Aimee Herman's Blog, page 19
November 12, 2016
make america safe (again)
Dear America,
I am queer. I am emboldened. I am angry. I am peace. I am white. I am an atheist. I am gay-marriaged. I am trying to believe in you again.
America, I am a teacher with students who are being targeted. I tell them their brains must keep them loud, must keep them present, must keep them learning. I tell them to remember why they are in school. They are making America better. Because they are working hard to succeed toward their dreams.
America, your graffiti-hate-crimes, your misogynistic superiority, your fists, your intolerance will only cause us to grow stronger. Not meaner, not violent. But firm in our beliefs to remain united.
America, your flag has never just been WHITE. It has included other colors, which is why it waves so valiantly. To bleach yourself, America, is to forget what has made you what you are.
We are a country of immigrants. Of people who came here with dreams. With nothing. With hopes. With empty pockets. With love. Exhaling trauma. Desiring opportunities. We are a country where we need to be holding hands now, not wrapping them around guns or insults.
Dear America, it is far easier to love. To accept. To be kind. To say hello.
Grab a ginkgo leaf. Hand it to a stranger. Let them know these trees date back to the dinosaurs. That they are medicinal and their leaves are shaped like wishes.
STOP being mean, America. We all belong here. We all deserve a chance to succeed here. To fulfill our dreams. To be kind.
Are you listening?
Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", i love you Hillary, meant to wake up feeling, post-election
November 4, 2016
Climate Change
originally published by great weather for MEDIA
It begins to feel amiss once you walk inside it.
If one of my students had written this sentence, I’d write: who or what is “it”?
It is this election-aggression, this chaos of season change, shift in age bracket from young to invisible, status of single shifting to a bit more traditional.
It can be racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamaphobia, transphobia. All the isms and ‘obias plaguing us too loudly these days.
*
Hélène Cixous wrote, “In the beginning, I adored. What I adored was human. Not persons; not totalities, not defined and named beings. But signs. Flashes of being that glanced off of me, kindling me.”
I’m just/looking to be/kindled.
Instead, I feel like the residue– the ash, the dust, the remains of what was but no longer. Our climate is changing or we are and perhaps we need to pay closer attention to the scorch of storms clearing us out.
*
I send a message out to my friend out west, “I am failing at being an adult.”
Cixous wrote, “Perhaps being adult means no longer asking yourself where you come from, where you’re going, who to be. Discarding the past, warding off the future? Putting history in place of yourself?”
Replacing it, I guess, with thoughts of things:
Accessories, adornment, matching placemats, furniture upgrades, grocery shopping, electricity bills, daily selfie uploads, health care coverage, car payments, doctor appointments, pap smear, teeth cleaning, arnica, paxil, lithium, clonazepam.
We are I am so deep inside the distractions of external, that we are I am forgetting to work on within.
*
Yesterday on the 4 train headed uptown at just before noon, I hear a woman (out of eyesight) yell at a man accompanied by bike. I am standing, suctioned between the other commuters, trying to balance book in my hand. I hear her yell at him for being in the way, “you should ride your bike, not take it on the train,” and so on.
We (fellow travelers) do not respond. We don’t react. Until. She says. “Go back to where you came from.”
Suddenly, a chorus of gasps fill the 4 train mixed with how dare yous and eye rolls.
Two stops later, I get off at Fulton Street and climb away from the anger fuming through the train like a smoke bomb. I feel hurt and disappointed and very, very tired. I am worried I will be coupled with this person. This woman. This white woman. Worried I look too much like her and people will assume we are the same/feel the same/act the same.
Which is what we all keep doing: assuming those in particular groups, similar genders, religions, ethnicities, races, sexual orientations, … are all the same.
We. Are. Not.
*
The climate has changed and I am manically purchasing rope. Everyday, five block walk to hardware store, buying out their stock until the next day, when I go back and purchase more. And with this rope, I make knots to add to its length. Longer. Longer. Create a noose. (This is not what you think.) And when it’s long enough, I aim this lasso toward sun, and bring it closer. Force its light in. To lift us out of all this all this dark.
Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", body, climate change, election overwhelm, great weather for media, meant to wake up feeling
November 1, 2016
Things in Do in New York City (# 2)
To call it dark, would not be enough. A campsite at 3am after all the wood has burned and the stars have shut their eyes. Lungs, after a lifetime with nicotine. Or meat left on a flame, forgotten due to a lover’s quarrel. That dark. The pigeon led me down to where the rats grow old, to where humans learn new ways to be human. The mole people. The subway shadows. Where garbage grows wings, fluttering over the tracks like ghosts. Here, we gathered to share one slice of New York City pizza together. Cheese congealed after waiting too long–slowed down by the other: short legs of humans, lack of wings on I. As we gathered up calories, we spoke in languages neither of us shared, on all the ways we’ve loved before. Seventeen times for me, and only once by this pigeon, unrequited and undisturbed. Towards a letter it once carried. Many, many years ago,
Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", meant to wake up feeling, pigeons, prose poem, things to do in NYC
October 30, 2016
List of Things to Do in New York City
Eat pizza with a pigeon below West 4th Street, where the rats grow old, and swap stories of all the times we’ve fallen in love
Grow a garden of nasturtiums on a rooftop belonging to someone I’ve never met before
Learn Spanish
Learn French
Dig a hole somewhere in Prospect Park and plant love poems
Crash a movie set
Go to the library and read as many books as I can in one day
Fall asleep beneath a cloud shaped as Manhattan
Greenwood Cemetery. Find Basquiat. Dance with him one more time
Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", list poem, meant to wake up feeling, new york poem, things to do in NYC
October 23, 2016
Thank you, Canada, for reminding us we aren’t so bad
I fell in love with Canada over eight years ago when I met someone who reminded me how to see the world in all its brightest colours.
I have always lived in The United States; I have not always felt pride by this admission. It’s not an easy time to be an America….though one could probably add that it isn’t so easy to be a human wherever you live.
Thank you, Canada, for taking the time to tell us (America) how great we are.
Love your biggest fan,
Aimee.
Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", Canada, Canada pride, election time, hard to be an American, I love Canada, meant to wake up feeling
October 15, 2016
Are you a Writer???
To all the writers in search of some readers, I encourage you to submit your work to…
great weather for MEDIA!!!
Submissions for our 2017 anthology are open October 15 2016 to January 15 2017.
great weather for MEDIA seeks poetry, flash fiction, short stories, dramatic monologues, and creative nonfiction for our annual print anthology.
Our focus is on the fearless, the unpredictable, and experimental but we do not have a set theme for our anthologies.
**We highly recommend reading one of our stunning previous collections to see the type of work we love. Let us know in your cover letter how you found us, and any feedback on what we have done so far. We are based in New York City and welcome submissions from national and international writers. For submission tips, check out our interviews on Duotrope and The Nervous Breakdown
We are thrilled to announce our 2017 guest prose editor is Lynette Reini-Grandell. Read our interview with Lynette.
We accept work through Submittable only. Work sent via email or snail-mail will not be read. You may set up a Submittable account for free and we do not charge a reading fee. Your account will be created during the first step of the submission process.
Finally, please read the guidelines! We do tweak them each reading period in order to improve our submission and selection process.
Filed under: "self diagnosed lactose intolerance" Tagged: "aimee herman", anthology, great weather for media, place to submit for writers
October 14, 2016
one hundred heart burns
The mothers count fingers of new babies to catalogue what is missing, but in New Jersey, everyone forgets about what hides.
Later on, they prescribe away the wild to cure what existed in utero.
It is easier to eat out of boxes to bloat away a language.
“Allergies, nine stitches, burnt heart from misread temperatures, airplane, haircut, broken teeth, pierced tongue, that time that time: drugs, a silent no, split ends, abandoned diets, balance beam of stretch marks, not enough time.”
I am not sure where I began, but I know I am still beginning.
Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", body, Brooklyn poet, meant to wake up feeling
October 7, 2016
Celebrate Teachers who Write on Saturday, October 8th
Writers who Teach. Teachers who Write.
The Word Cabaret presents LEARNING CURVE. A celebration of NYC Educators reading poetry, prose and perhaps a little music mixed in!
