Aimee Herman's Blog, page 39

day 15: re/in(carnation)

���People don’t become what they were brought up to be, people become themselves.”

��� Sarah Schulman

You walk into a room and swallow as many cellular structures as you can. You ask yourself:��was this table, etched with unclear floral arrangements, ever someone with limbs?��

Furthermore, you wonder:��how much of what we once were parts of what we are right now.

You have begun to romanticize reincarnation as though it were a new love interest. You bat your eyes toward flashes of memory. You are unclear if these are��your��theatrical trailers of lives once lived, or just scattered bits of movies and conversations you’ve devoured on lonely nights.

When do you officially��become?

You were brought up to leave your elbows behind when eating at the table. Back erect and hair untouched while food fondled your lips. You were brought up never to cuss or complain. You were taught homosexuality was a sin, so you left yourself behind��for two decades. You were told to keep your hair long in order to be approachable. You were trained to walk away from who you felt you were.

Or are we perpetually��becoming?

You decide humans are always humans and do not reincarnate into inanimate objects like stones or light bulbs, but trees and water��are a grey area, since they move.

So, you may have been drops of water in that lake you swam in upstate this summer.��And you may have been splinters stuck inside the tree you straddle in the summertime during moments of mourning. And you might have been a slice of paper in a notebook that someone somewhere wrote poems in once.

Perhaps we are in constant modes of��arrival.

Perhaps we never��arrive, instead we transform into various shapes and sounds; there is no stopping point; there is no��complete. There is just being.

Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", becoming, body, life, memory, moments of arrival, poem, poetry, reincarnation, Sarah Schulman, trees

day 14: a punctuated affair

There is something deeply romantic about punctuation marks. They direct; they gather momentum; they are like fingers beckoning.

Several years ago, I was wooed by a question mark. This stunning curvature twisted around me and we made love without answers. We crossed borders on our tiptoes, twirling our tongues over mountaintops and forest hikes. I proposed marriage to this question mark and we spent our days researching our way toward a comeback.

But what started��as alluring, slurred into frustration. Breath became an elongated interrogation and suddenly we found ourselves apart.

On a Thursday morning while coffee spilt into my mouth, I looked to my right and immediately felt the heat emanating off an��exclamation mark. I was captivated by the volume of their speech. A week later and they plunged their screams inside me and questions were no longer a part of me. I gave up on wondering. I gave up on trying to understand what suffocated inside me. Instead, we yelled. We wrapped our skin inside howls and shrieks. This love was exciting, but. Overwhelming. And unpredictable. At times, unsafe.

We parted and I realized how difficult it can be to get over an exclamation.

I had��an affair with an��M-dash. This floating line asked me to undress it as we found our way inside a tiny bathroom stall in a bar on Delancey as we both tried to forget the haunt��of our significant others. This extra-long dash was taller than I and so beautifully feminine.��I gathered up their soft. They stained my neck with red and blue. It was only that night, but I could feel myself expanding.

I had been searching. I had an idea of what I was looking for, but could not seem to find the right shape. I met a��period, but they were too controlling. I almost thought I had met my match with a��comma��until I realized we were in search of different ways to pause.

Then.

On a Sunday. Past the point of cold but not exactly warm. New York City. Lights. Overpriced whiskey. A��semi-colon walked into the room; suddenly, I could feel the elocution of my lungs. And for once, I felt at home in my body. Perhaps because I was seeing another so comfortable in��theirs. We spoke and even in our shynesses, I had a sense that I had finally met the other half of my��sentence. An independent clause.

There is a pause inside us and a need to (be) complete as well. This is what is so beautifully complicated about a semi-colon. We are complete without the other half; and yet, so much more profound and elucidated by the other.

Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", body, gender, love, pen pal, pen pal love, poem, punctuation, punctuation love, semi-colon

day 13: coiled music.

dear pen pal,

I uncross my vocal chords to sing you a song about turtle shells. Did I ever tell you about the time I hunted a fence? Followed it through three cities just to see where it curved. And do you know where it stopped? Then, I tripped on a train track playing a Miles Davis song on a loop. And I forgot all the words, so I just hummed. Dance with me. Grab my dimple and make a wish.��Tell me this can last. Tell me how sore you are from breathing in new york city. And then there is that infamous story of onion skin and when you got to that tiny core of spice and unlatched seventeen tears; I counted, so I can cite this number as��real. Hey, you are flint. You occur from history. You arrive at my destination and I’ve been lost. How do you reach that key. That note of soprano snuck behind your tongue of alto. I can sing sometimes too. So, I stretch out my freckles like a ribbon of elipses and call out the chorus. And repeat. And repeat. Until you sing along.

Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", love, love poem, mix tape, music, pen pal, poem, poetry, songs

day 12: welcome in the chaos

There is no meaning without just a little bit of chaos. Gather up your gnawed-at wires and all those batteries scattered around your home like miniature rolling pins for miniature pastries.

Walk inside the worry of a wound.

You’ve thought about this for weeks.��No, months. (Years sounds far more dramatic. To be able to leave all your alphabets behind in order to enter a place without baggage.��Literally. Of course, metaphorical baggage will travel with you near and far, with and without passport.��Chaos is defined as:��complete disorder and confusion: snow caused chaos in the region.��Behavior so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions.��

We view this as odd, unfamiliar and troubling. But what if we welcomed in this chaos. If it left you to adventure. If it arrived at the answer to all your question marks. If it encouraged more photographs to be lived out loud, rather than viewed behind glass screens.

This is what I mean:��On a long train ride from one part of somewhere to another, a human gets up and begins asking every passenger– one-by-one– how their day went. It went a little something like this:

Chaos Encourager:��Hi. (spoken to someone stuffed inside a suit perhaps

more expensive than my rent payment) How was your day today?

Traveler 1: (silence)

Chaos Encourager: How are you adjusting to this weather? Did your

feet stay warm? Today, I thought that if I were to title this day,

I might call it a grumble of shivers. Do you ever think like

that? Hey, I really like your tie.

Traveler 1: (silence, then…looks up from cell phone game with

neon colors) Thank you. Thanks for noticing.

I know what you are thinking.��There is��no way this actually happened, but it did.

We forget to notice what needs to be noticed.��Others. The smell of the air. The instrumentation of the rain outside, which may be a bother because it makes everything wet, but it also sounds like a��symphony��of percussion.

Chaos just means interrupting the��norm. The quiet. The undisturbed.��

What are we so afraid of? What if we were to break these habits of looking away? We��forget that if we were to lift our heads from cell phone hypnosis, we might find actual��meaning to things.

chaos.��disorder, disarray, disorganization, confusion, mayhem, bedlam, pandemonium, havoc, turmoil, tumult, commotion, disruption, upheaval, uproar, maelstrom; muddle, mess, shambles, free-for-all; anarchy, lawlessness, entropy.�� an order to the��disorder.

Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", adventure, chaos, life, move, movement, poetry, questioning life, relocating

day 11: fall.

“She is a letter in the / envelope of your body” ��–r. erica doyle

1. You don’t always know. You don’t always know when you lose something. You don’t always know when you lose something, especially when you may never have had it in the first place.

2. Suspend your disbelief for just a moment when I tell you that��sometimes love travels with you in silence until you are ready to��fall. Until you are ready to articulate your dark, your scary, your spider webs, your uncertain.

3.��“I knew when I could combine the disconnection of my nude with my clothed and they still loved me. When I wasn’t shamed into a gender that did not feel like my��own, I knew they were��the one.

4. Letters. Post. The intimacy of handwritten articulation.

5. Be someone’s Autumn. (Translation: Show all your colors and encourage them to show��theirs. Be an adventure, as you give yourself permission to fall and��be and belong. Mesmerize.)

6.��“She is the gape of a second.”��–r. erica doyle ��(Translation: Do not look away because there are moments that are like gasps and you may meet someone who steals your blinks away. So brief. But in a sliced-open��second, love can be found.

7. The others do not have to hide. You can still find room inside the carved box of your mind to love the others. To remember them. But do not romanticize. There is a reason they are no longer in sight. But love never goes away. It just��elipses……

8. Ray LaMontagne on repeat.

9. Unfold your hiding spots and play��seek.

10. Love like you have not watched any of the movies.��This is��your script to write.

Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", falling in love, gender, human, love, poem, queer, r. erica doyle, searching

day 10: body as a project

The following is from a project I took part in called��Body Stories. I was asked to free write about my body. This is what fell out.

You can click on the link below to listen. Also, the transcript is below as well.

