived here before and who must have had a weird relationship with plants. Maybe it’s dumb to hope, to bring kids into a world where their peers are being jailed, to keep voting even though the whole system is designed to keep people out until we’re rich and/or white enough. But as the hordes of pearl and flag-clutching anti-maskers prove every day, dumb can be painted as patriotic or brave sometimes,too, right? Bold, inspired, one of those many words used to sell vaguely spicy foods to gringas like me. I don’t know any better. I really don’t. I don’t know that anything I can do or will know will make things better than what we’ve got, but doing it anyway matters. I’ve signed up to die fighting for better. Dumb and fighting.
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Why I wanted to make Pickled Peppers and Pickled Egglplant.
“There are many things that can stir up old feelings in this world. A scene, a sound, a taste. I have recently been thinking about some of the old feelings I remember from when I was a child. I remembered my grandparents and what struck me heavily was just the very smell of their house. A combination of garlic, olive oil, and various spices. But the memory it brought back to me was “Comfort” , and “Safety”. I remembered rows of Mason jars in my grandmother’s garage containing her ‘gravy’, of course, not to mention jars of both pickled peppers and pickled eggplant. I actually remember as a child not being particularly fond of the eggplant, but now, for some reason, I crave it!! Why?? I see now that it is some apparent attempt to recapture something important. I had decided to try to recreate some of these past feelings by making some of those foods that brought back so many memories for me. And thereby also passing on a tradition of something important. These traditions cannot be lost. We may lose sight of what is important occasionally, but let us never forget. Kristyn and I attempted to recreate something from the past. Hopefully to preserve and perpetuate something important! All my love to my beautiful daughter for participating with me in this endeavor. This has been my best Christmas ever!!
NOTE: Kristyn, Feel free to paraphrase and to change anything you feel…”
lasagna love
My Dad died at home and I can’t eat anymore.
We saw you on Chip’s birthday, lunch at Goldie’s but you didn’t make it time. Brought your order home brown and greasy.
Technology – death in the digital age. Hey Alexa, when did he stop eating? Last delivery from Grubhub, Flaco’s Downtown, fuck that place. I’m sorry, Sara, I don’t mean that. Maybe it was the burgers or the birthday cake, maybe it had nothing to do with yucca frita or the old hot dogs in the fridge.
Comparing records like I’m CSI. Credit card activity, Ring camera. Oh, here’s the Instacart shopper now, a bag of bottles you pulled inside, shaking.
When I walked through your house, after I could stand up again and after the police had been called, I looked around, context please, do you know what happened here ma’am, had he been ill, any reason to suspect foul play?
Cut limes, tonic water, a fat straw, nothing much to see here. Pepto Bismol by your laptop, Pedialyte, “World’s Best Pop.”
The first weeks, I ate and ate.
There’s this specific feeling I’ve had, a piece from the middle of the lasagna, has been edged out with a spatula. It’s lonely to look at, it’s stupid. What kind of a person? From wriggling static and disappointed texts, there’s now just a bare tense pain on the inhale. I filled it with delivery. Friends sent sushi and tacos and sandwiches, boba tea and donuts. After the funeral I wanted to press my whole body into a pizza from the place where I used to work, tomato sauce spa, holy water hot garlic and oil.
You loved food in a way that was so honest, before. When you were fat and not diabetic you called yourself “dessert boy,” you loved telling everyone how you ate your dinner like an otter. You walked down to the pool with a plate of fried tortellini once, golden against hastily toweled chlorine hair. Sushi at the sushi bar, chicken wings at the beer bar where you met your second wife.
My fists can tell you about pushing raw pork and beef into egg and breadcrumb before going to church that time to watch my boyfriend’s band play. Bussing our own table at Rino’s and feeling like a VIP, your girlfriend was the waitress so I got to walk through the back. Frutti di mare after the first time you let me smoke weed. Peeling garlic, pressing the fuck out of the eggplant, making sure the jars were sanitized and the lids had popped.
After I moved here, it was forever Satchel’s. I almost had a panic attack when I brought a date there after the summer. Because of course my marriage didn’t survive your death. When it happened, there was still sugar at the corners of my mouth, caramel crust from cafecito at my mother-in-law’s viewing. He learned to make the coffee after that but it was too late.
