Aimee Herman's Blog, page 10

Tonight!! Hydrogen Junkbox and Friends presents music and poetry!

Hydrogen Junkbox presents an evening full of music inspired by poetry and spoken word. Featuring the NYC band o’ poets Hydrogen Junkbox ( David Lawton, Aimee Herman, and Zita Zenda), plus special guests Davey Patterson (music maker) and TIDAL CHANNEL (theatrical spoken word paired with music)

Come to Dixon Place located at 161 Chrystie St in NYC. Doors open at 7pm/ show begins promptly at 7:30pm. This is a free show, but please support this fantastic venue and purchase a drink or some chips!

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Hydrogen Junkbox is a collective of poets and music makers in New York City. They have performed at the Brooklyn Wildlife Summer Festival, LaMama Experimental Theatre, Parkside Lounge, Stonewall Inn, and Dixon Place. Hydrogen Junkbox is David Lawton, Aimee Herman, Zita Zenda, and Starchilde.

Tidal Channel is the noise-poetry alliance of billy cancel (all words + vocals) and Genevieve Fernworthy (all music + instruments). Described by the New York Times as “sonic abrasiveness”, their work incorporates industrial synthpop, psychogeographical field recordings, and time-based performance. Two of their contributions appear on the “BC35: The 35 Year Anniversary of BC Studio” (2018, Bronson Recordings). More info at www.tidalchannel.com

Davey Patterson is a Canadian-born, New York City-based musician and songwriter. His credits are vast and varied, but these days, he lends his talents to TV’s “Late Show With Stephen Colbert”, “Late Night With Seth Meyers”, and musicians like Jon Batiste and Stay Human.

Everything Grows

When I was younger, and someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered with:

veterinarian

hair stylist

pastry chef

poet

teacher

writer

There was a time I didn’t know how many words I had in me. (I still don’t)

There was a time I thought, tomorrow may never get to know me.

There was a time I thought, is this the last poem I will write?

For ten years, I worked on a story that turned into something longer and will soon be all folded and ISBN’d and (hopefully) on bookshelves. I’ve been reading novels for much of my life; I never thought I’d be able to say I wrote one!

Everything Grows is an epistolary story told all in letters written from the point of view of a teenager called Eleanor writing to her bully who has just committed suicide. But it’s not all darkness. In fact, there is quite a lot of light in this book. This is her coming out story (in more ways than one). Taking place in 1993 in New Jersey, Eleanor find friendship and love in interesting places, and starts to locate more places on the map of who she yearns to be.

I am so proud of these words and thankful to Three Rooms Press for publishing Everything Grows in April 2019. So……make some room on your bookshelf!!!

A Kind of Practice

You measure out everything that circles. Like pills without the aftertaste side-effects medical coverage. You decide you have practiced long enough. You decide your local news feed could benefit from something like this. You decide not to swallow yet. Instead, you hold all these circles on the tip of your tongue, some guerrilla themselves down your throat. You have been searching for the cleanest options, you’ve made too much of a mess these days. You slide the tiniest questions behind your fingernails for them to find. You masturbate one last time using only toes and elbows. You briefly wonder what they will say, how they will pretend they knew you. You trace the expected size of their teardrops on your thighs, look at the oxidized moon one last time and become consumed.

A Separation (or Dismembered in disHarmony)

After the divorce, they split everything in half: torso, curdled hazel, garden soil brown, knees, the scars you inherited, the scars you gave her, fourteen moles carefully severed, chapters forty-seven through fifty-two, books (you requested all the endings; she begged for the acknowledgments), the ghost of your uterus, the ghost of her sex drive, that time that time that time she gave you, that time that time that time you never got to, grid paper, the tags they used to tag the buildings they crawled inside, half a song (mostly chorus), cracked voice, swollen cartilage, library card, flint, James Baldwin, pile of uneaten hair, invisibility cloak (barely noticeable). They grew their arms long enough to carry, to carry. Walked six years in different directions. Dropped what they had when they could no longer speak footprints. And then, started over.

museum of meat and diets and unconfirmed deities

With every cut of skin,

a circus of blood–

 

drops trapezing off veins

juggling moles, sun blisters

 

elephant trunk disconnected

from its rest– an arm

 

abandoned bodies may also be called

museums, the kind that are abandoned too

 

and underneath, dancers dancing death

a glow-in-the-dark complaint letter

 

Beneath the giving tree, a carnival of mountain lions

The moon is my pepper spray

These mountains, they climb me

I am floating over prairie dogs

I am tangled up in trees.

Collapsible Mesh

I swing on the scratches–

red twigs splintering your back.

 

Two erasure poems

scar your chest.

 

You sweat glittery, uneven tattoos

mosh-pitting your thighs.

 

Your eyes, a car door slam

during traffic, hitchhiking off road.

 

When we kiss, I taste a dungeon

of scars–  handcuffed and bleeding

 

a baptismal cut-up.

A Run-On of Deficiencies

And knee pads as footsteps are not enough

And carved out broken bedsprings are not enough

And Woolf and Lorde and Hurston and Baldwin are not enough

And wound shape comparison, whistle sharps are not enough

And spoons burnt from below are not enough

And museums and meditation, not enough

And reoccurring dreams of hostage not enough

And the sex you think you shouldn’t be having, not enough

And cage. And babies. And babies in cages. Not enough.

And the reason your body odors and resistance. Not. Enough.

And hymns. And disbelief. And disbelieving hymns. Not enough.

And liberated spines and discounted lacerations and everything we choke on that cannot be deciphered. Not. Enough.

And incubators and incubating and departments. Depart. Mental. Isms.

Not. Enough.

Archived and Bodily

After a certain age, you don’t have a figure; you have a body.”  —Bobbie Louise Hawkins

 

All of this is borrowed, isn’t it? This sky with tear-dropped cumulous barely belongs to any of us. What they used to whistle at is now pillowed and pockmarked, and if you look closely enough there is a misspelled slur. What would it look like to archive all of this. Catalogue recently pierced ear, measure diameter of hole still remaining in tongue, separate sod from soil, open up the grave behind heart.

Maybe it is erasure, maybe it has become too queered. All of this, symptoms. Your lassoed hair. The cigarette burn above right knee. The alleyway behind throat. All of the arguments which grime beneath fingernails. The places on your body which could have used stitches. The audiobook of your belly.

You don’t have to figure; all you need to do is body.

Red Potato

Sometimes, foxes pose for photographs beneath banners that spell out Happy Birthday.

Sometimes, it doesn’t even need to be your birthday to receive a relic from a corn goddess with hair made from coiled coconuts.

Sometimes, trees plant prayers inside their branches so if you sit beneath one long enough, you may start to understand the meaning of life.

Sometimes, you need to stop apologizing and just sing (even with eyes closed). It will feel like every single letter, misdirected or never written, suddenly arriving in your mailbox. And you will feel loved and listened and raw and cut-up and cut into and kissed all at once.

Sometimes, you need to confront. Tell a stranger that secret of what you did years 26 to 34. Dispose of your body behind a dumpster where you found that blue chair. Present a barely understandable presentation on the dissertation of your trauma. Call it something unpronounceable. See who remains.

Sometimes, you need to walk until enough blisters form to replicate the mountains you gaze up at. And you will trip over at least thirteen prairie dogs and leave half your hair in a bathroom no one uses just to see how closely people are paying attention.

On the back of a poem, there is a recipe called Red Potato.

Sometimes you wonder if life is a recipe and all of this (the tragic, the repent, the lies, the leftovers) are its ingredients. And the more you breathe, the better it tastes.