http://www.bodystories.nyc/new-page

Transcription

Is there such a thing as fat free? And what are the good fats and is my fat good fat? Only when I was a baby, was my fat caressed and ok���d. My mother unfolded my layers before bath time to reach my folded skin. When I was in middle school she told me someday I���d reach 100 pounds and that is when everything remains. Stretchmarks. Cellulite. Things are looser now and how far along are the muscles? Big is too big and small is not small enough. MATH: Zero is not a number is zero a number? I am recognizing reflections in my skin. Nineteen years of age. Twenty-six. Thirty-two. I eat what my body tells me to. Not NY Times diet trends or my mother or lovers. My belly is schizophrenic and sometimes I am ok with these voices and sometimes I want to starve it away. Girdle it gone. So now I am thirty-four and my thighs are blurry and layered with guilt and years and I am in search of a mirror that that not mislead me. Today I am nude longer���ok in my hair and dryness and flabby and the flesh that refuses to harden. All of this is comforting. There was a time I think maybe I wanted to hide so I added more. What is left? I am a chalkboard of rejected menus���dust still soaking the air, reminding me what I���ve tried, attempted, lost track of. Scars. Scars. Here. Over here. Beneath here. And the worst are the invisible ones. And the worst ones are the ones that have been here the longest���birthed new ones���scars��� offspring. I am my body���s bully. At this age, my mother just reminds me to eat as though I���ll forget. She always wants to know what I am having for supper���maybe because it has been so long since we have had it together. Her body is my future body is her body my future? Diabetes. High cholesterol. Thyroid issues. Sad skin. Medicated, depressed skin. Liver spots and aged neck. And this is my future? If my body came from hers, is that my future?

I never grew up in a house where it was all about, “You must look a certain way,” but, in a really normal way, if we gained or lost weight, it was acknowledged. Everything in our cabinets was fat-free, or sugar-free – diet everything. My mom was in Weight Watchers for a time, and my sister was in Weight Watchers for a time, and that’s how it was. When I was growing up, and I was starting to create all of these scars on my body, then I became so embarrassed of my body and I never showed it. And so, for me, my body’s story is that I have scars on my arms, and they’re not going to go away. In a way, I think it’s important that I still see these scars because they’re a part of me, and they remind me of where I was at one point, and where I’m really not. Our bodies are evolving. They don’t stop. It’s like shedding skin. We’re shedding all over the place and it’s kind of beautiful.

Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", awareness of body, body stories, body stories nyc, celebration of skin, fat, http://www.bodystories.nyc/, http://www.bodystories.nyc/new-page, scars, self-harm

day 9: elixir.

“What we need, is a break out. Out of our lives, out of Seattle, out of the dumb script of girl.” ��–Lidia Yuknavitch

I search for the��gentleman inside me. Swallow elixirs in order to make sense of the smoke and rough. I��obsess over the wing span of my spine. How many words can I bench press. What can I digest in order to turn my body into a billboard reflecting what I really feel.

I visit an alchemist in the west village named Saje. This��elixir mixer gesticulates me to sit down as he��peruses narrow shelves with a collection of bottles, all varying in sizes.

Achillea millefolium, the alchemist speaks.��Scent of��chrysanthemum. It will carry away your wounds.

I grab this blue bottle with scratches like scars along the side from the alchemist. Inhale some of the liquid and drip it onto my weary tongue.

It will swallow your pain. A tonic for the blood you weep over,��he spoke.

At home, I drink enough tea to float me away. When I walk, I can hear the tea leaves slosh around like an ocean of impatient waves.

My bladder empties and fills and empties and I take more drops of elixir in order to fill in the lines of my soul.

Previously��in the west village, the alchemist had said to me, Take this ocimum tenuiflorum. Its holy will remove your fever. The heat of your questions scalding the remains of your day. And I am throwing in urtica dioica to treat the��hemorrhage��of��your worry. Be mindful of servings. You can overflow your heal.

There are some parts of bodies that have no answer. In the most intimate parts of the day or night, I close my eyes and pretend away some of my bones. I wonder how my skin will fall. I cut out words from newspapers and magazines stuffed into my mailbox. I throw these letters in with the hot water and tea leaves. I drink sounds. I swallow fragments. All these pre-recorded meanings become something else. I give birth to something else. And��this cannot fit into any box because these words are just beginning.

All of this is part of something similar to healing. Closer to��meaning. Touching the tip of what all this means to be alive and searching because all these��scripts are subject to a rewrite.

Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", alchemist, body, elixir, finding oneself, gender, healing, poetry, salve

day 8: how to turn loss into a movement of yellow.

Dear J,

Remember that time. We twisted maps with tongue ring and toenail. We terrified whiskey. We tumbled down staircases from the push of childhood fists. We made mix tapes and love as though we were experts at music and��feeling. We died seven times in the calendars we were together. Remember.

I want to sew you a quilt made from iron and calcium to strengthen the heave of your tear ducts and remind you that loss is also an arrival of��life. Each breath dies upon exiting, but also becomes reborn with each��inhale.

I remember hearing her voice once. I cannot recall if she called me or you pushed your plastic against my ear but I could hear the vocation of her smile.

*

I was recently encouraged to write a poem about love and I dug up an old one that lists every name that ever entered my body. That is, the ones I could remember.

Do you remember that Irish pub off St. Marks. I want to write a poem about the parts of speech that stung our livers far before the liquor reached us. How can skin flirt even when sad or lying. Even when it is mourning in such a loud way that swallows cannot be heard.