I moved into your house, used the last of my Grubhub inheritance and drank your Diet Mountain Dew. I had to start cooking and shopping for myself and the kids again and found nourishment akin to rubbing the edges of a sloppy excision, fingers retracing the chunk of nothing.
I think of food now and I’m reminded of having a body, of finding yours, of the salami pie I was going to drop off to you that day, of being a thing that has to function as more than an object for working and fucking. A million times a day, “oh this is how you must have felt,” drinking beers, filling nothing. And it all just makes me sick.
for Monica
-Take your meds
-Build a web
-Keep your mouth shut
-Find something you trust and hide it
Symmetry distracts, deflects: they’ll leave you alone, your scared/scarred/secret/sacred self
is safe with me, you broken thing. she’s missing one leg and exists In facsimile, injection molded plastic but ich und sie, the WE wir sind super super fluid golden, badass blood and glue
Only web will do dear goddess lizard make me new
One leg then the next: zip: all in silence, skip
Be a wolf, gray work
An orange drained not the color but all things bruised and bloated:
powder mildew and glucose tabs
Be an owl, be a widow
Peeling hands on peeling handrails
Be a huntsman, “bats & spiders”
Be a wolf
Be a wolf
outer space dirty south
The ice cream is freeze dried and I have to strap myself in to pee.
It feels like time is not slipping but sloshing by me; things happen in wet, ugly chunks, both good and bad.
I’ve been drawing more, but then for days I don’t, and it’s like it was just another pipe dream - that I should be able to do something (even this, waking up early, writing, literally anything that’s good for me) consistently. I organize some sources, write emails, put on my three jackets and scarves before I walk the dog. I drink red bull, find a few hours of kindness and generosity, then crumple myself back into bed. When I was fifteen, I found this old, crusty leather jacket at a thrift shop. It had gotten dry and damaged, probably a result of leaving it out in the Florida sun. It fit, but more like a hard cocoon or being encased like a rhinoceros in a plated skin. The jacket was a missing piece of the punk rock wardrobe puzzle, and I wanted to fix it up so bad. Leather conditioner, oils, stomping up and down on it with my imported steel toe boots, getting my stepdad to run it over and over with his pickup truck.
I only have bad habits, ruts and uncomfortable patterns. I keep them. They hurt. They fit.
My boyfriend Zak was the lead singer of a punk band back in these days - they called themselves "The Annoied." I wasn't allowed to go to many of their shows, or hang around and get drunk with them on Friday nights. So I made stuff. Zines, flyers, mix tapes, collages, angry letters. In English class that year, we were tasked with completing an independent research project on a topic of our choosing, so I chose to write about the band. I interviewed all my dirty suburban friends with spiked hair, I bought books on gender and subculture, referenced song lyrics and analyzed the role of different subgenres within the scene.
The Annoied broke up mid-paper, and the final work was so biased and bratty that even had Zak and I stayed together, the rest of them would never have let me back into the fold. Of all the writing I’ve done, it's the piece I am most - well, annoyed - about not keeping. Part of me craves the inevitable self-deprecation that would come from this twenty odd years later reading, the cringiness and whiny tone I’d find, but I also know there’s something valuable about what I did, why and how, and from a teaching perspective, the assignment itself. But mostly I want to remember what it felt like, the thrill of research as a practice of setting everything on fire, the validation of fearlessly watching bridges burn to the ground.
Maybe it’s best if every copy has been long since turned into pulp and living a thousand new lives as paper bags and Nike shoebox liners. I’m sure I searched my old pink file cabinet ten times when I was in the height of my COVID-Zak-limerence-fever dream. I was looking for anything to connect mea photo, scrap of fabric, journal entry - to transport me back - through him, to a better me. Instead, I ended up building an Adderall and rejection fueled rocket straight out of the Zakdemic and also my marriage, through my Dad’s death; the baby weight and clutter falling away, the grief turning into a star map.
And now I’m here in outer space. The days all look the same somehow although everything is brand new. I don't know I’m doing something monumental, but maybe this is what experiments look like. Mostly it just feels like orbiting the broken pieces.
