Tattoosday (A Tattoo Blog): April 2016

Saturday, April 30, 2016

The Tattooed Poets Project: Sarah Cook

Today's tattooed poet is Sarah Cook who has a literary tattoo on her ribs:

Sarah tells us:

"This tattoo was done about a year ago, for my 28th birthday, by Jacob Hanks, who tattoos both in Portland, OR and out here at his smaller shop in The Dalles [Hanks Family Tattoo Co].

The line is from Anne Sexton's 'Hurry Up Please It's Time,' a poem that slays me with every single reading. My first relationship with Anne--high school years--felt traditional. I read her early stuff (Bedlam, All My Pretty Ones), and her confrontation of 'hard' subjects became a place of permission for me. I mean I can probably quote from Love Poems if put on the spot.

I grew out of her work as I developed my relationships with more contemporary writers and poetics, and then I came back to her and found entire new worlds of appreciation--the beautiful frenzied thinking she can accomplish within a sentence. Her later stuff, including what's been published after her death, is more patient, much sadder, more directly suspicious of god in a way that prevents her from ever setting god down.

She says, 'Abundance is scooped from abundance, / yet abundance remains.' It's a way to keep living."

Sarah also shared the following poem, which is from a longer series called Field Poems:

I wish I could look the field directly in the face but I’m forever below it

or rather, the field lacks

eye contact &

when feeling brave stares

straight in the direction of

possible love

& assumes

magic

with every face

that doesn’t look

away, i mean it learned at a young age how to hesitate, this field

yr car is

a woman but yr man

is a house

just because yr outsides look like this

the quiet

field mistakes silence

for solitude & sets up

its own car insurance

policy commits to

walking everywhere

remains ignorant

of its

celebrity stronghold

it’s hard not

to fall in some

kind of lovespace

with every un-

hesitant pair of

eyeballs if you

see something, say

something like this field i just can’t look away

so grass*belly*grass there

i said it

there’s nothing

between us at any

given moment but

clothes how

embarrassing

to go from

person to body

just like

that

misread “bruised”

as “buried” &

thought what’s

the difference

the weather isn’t fake

just controlled

& the field is just

far enough away

to not yet be thinking

about coming back

~ ~ ~

Sarah Cook is a poet. She lives in Oregon.

Thanks to Sarah for sharing her tattoo and poem with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

If you are reading this on another website other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Friday, April 29, 2016

The Tattooed Poets Project: Alex Giardino

Our next tattooed contributor, Alex Giardino, identified herself to me more as a translator than a poet, but one needs a poetic sense to be able to translate successfully, in my opinion, so she was in. Not to mention, her tattoo is a poem fragment by Kazim Ali, who not only has appeared on the Tattooed Poets Project before (originally here), but has been a wonderful help this past month referring me to other tattooed poets (and translators).

Check out her tattoo:

Alex shared the following with us, as well:

~ ~ ~

Escaping the Labyrinth

Tattoos, for me, are thunder strikes. They are conceived in a single moment of electric clarity. Like love at first sight. That was how I felt when I heard Kazim Ali read his poem “The Escape” in Napa one warm spring evening in 2014.

As Kazim stood before a crowd and read these lines, “Finally free of the labyrinth and overhead nothing but sky,” I felt a jolt of clarity. These lines must be printed across my right shoulder.

But, first, there was the labyrinth, a tattoo I had done in Mexico City in December 1996 at a studio somewhere in the Colonia Roma. It was my first tattoo: an image I stole from the cover of Octavio Paz’s book The Labyrinth of Solitude. I hadn’t read much of the book, and yet I was utterly familiar with his argument, especially this line, “Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.”[1] I had been living in Mexico for several months, unable to speak Spanish, in a failing relationship and often wandering alone down ancient streets. The tattoo would be my reminder of that time, when I felt trapped in a labyrinth of solitude. Despite twice being redone, the tattoo eventually became a dollar-coin-sized indigo blur on my left shoulder.

Flash forward to that warm 2014 evening, eighteen years later, when I was listening to Kazim read. By now, I had been freed of that sense of isolation and loneliness I felt in Mexico because I had found communion with other writers and with my own writing. Now, there was Kazim, a poet-teacher, reading before me and his boyfriend Marco, my fellow MFA student, sitting next to me--both of them a part of my extended writing community.

