Alli Marshall's Blog, page 4
March 27, 2019
The songs of gentrification and capitalism and ghosts and loss
This is a poem I’ve been working on for a couple of months. It names a number of Asheville, N.C.-based landmarks, characters, and artists, but my hope is there’s something of the universal. So many of us are witnessing the loss of our communities to the juggernaut of development and wealth, neither of which ever do much to forward the arts or the creative culture.
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The Merle performing at Vincent’s Ear.
THE GHOST OF GAVRA LYNN
The man took the temperature
of this neighborhood and decided
in his boardroom that, yes, it’s time
to capitalize on what the artists
built. The ambiance of ingenuity mined
from the rubble. Construct a hotel
to tower over the coffee shops and dive
bars, over the thrift stores and book stores, over
the murals, over the graffiti tags, over the sharpie
love notes scrawled hurriedly
in bathroom stalls. The man wants to drink
the blood of the cash cow like milk
money. This is how capitalism feeds
itself. For that unquenchable thirst
I invoke the gutters of Water Street, which was
the name of this street before this town
was a tourist destination and just after the road
was cut through an indigenous graveyard,
the bones of the ancestors mingled
with foundation stones, the ghosts left to wander
with the working girls and the stable boys. Gutters
running with wash water and corn liquor
and animal waste and the heaving rains
of late summer, all running downhill
toward the river. I invoke the barred doors
of speakeasies where life went on in smoke
and jazz, out of earshot of Prohibitionists. I invoke
the rooftop that broadcast Appalachian country
music to the cities beyond the Blue
Ridge, and the road toward Beaucatcher Mountain
that might as well have marked the end of the world
because the bowl of the valley was its own nourishment
and its own famine. I invoke the courtyard
of Vincent’s Ear where everyone was sitting
while Jack White played inside because really
was he even that good? And wasn’t it better
to be together under a blanket of stars? I invoke
the ghost of Gavra Lynn, may she be not dead
but also may she not know how the places
she graced with her guitar and her warble
have been desecrated by the khaki-wearing
masses, by the herds of bros and bridesmaids
who could not hear her songs over their shrill,
stale merriment. May the khaki masses
receive the vision of heart to know the music
of this street. Its metallic buzz, its raw
yowl, its electric melee. And if they can’t hear it,
may they move on toward Charlotte
or Atlanta, some place large enough
to swallow them because it’s eat
or be eaten: The man who builds monuments
would say as much. I invoke the ghosts
of Cowboy and of Ramshead, misfits
sometimes troubled by this place but still
walking its broken pavements to find some sense
of self. I invoke the ghost of Perri Crutcher
gardening the alley where a building once
stood and where, in its absence, he made flourish
a strange Eden. I invoke the ghost of Eric
Legge whose studio was once
where Lazy Diamond is now, and where,
at some future date, Lazy Dimond will no longer
stand, but the breath and pulse of Eric Legge’s paintings
will go on and so, too, will the breath and pulse
of Lazy Diamond and all the tattoo shops
and record stores because sound
is a boomerang. Did the man who came to construct
Another statue think of this? That he can lay
brick and mortar over bones and dreams
but what remains is an energetic stamp, a soul
relentless in its vinelike climbing, its insistent
song. The man will build his boutique hotel
on a curse that is also a promise. A banishment
that is also a love spell. An evil eye
that protects its wearer and turns all others
away. Paint your transoms and your sashes Plateye
blue, man, because the haint that haunts
this neighborhood is a living ghost. A story
in motion, in the act of telling itself, a story
that wants to go on adding characters
and voices and the passing of time. It’s
not a commodity to be bought and sold, not
a resource to be exploited. It’s a thoroughfare
and a handful of cross-streets hemming
in a history that wends and snags
and spools itself outward and more
outward. A mending, a seam, a flannel patch
over worn denim, a knot that holds
like a choke sometimes and,
other times, an embrace.
March 22, 2019
Erotic spoken-word show, May 1
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March 15, 2019
WOLF’S CLOTHING
Image from Pinterest. No artist attributed.
It’s been a terrible week of world news. Terrorist attacks on a mosque in New Zealand, Israel launching air strikes at Palestinians in Gaza, a plane crash, refugees denied asylum at the U.S. border. I feel the heaviness and also I know I’m okay. I’m infinitely blessed and comfortable. I know this, but it doesn’t make me happy in light of the greater global sorrows. This poem, I hope, speaks to that. It’s personal. It’s a microchosm. But it’s also about the larger collective effort of rising and staking claim.
LAMBING SEASON
What do I know of triumph, anyway? I
spent the summer sweating in
an oversized sweatshirt to hide
the shame of my traitorous torso
when I should have flown
my name like a banner, like a kite — not
a child’s toy, but a bird of prey. This
is how we arrive at lambing season. Innocent
of wolves. Not unaware that they exist
but that we could be them. What is so great
about being a lamb? A frisking thing
in a green field, the breath of spring.
But the lamb is to the slaughter. This
was always the plan. Spring becomes
summer, lambs become sheep, girls
in oversized sweatshirts endure
a season of teasing and that is the portal
to adulthood. Arms crossed protectively
over breasts, over organs, over dreams
that would spool out red and wet
and shameful at the slightest jab. Be
not the jugular but the knife, be
not the pasture but the lifting wind, be
not the child’s toy but the bird of prey.
