lofty metaphor

Yesterday, we got a couch for the apartment. Goodbye cruel futon! It was awkward as awkward can be carrying it up the stairs, though. I had to leave it in the hallway for many hours because I was unable to move it. I taped a sign to it saying "Sorry for the eyesore! Waiting for strong men to arrive." Then, at nine PM when Garrett came home and Rohin came by (and the landlord stepped out of his apartment), we took some allen wrenches to it, pried it apart, and wrangled the pieces up the stairs. I think of this like democracy. Everyone gets themselves a part, and it might be weighty and cumbersome but you still gotta bring it home.

Another news.

Sweet reader: Garrett's chapbook has been reprinted and is for sale at Achiote Press; if you missed it the first time around, here's your chance -- e-run, don't e-walk (ewok) to the website now.

We are having a most delicious curry (tomatoes, peppers, and onions) and watching TV (True Blood). This is a good day. Garrett says this is a boring post; what does he know (all my posts are boring).

hah hah hah

In the next few months, I will be in Chaffey Review and Post Road. I hope that if you see those publications you will pick them up and have a look at them; I am bloody stoked to have been picked up.

Also, please do (me; yourself) a favor and check out the new issue of At-Large Magazine -- it will make you more vitaminous & your hair might grow faster*. The poets in it: Todd Dillard, Rickey Laurentiis, Janann Dawkins, Nanette Rayman, and Reid Mitchell.




*not proven by science or anything.

stick-figures of world leaders

Dear bloggers, look at my charming, well-behaved Romas! I am so proud of them. They climbed and vined for so long that I thought they were destined for out-of-control hooliganship on my windowsill, but eventually they settled down and became attentive to family matters. Today, I counted nine tomatoes in various stages of ripening. Indoors. In October!

My colleague suggested I make wallet-sized photographs and carry them with me to show people when they ask about my family, but I think that's a little morbidly over the top for something I'm going to eventually eat. Then again, I once was a teenage goth; the dregs of that attitude are still there, so maybe it's not that outlandish to be cavalier about matters of life and death. Also it would be a really great way to confuse the CVS photo lab people.

here's the sad story about a deer and a man

nukun niin kuin heräävät heräävät -- "sleep the way the waking wake"

... How fantastic that the sonic repetitions in the two renditions approximate each other. I am so pleased with these versions. Or maybe just infatuated with the bright-edged illusion of my poems in "another language" -- the language of my childhood, the language that sits in the back of my brain all the time, waiting for its turn.

Also, this new TV On The Radio album. I think it's destined to be listened to only in late nights.

Also, Garrett brought me Johann Göransson's A New Quarantine Will Take My Place, and it's frantic, hopeless, weird. I have been reading it on the subway; this is probably contributing to the paranoid feeling that colors the edges of my days. When I say paranoid I mean shifty and self-conscious; when I say those words I mean no words at all, just a creepy staring statue.

poetry and various

Something about Avery Slater's found-poem on Pebble Lake Review is beautiful to me, right now. Please read it here and thank me later. Although maybe you already read it. In any case, I encourage you to look at it, perhaps again, now.

We are mere days away from launching At-Large's new issue, themed "Teeth." We have some new, wonderful, genre-bending stuff, and I'm quite excited for our lineup, who, once again, seem to uncannily work off each other. Also, the next issue theme has been finally decided: Airport/Motel. This means not necessarily those two spaces, but the kind of nowhere-space that they as spaces represent.

Now, I'll go to bed, I think; it's my second-to-last day at the old job tomorrow, and I'd like to be coherent.

pot-au-feu

The weather outside confirms: my hands and feet and nose-tip will be cold for the next four months. But I like it. I like the feeling that fall gives me: giddy and vaguely ravenous, yoked internally to some weird perhaps lunar force. I'm finishing projects left and right, and it feels good. This photo is a visual indicator of my general mood and mode:

Verifiable image proof of the rapidly mushrooming condo project next door to us. I left the flash off, so I'm sorry it's all blurry and unfocused and Halloween-orange, but I think it's somehow more accurate this way in terms of the vibe. I snapped it the other night when Garrett and I were walking back from the bodega. It reminded me of jack-o-lanterns, but in this photo it also looks a little like a bunch of makeshift barbecues lit on top of one another. It looks dangerous and kind of inviting at the same time. Either way, I'm glad to inhabit this place and time. Though when the radiators start furnacing us out of the room, I'm sure I'll la-la a different sort of song.