The thunder strike: I am free of that labyrinth, and to mark that awareness, a tattoo of Kazim’s words.

I waited a few months, until my birthday in late August, to have the tattoo done, a gift to myself to mark 48 years. It was inked at Spider Murphy’s in San Rafael, California. Waiting those few months to have the tattoo done gave me time to think about my understanding of Kazim’s lines and of the myth of Icarus and Daedalus that inspired them.

That myth tells us that creation cannot exist without destruction. The artist knows this. Invention for invention’s sake is not enough. Sacrifices must be made, and consequences faced. “To create a beautiful, well-wrought sculpture from a block of stone, one must destroy all the other possibilities inherent in the stone.”[2] When one story is told, a thousand others are not.

As I walked out of Spider Murphy’s with Kazim’s words on my shoulder, I wondered: What do I make now of the open sky above?

I choose stories to write every day, aware of the sacrifices and consequences of telling them.

[1] Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 195.

[2] Kristopher James Ide, “The Daedalus of History and Myth: The Meaning of Creation in Literature from Homer to Joyce” (Honors Thesis, Dept. of Comparative Literature, UC Davis, 2011), p. 30.

~ ~ ~

Alex chose to share all of Kazim's poem, from Sky Ward (Wesleyan 2013), with his permission, below.

The Escape

Father whose purpose swims

while the universe mends itself

Wind was water

porpoise was prophet

Father my swim

the sutured eventual blue splinters

Seed planter, hedonist

heathen when the unwise son fell to pieces

Purposeless when the father

flew for cover

The cloven will cleave

the water finishes itself, finishes me

Stream unreeling, you are

the end of the world, an endless horizon

It’s a sham, this charnel-choice

between heaven and home

Finally free of the labyrinth

and overhead nothing but sky

~ ~ ~

Alex Giardino is a writer, translator, and teacher living in the Bay Area. She received an MA from Mills College and an MFA from the Stonecoast Program at the University of Southern Maine. Her work has appeared in various publications and on air. She translated My Life with Pablo Neruda and is now at work on several picture books for children. More about her work can be found at alexgiardino.com.

Kazim Ali is a poet, essayist, fiction writer, and translator. His books include The Far Mosque, The Fortieth Day, BrightFelon, and Sky Ward He teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Oberlin. His website is kazimali.com.

Thanks to Alex for sharing her words and her tattoo with us here on Tattoosday! Thanks also to Kazim for inspiring the tattoo and for his continued support of the Tattooed Poets Project!

Thursday, April 28, 2016

The Tattooed Poets Project: Kait Burrier

Every year I feature at least one poet who I've met face-to-face and talked tattoos. This year, it's Kait Burrier, who I met last July at the NYC Poetry Festival on Governor's Island.

Kait posed for this photo for me:

Here's a closer look:

Kait explained the origins of this tattoo:

"Brittany, France is covered in triskels. Scranton, PA artist Mike Frenchko, formerly of Slingin' Ink and now at Electric City Tattoo, drew up my tattoo after I'd shown him a few images of this Celtic symbol. My tattoo brings me back to Quéven, a dreamy Breton seaside town with an incredible theater community that taught me about craft, communication, gratitude, and the tragicomedy of the human condition. They gave me a souvenir clown nose, but I've misplaced it; a tattoo seemed harder to lose."

Kait shared the following poem, which she wrote "in response to the William Carlos Williams poem The Young Housewife, reimagining a different scenario for his poem's subject." It appeared previously both in a zine printed by the Breaking Ground Poets and online at Inknode.

The Young Homeowner
after William Carlos Williams

When it is warm enough to strip
plastic seals from window sills
she will allow the sun
to dress her.
Neighbors will just
have to deal
with her nipples.

~ ~ ~

Kait Burrier writes poetry, drama, and to-do lists. Since moving to New York City in 2014, she has facilitated workshops, shared her work at local venues and in college classrooms, founded and hosted Union Square Slam, co-hosted At the Inkwell reading series, volunteered with Out of the Binders, Inc, wrote as artist in residence at Lemons Brook Farm, and worked in publishing, bookselling, and as a freelancer. She holds a M.F.A. (Wilkes University, ’14) and received the 2013 Wilkes-Etruscan Press prize. Visit www.kaitburrier.com for updates and publications.