Don’t go quietly to slaughter but
pummel the drum of the dream, sound
the siren, come to battle with wings
wide, you fierce angels of mercy.
January 14, 2019
THE RECLAIMED HYMNAL
Inspired a ukulele made from repurposed church pews by the artist Zeke Leonard at Pentaculum 2019 — a craft and writing residency at Arrowmont School.
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Photo by Dan “Soybean” Sawyer
Say an instrument is born with all of its songs
intact, DNA in the material from which
it’s forged. A ukulele fashioned from repurposed
church pews, the wood still holding ghosts
of parishioners in Sunday best. Their noble
intent, clean sweat of palms pressed in prayer
or maybe in some darker deal. Forgive us
our trespasses and the salt of tears
folded into handkerchiefs. The resonance
of hymns and the counter refrain of despair. A symphony
requires every note, harmonic and dissonant, even
the ones meant only for the confessional
of solitude. But nothing that sings is solitary. Music
culled from other lives, recycled from stiff-
backed pews into an instrument that lilts
and sways and whispers of Hawaiian sunsets
slack-keyed, loose hipped, dance with me
it says, even though the parishioners didn’t dance,
at least not where they could be seen. But who’s
to say they didn’t glide and twirl in dreams
of Fred and Ginger, of hula on the beach, of love
unfettered and infectious as a melody. Clean sweat
of palms pressed in prayer or maybe some higher
calling. All love songs are sacred, so sing them
to whatever heart will listen.
December 21, 2018
Asheville Fringe show announced
Join me Thursday and Saturday, Jan. 24 and 26 for The Oracle of Everything (as part of the Asheville Fringe Arts Festival). There will be costume changes, interpretive dance, a smoke machine and I made my own tarot deck. Show at 7 p.m. at The Sly Grog Lounge. Tickets go on sale Jan. 1.
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November 21, 2018
Dec. 5 reading event
Culminating my year as the UNC Asheville Ramsey Library Community Author Award recipient, I will be giving a reading on Wednesday, Dec. 5, 6-7 p.m. Local musician Heather Taylor will accompany me. There will be snacks.
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Photo Adam Taylor
Much of the work I’ve been focused on for the past year has been around themes of women’s wisdom, the mythology and archetypes of femme-identifying people, and social justice. I’ll be sharing pieces from a collection about the Oracle of Delphi (and my contemporary interpretation of that phenomenon) as well as a new piece that seeks to weave the mythology of the Appalachian/Cherokee Wampus Cat with that of the 16th century Mayan jaguar goddess Ixchel. There will likely be an f-bomb or three.
More details here.
November 11, 2018
FUNDRAISER/magical poem giveaway
I’m participating in the 5th annual Mountain of Words Write-A-thon to benefit Asheville Writers in the Schools and Community. My goal is to raise $200, and I am hoping that you will help by sponsoring me as I write as much as I can for AWITSC between now and November 17. Click through to learn more and/or donate online or by mail.
Everyone who sponsors me by Nov. 17 will be entered in a drawing for a personal poem, by me, infused with magical intention. Positive magic only!
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October 24, 2018
WITCHWOOD, part 2
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SKELETON KEY
You collect them. One was stolen from a neighborhood
house empty of all traces of its previous owners except
the crystal knob on the hallway door and the thin
iron key. Whoever bought the house wouldn’t care
about the lives lived in it before, or the echoes of footfall
or the way long shadows took on the shapes of those
who no longer sit at the tables or gaze out the windows. You
wear the stolen key sometimes on a black cord. Strange
adornment, tattoo of some other life you can’t recall
but also can’t set down. Someone must carry the dead, otherwise
we live in overpriced apartments on desirable streets,
built on rebar and scaffolding, oblivious to what lies
below. We live on farms fallen fallow or over cemeteries
or the catacombs of Paris where tourists stroll along corridors
of bones. After you see a thousand human skulls, or maybe
just a hundred, they lose their macabre intrigue. You could hold one
in your hands and barely think of how we’ll all meet
the same outcome. Then the furniture will be hauled out
to the street, the empty closet locked with a one-of-a kind
key — clavical, phalange, metatarsal, cervical rib —
a thing that could be so easily misplaced.
October 22, 2018
Song + spoken word video
My talented singer-songwriter friend Heather Taylor recently invited me to collaborate with her on one of her songs. Jesse Hamm of Acoustic Asheville filmed this video of her performing “Up on a Mountain” with my poem “Collar of Wasps” in the middle.
October 18, 2018
WITCHWOOD, part 1
“Spooky house” by Wayne Woodruff. See his photos here.
This neighborhood had a name before it was colonized by Trader Joe’s and an endless stream of SUV traffic. Just because no one who lives here now can remember what it was called doesn’t mean you get to rename it.
You build your house on a graveyard and act surprised when the ghosts move into your hot tub, your gourmet kitchen, your wood-fired pizza oven. There’s a reason why houses from a hundred years ago had such small closets: no space for the dearly departed.
The ancestors are not impressed with your two-car garage, your home yoga studio, your posh amnesia. If you don’t call a place by its true name, you’ll dream of its former inhabitants. You’ll wake to them rattling like mice in your walls.