I never told you that I stopped kissing you because my favorite song came on your borrowed car radio and it reminded me how alone I needed to be.

I lost a tooth one month ago.��Well, a filling.��It arrived in my mouth after that evening I was with you. And I had fallen. Nine stitches. Do you remember.

I lost my middle name almost twenty years ago.

I lose hair all the time.

I lose weight in the wrong spots.

I’ve lost several friends due to my inability to be myself enough.

Remember that time. You started over in new city and found your way. Remember the courage you had to leave.

Loss is the end of something, but it also begins something else. Remember.

Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", letter, loss, love, memory, poem

day 7: glitter

Not so deep in the bellows of my belly lives a disco ball. At night, I can see the illuminated squares rotate from within and when I pinch my skin, I can see the reflection of all my meals. Neon dinner. Rotating snacks.

Look closer, and one can see the ransom notes I’ve sent to various parts of my body. Over the course of many years I’ve patched together letters, addressing my bones and bends. But today, I want to turn my body on. I want to celebrate the glitter blinding me. Bits of confetti exhaling out from my pores and pounding me into a new shape. Skin looking a bit more like a holiday collage of colors.

Several night ago, I watched a human on stage dressed in so much glitter, one might believe they were a flesh-covered disco ball, spinning and singing about the history of their body and gender. I sang along because sometimes bodies share songs like maps in glove compartments all across the country and beyond. So many of us are looking for the same road…it just takes us awhile to get there.

Detours.

Potholes.

Road blocks.

Poorly lit roads.

At the end of this human’s performance, there was the repeated mantra that sometimes we must leave things behind in order to move forward.

I have traveled with this disco ball inside my body for many years. Perhaps since birth. I went years with it laying dormant inside me, barely reflecting anything besides the confusion of my blood. Only recently, have I rewired it, shining squares that never saw light.

I agree. Sometimes we do need to leave things/thoughts/humans behind in order to come closer toward an entry point.

Upon rummaging for this disco ball, I found more EXIT signs than I could keep track of. I went on a long walk in search of an “S“. Put on two scarves and two pairs of socks. Two pairs of pants and several sweaters to keep me warm– I had no idea how long this journey might take.

It had been several hours and hunger started to arrive in my system. I ignored the growls, and suddenly noticed something beside a pinecone. It was what I had spent all day searching for. The “S“.

When I got home, I slipped off all the layers and found my nude. I dug deep inside my body and could feel the rotating disco ball. This made me smile. I grabbed as many EXIT��signs as I could find stuck to my bones, and pulled them out. I found one stubborn one behind my ribs; I pulled it out and stuck the “S” to it.

Sometimes we need to leave things/thoughts/humans behind in order to remember how to��EXIST.

Filed under: WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", belly, body, disco balls, gender, genderqueer, poetry, ransom notes to body

day 6: poems out loud.

Here are two poems I read at Parkside Lounge at an evening celebrating the great poet, John Sinclair.

Several years ago, a poet said to me: Write the poem that will get you in trouble. So, I immediately thought about the first time. Freshman year of high school. I was still practicing Sylvia Plath’s name on my tongue. I was falling in love with Bob Dylan and Lou Reed and I had enough sadness to melt the sun into a puddle of tears. I read a poem of mine in front of a room full of strangers during a school��assembly. Teachers who did not know me started worrying for my life. The guidance counselor called me in. Everyone worried about me and my safety.��Do you want to hurt yourself? Do you have a plan?

I had no idea the power of words until that moment. I didn’t exactly get in trouble, but I did get noticed.

There was that time I thought I hated men, so I wrote a poem that would taint my breath for years. It was one of the first poems I ever read at an open mic. Strangers called me angry.

The one I wrote about the only boy I ever loved. It didn’t get me in trouble, but those words haunted my palms for years.

I’ve written poems that have outed my sexuality, my identity, various jobs I’ve accrued that I’ve left off resumes. I was never looking to get��into trouble. Instead, I just wanted to feel heard. Like that��first time at the assembly when finally people started to��see me.

Words clarify the blurriness of our existence.

I smuggle poems all the time: in my pocket, against my hips, stuck to my cracked heels. I’ve swallowed so many that I have a permanent ache in my gut. I’m not looking to harass anyone’s eyes or brains. I’m only looking to cause a commotion with your one-way thoughts. I want to twist your mind into questioning what you think has only one answer to.

OK, maybe I am��looking into getting in just a little bit of trouble.

Filed under: SHOWS | video, WRITING | rambles Tagged: "aimee herman", body, coming out, depression, gender, genderqueer, John Sinclair, NYC poet, open mic, Parkside Lounge, performance poetry, poem, poems out loud, sad, smuggled poem