Thanks to Kait for sharing her tattoo and poem with us here on the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

If you are seeing this on another website other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

The Tattooed Poets Project: Chip Livingston

Our next tattooed poet is Chip Livingston, who shared several pieces with us:

Chip's Tarot cards, Ace of Coins and Ace of Cups

La Sirena fresh and Jack of Clubs, part of spiral

Lila tattoos Chip's Sirena at Rock City Tattoos in Barre, Vermont

Chip tells us:

"Seeking to remember the advantages I might carry into any situation, I had Lila at Rock City Tattoos (in Barre, Vermont) put these 'cards up my sleeve.' The Jack of Clubs represents 'the man in the woodwork,' the secret admirer working on my behalf without my knowledge. The Ace of Cups represents abundance of emotional resources; the Ace of Coins represents abundance of physical resources. La Sirena from the Mexican Loteria reminds me of Iemanja, the goddess of the sea, who nurtures me in many ways. And with those charms under my skin, I feel prepared for anything. Above the cards on the right shoulder is a rough spiral, from the Egyptian hieroglyph for the verb 'to be.' And around the left bicep is a feather armband to represent my Creek heritage."

Chip sent us the following poem, “To Remove Anger” from his book CROW-BLUE, CROW-BLACK (New York Quarterly Books, 2012):

TO REMOVE ANGER

That man of black wood, that man with the blankets, give him a place to rest his
thundering headspin. Let him see an all-red man removing the venom from the
spider. Remaking tobacco with his right hand. To pacify the coiled serpent.

That man of black wood, that man with the blankets, wrap him a stick of red cedar
and build him a fire to heat the rocks he carries. Offer those stones creek water and
watch them crack into jewels. Help him dig a cave under the wet roots of a cypress
tree. Help him bury them.

That man of black wood, that man with the blankets, make him a supper of sofkee
and sweetcorn, roast him the red fish you call from the river, feed him ripe
scuppernongs picked with your fingers.

That man of black wood, that man with the blankets, remind him he is a kinsman, a
red man, a great wizard united with another great wizard, to fail in nothing.
Remake tobacco with the left hand in a counterclockwise direction.

~ ~ ~

Chip Livingston is the author of two poetry collections, CROW-BLUE, CROW-BLACK (NYQBooks, 2012) and MUSEUM OF FALSE STARTS (Gival Press, 2010), and a short story/essay collection, NAMING CEREMONY (Lethe Press, 2014). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, New American Writing, and on the Poetry Foundation’s and the Academy of American Poets’ websites. Chip teaches in the low-rez MFA program at Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM, and at Regis University’s Mile High MFA in Denver, CO. Visit chiplivingston.com.

Thanks to Chip Livingston for sharing his poem and tattoos with us here on the Tattooed Poets Project!

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

D. Gilson's Typewriter (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Today's Tattooed Poet is D. Gilson, who shared this photo with a glimpse of a pretty cool tattoo:

Knowing Tattoosday readers would want a better glimpse of the work (the photo is cool but the half typewriter doesn't really showcase the ink), Gilson complied with my request for a better photo of the tattoo, with a bit of humor:

D. Gilson explained that "this typewritter is the one Frank O’Hara used to write Lunch Poems, which is the book that made me want to become a writer more than any other." He credited Nathan Mould at Artisan Tattoo Gallery in Pittsburgh with the work.

He also shared this poem, which comes from the book Crush, with Will Stockton:

At the Bathhouse, Scholars Discuss The Oceanic Feeling

A Miltonist and a Poet walk into a steamroom.

The Miltonist says, I want to watch you fuck him.

The Poet does not hear this because the Miltonist

does not say this. But the Poet knows this truth.

Freud says it’s natural we long to see ourselves

as one with the world. That the ego has a way

of denying dangers it sees in threat of this desire.

The Poet will claim he does not want to possess

the Miltonist. A typewriter drips on his enjambed

chest as the Poet fucks a man for the Miltonist.

What these two boys know is especially this: perhaps

everyone wants to be desired for possession. Satan

heaves on the arm of the Miltonist as he watches

the Poet fuck. Their tattoos, a permanent possession

under the dim wattage of steamroom fluorescents.