SATURDAY, October 8th, 2016 at BWAC (second floor performance stage) located at 499 Van Brunt St. in Redhook, Brooklyn at 4pm
FEATURING: Aimee Herman, Brett Burns, Nicole Smith, Danny Shot, O’Hagen Blades, Raquel Goodison, Avram Kline, and Tim Tomlinson
Filed under: SHOWS | video, WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", Avram Kline, Brett Burns, Brooklyn literary reading, BWAC, Danny Shot, LEarning Curves, meant to wake up feeling, Nicole Smith, NYC lit reading, NYC teachers who write, O'Hagen Blades, Raquel Goodison, Tim Tomlinson, Word Cabaret
October 3, 2016
Thank you BOMB for publishing my poems!
A writer writes.
Some writers keep their words inside notebooks to simmer and steam. Other writers pass their words out like meals to be eaten. Whatever kind of writer you choose to be, the words still remain.
Here are four poems recently published online by BOMB Magazine. I am so grateful to the editors, specifically the marvelous Raluca Albu. They publish quality work, and I am humbled by having some of my poems part of their publication.
Check out my new poems HERE!!!
Photo by Gwen Dolin, 2010
Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", BOMB, BOMB magazine, meant to wake up feeling
the sexual orientation of hair
first published by great weather for MEDIA
“my haircut came out before I did” –Anonymous
1.
You cut your hair on a Tuesday when the newspaper revealed
fourteen different murders spread out in over five different territories.
On page eleven, there was an interview with a survivor of sex trafficking
who had just written a book, which seemed to receive high praise. The weather
outside could have been described as drab or B-movie-horror bone chilling.
But none of that mattered because you cut your hair from twelve inches or nine
to two or four and now you are no longer what you were.
2.
When you were seventeen, you grabbed the slightly rusted scissors found in
mother’s coupon drawer, stormed up to your purple-drenched bedroom and
began severing all the compliments out of your hair. You watched a puddle of
the only thing anyone ever noticed about you cover the floor. You refused to
watch as you amputated each strand, tufts at a time. And then, you turned around
to face your massacre and you smiled. Because now, the only thing distracting away
from your face is what really matters: your brain.
3.
Your parent sees you post-shear and asks why you always feel the need
to make yourself unattractive. You wonder why hair means so much to
others, when it contains no tongue and chords to speak and impress.
4.
Can be used as camouflage to hide and protect. You use this method to conceal
the parts of you which do not match the way you feel inside. See: vagina
5.
Before, when it fell past your shoulders, the whistlers called you beautiful and sexy.
Compared you to princesses and paper dolls. After, everyone forgot to look.
6.
You learn that hair has a sexual orientation because when you no longer have it, suddenly
everyone sees you asgay or queer or a dyke or butch. All the words that were always inside
you and had nothing to do with your hair.
7.
There seems to be a binary in the non-binary of queer measured by haircut,
so you give in. You spend two monthsdoing research. Going to LGBTQ events
to study the queer coifs that seem to be in rotation. You catalogue about five
different kinds, but none would work with the frizz genetically burned into your
scalp, so you leave your hair alone. Hope you are still seen by just your presence
in the room. You give it fifteen minutes. Then forty. You leave having uttered
only the exhales of your oxygen.
8.
When you move to New York City, you worry about your leg hair. And all the
curls and stench beneath your arms.It is summertime and all the other female
presenters are smooth like sanded-down wood. You sit on subway, hoping no one
will notice. Then across, you see a gender-experimenting human with hair to match
yours. When they smile, it reaches your face and you feel seen for the first time in this
siren-soaked city. You stop worrying about others. You throw away your razors, which
at this point had just grown oxidized. You stop putting so much pressure on your hair to
define who you are. You buy a dictionary and start learning new words to call yourself.
You came out of the closet almost twenty years ago, so you stop allowing its contents to
define you as well. When you enter spaces, you stop waiting for others to speak to you.
Because you are tired of waiting. Because you know you are a beautiful anomaly.
But so are they. With or without hair.
Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", great weather for media, LGBTQ, meant to wake up feeling, queer body, queer hair