I watch you finish and finish myself, wipe the sweat

from my eyes, the past from my feet, as we leave.

~ ~ ~

D. Gilson is the author of I Will Say This Exactly One Time: Essays (Sibling Rivalry, 2015); Crush (Punctum Books, 2014), with Will Stockton; Brit Lit (Sibling Rivalry, 2013); and Catch & Release (2012), winner of the Robin Becker Prize. He is Assistant Professor of English at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and his work has appeared in PANK, The Indiana Review, The Rumpus, and as a notable essay in Best American Essays. Find him at dgilson.com.

Thanks to D. Gilson for sharing his poem and tattoo with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

Monday, April 25, 2016

The Tattooed Poets Project: Ruth Awad

In 2012, the poet Traci Brimhall said I had to talk to Ruth Awad. Ruth has a lot of tattoos and she is a damn fine poet. Ruth and I have emailed back and forth for four years (and in the mean time, at least a dozen other poets said, "Ruth is tattooed!"). Well, the planets finally aligned in 2016 and I am happy to have Ruth and her work appearing on The Tattooed Poets Project.

We don't get a lot of fully-sleeved poets, so let's just take a moment and look at all of the details in this work:

Ruth calls this her "poppy fox bunny sleeve" and credits Roger Ziegler, owner of Bomber Crew Tattoo in Carbondale, Illinois. She adds that Roger "has a real talent for creating depth and detail with color, and he's one of the few artists who isn't my mother who has tattooed me."

Now, check out this lovely tattoo:

This is Ruth's "disco watercolor bear." She elaborates:

"Like nearly all of my tattoos, this one was done by my mother Deborah Stevenson. She used to run her own tattoo shop and art gallery in East Nashville, Tennessee, and I hope she opens another shop one day. She's incredible, and I'm not just saying that because I'm her daughter."

I'd have to agree her work is remarkable.

Next up are these swallows:

Ruth tell us:

"These are about a decade old now and could use a touch up. Anyway, Marty, the tattoo artist who trained my mom, did the swallow under my right collarbone as a kind of test for her when she was an apprentice – she had to make the left one match his (she did a fine job, too). Marty died a few years ago – it's interesting to think about a tattoo artist's work outliving them in this very literal way in someone's skin."

Readers following the site this month may recall that Katie Riegel's tattoo (here) was done by Ruth. A poet and a tattooist! Well check these cardinals out:

Ruth tells us:

"I tattooed these birds on my own ankle a few years ago. I was probably bored, and I immediately regretted the decision after I tattooed the first line – it was a hard pose to maintain! Wouldn't do that again, but I'm pretty happy with the result."

Not bad for tattooing oneself, I must admit.

Ruth also chose to share the following poem, which isn't tattoo-related, but she's "still particularly fond of" it. It previously appeared in Diode:

Shame, Abridged

Walk a circle of salt
around the bed. A handful
of leaves or feathers.
This is how we hide
every moment we lived in the ground.

When shame becomes your phantom hand that digs its nails into its fist.
When you move it like a muscle just to feel your skin tighten.
I was thirteen. I stood calf-high in meadow grass. Two high school boys,
counting each pixel of flesh as I peeled the fabric from my body.
Become a worse animal. Let your quills pin their eager hands to the dirt.

Here, my armor: a plate of bone beneath my breasts
and your weight on top of it. Your wife and kid waited at home.
But I could feel them, too.
The ceiling fan, turning and turning over,
always above you.

I am the yarrow at your heel, leave your starved with me.

Your chest rising the way a bow draws an arrow.
I want to teach this song
to the children we won’t make.

A lover said, You can’t make me fall in love with you
and just leave. It was like in the movies. What power
tastes like: knowing I could have him, even then.
How that one-room apartment with no AC
in the dead of summer made his skin wet,
made me want to see just how cold I could be.

I’m trying out what it means to be a woman
and take out the world with one bite.
Out of the garden and into the bog.

I am awake as any animal
under the star-wheeled night.

My skin a red slip
I could slick from my back
and start over

if I don’t get in my own way.

Behind the screen, vines cursive the names of ghosts,
the faucet beads into the basin.
Be the space between each drip.

In the kitchen his calloused hand pins my thigh.

I don’t want to be held that way,
but the body is already bones and dirt.
You can bury it anywhere.

~ ~ ~

Ruth Awad has an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The NewRepublic, The Missouri Review Poem of the Week, Atticus Review, Crab Orchard Review, CALYX, Diode, Southern Indiana Review, Rattle, The Adroit Journal, Vinyl Poetry, Epiphany, The Drunken Boat, and in the anthologies The Hundred Years' War: Modern War Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), New Poetry from the Midwest 2014 (New American Press, 2015), and Poets on Growth (Math Paper Press, 2015). She won the 2013 and 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the 2011 Copper Nickel Poetry Contest, and she was a finalist for the 2013 Ruth Lily Fellowship. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband and two Pomeranians.

Thanks to Ruth for sharing her poem and her amazing tattoos with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

Sunday, April 24, 2016

The Tattooed Poets Project: Richard Foerster

When we launched the month with Lee Sharkey's tattoo, I received an email from one of her fellow Maine poets, Richard Foerster, with the following picture attached:

Well, you just don't send me a picture of an awesome tattoo and leave it at that, so I thanked him for the photo and formally invited him to participate in this year's offering of tattooed poets. And Richard was kind enough to oblige with the following explanation:

"Cephalopods have fascinated me since I first saw them in aquariums—how they can camouflage themselves by instantly changing color, how they can change shape to appear large and aggressive or to squeeze themselves down to hide in tight spaces, how they use jet propulsion and can zip away in a cloud of ink. And they are intelligent: I once read about an octopus in a tank at a research lab. The staff were puzzled by the nightly disappearance of fish from another tank across the room. So they set up video surveillance and were surprised to see the octopus lift the lid on its tank, crawl down and across the floor, then up into the fish tank where it enjoyed a midnight snack before crawling back to its own tank. There’s something admirable about that stealthy intelligence and cunning instinct to survive.

I’ve nine tattoos (thus far) and like to think of them as guardian totems. The octopus is one of my spirit animals. I worked with the very talented Jeremiah Loui (Instagram here) at Iron Works Tattoo in Portsmouth, NH to design this upper chest and shoulder piece for my right side to counterbalance a large tribal moko on my left. We worked from photos I found on the Internet. My only stipulation was that the design be colorful, massive, realistic, and 'non-threatening.' Jeremiah achieved exactly what I had envisioned. The tattoo was completed in about 10 hours over the course of three sessions."

Richard also kindly shared the following poem, the subject of which he says will "probably" serve as a model for his next tattoo:

Moon Jellyfish

Aurelia aurita

No planet could keep so many moons in tow.

They drift, constantly unconstellating

around you in their milky way. Even to want

to cradle one in your palm would compromise

their elegance: the opaque domes

are stippled with a compass rose and trail,

like auroras, fine voluted veils. Gravity

would spell their deaths. Voiceless, blind,

they seem oracular—mouths and eyes

fixed since the first pulse of the world’s womb

on a source beyond orbits of perception. To swim

among them is to float as if in the pure We are

that scorched the oceans into life. Watch

how your mere expended breath, on its own

celestial path, must break into their midst.

~ ~ ~

Richard Foerster was born in the Bronx, New York, and holds degrees in English literature from Fordham College and the University of Virginia. He is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently River Road (Texas Review Press, 2015). Foerster has been the recipient of numerous honors, including the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize, a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships. Since the 1980s, his work has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry. He has worked as a lexicographer, educational writer, typesetter, teacher, and editor of the literary magazines Chelsea and Chautauqua Literary Journal. For the last 30 years, he has lived on the coast of southern Maine.

Visit his page on Amazon here.

Thanks to Richard for sharing his awesome tattoo and poem with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

Saturday, April 23, 2016

The Tattooed Poets Project: Lennée Reid

Our next tattooed poet is Lennée Reid, who sent us this photo of her tattoo:

Lennée tells us:

"This tattoo is like my poetry, rich with natural, native, and pagan symbolism. The tree of life is an L for my name and has my astrological symbol, Aries, in its pattern. My favorite colors, purple blue and green, are used in the flower blossoming and butterfly in flight transformation . The happy cloud is off to the side above water which gives the whole picture depth and perspective. I designed its concept. It's a beautiful cover up done by Electric Rose in when it was on Harrison in Olympia, WA. A cover up of the same design, smaller and poorly executed, by some dude in Iowa."

Lennée shared this poem, as well:

Totem

The flight of a butterfly
Off of a beaver dam
Into the song of blue whale
Heard by the seal
Diving near the shore
Seen by the turtle
At home on a log
Watched over by bear
On her journey
To the waters that flow
From the source
High atop mountains
Only accessible
By the ram
Crowned with horns
Seeking from above
Guidance of the eagle
Who's always at home
Above the storms

~ ~ ~

Lennée Reid is a geeky veganish universalist QPOC witch doctor mama bear poet activist survivor goddess on the spectrum who doesnt like labels that uses punctuation when she d@mn well pleases smile emoticon period Lennée has appeared in the UPS DIRT! project, Creative Colloquy, godgirl, and is forthcoming in Lost Tower. Her poems and photos are often in "Works In Progress". Lennée repped Olympia Peoples Mic in NYC for WOWPS 2016 and has performed across the USA. Find her on everywhere online @lenneereid and mamamystic.wordpress.com

Thanks to Lennée for sharing her tattoo and poem with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

Friday, April 22, 2016

The Tattooed Poets Project: Karissa Knox Sorrell

Our next tattooed poet is Karissa Knox Sorrell, who shared this tattoo:

Karissa had this to say about this pretty blue butterfly tattoo on her lower left leg:

"I wanted a butterfly to represent metamorphosis and becoming, and it's blue because that was my late brother's favorite color. The top wings are flames to represent my voice in the world - may the words I create be both a light to others and also burn with truth. The baby footprints are for my miscarriages. The bottom wings are vines to represent the creative power of women. This is not just the power to carry a child and give birth, but to also bring life-giving art into the world. I love the symbolism of flight, feminism, and freedom in this tattoo! I got this tattoo at Needle Bent Tattoo in Gallatin, Tennessee. The artist did a great job of collaborating with me and creating what I wanted. Unfortunately I have forgotten his name."

Karissa also shared the following poem, which was originally published at Silver Birch Press and can also be found in her chapbook:

Chrysalis

I am waiting for a god I can touch.

I am waiting to feel the world turning,

to sense myself moving at a thousand

miles an hour. I am waiting to shout

to the universe I am here! To hope that

something out there is silent enough

to hear me. I am waiting to birth

a voice that echoes.

I am waiting for another I am,

for the incense of burning bush

on the air, for something I might recognize

as miracle, which might be as

quiet as a naked branch in winter

or my son’s heartbeat beneath my fingers.

I am waiting for the stars

to explain themselves instead

of disappearing into the past.

I am waiting for the earth

to rise up and claim itself

away from us. I am waiting for

an earthquake to split the chrysalis

wide open until every tethered

winged thing breaks into flight.

~ ~ ~

Karissa Knox Sorrell is a poet and ESOL teacher. She is the author of Evening Body, a poetry chapbook published by Finishing Line Press. Her poems can be seen in literary journals such as Two Cities Review, Blue Heron Review, Gravel Mag, and Cactus Heart. Karissa lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her family of four. Read more about Karissa's work or buy her book at karissaknoxsorrell.com. Find her on Twitter @KKSorrell.

Thanks to Karissa for sharing her tattoo and poem with us here on Tattoosday!

Tattoosday (A Tattoo Blog)

Saturday, April 30, 2016

The Tattooed Poets Project: Sarah Cook

I wish I could look the field directly in the face but I’m forever below it

Friday, April 29, 2016

The Tattooed Poets Project: Alex Giardino

Thursday, April 28, 2016

The Tattooed Poets Project: Kait Burrier

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

The Tattooed Poets Project: Chip Livingston

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

D. Gilson's Typewriter (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Monday, April 25, 2016

The Tattooed Poets Project: Ruth Awad

Sunday, April 24, 2016

The Tattooed Poets Project: Richard Foerster

Saturday, April 23, 2016

The Tattooed Poets Project: Lennée Reid

Friday, April 22, 2016

The Tattooed Poets Project: Karissa Knox Sorrell

Sitemeter

Sitemeter