Wrapping Up National Poetry Month with Josh Medsker (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Our last tattooed poet for National Poetry Month, 2019, is Josh Medsker, who sent along this photo:

Josh recounted how this tattoo came to be:

"This tattoo was done at Supernova Tattoo in Astoria, Queens, New York. It’s the logo for Social Distortion, one of my and my wife’s favorite bands. We went to see them at Stubb's in Austin as our first date (the date on the top banner). I got this tattoo for our 5th wedding anniversary in 2009. Leigh got a shamrock with my initials."

Josh also shared this poem:

“Drag”

I.

The Sunday after Starbucks girl’s party

my head is pounding

and my shame complete.

It didn’t work out… let’s just say

whiskey and vomiting was involved

and never speak of it again.

I squint and groan my way down Nueces

to the drag, to Barnes and Noble.

While browsing Poe

Chris, the assistant manager,

tells me I got the job--

Starts tomorrow.

I spend five dollars on a

celebratory Mocha Chip Frappucino

and catch the bus back to Cameron Road

through scary-ass East Austin… where

a dude hovers by the ATM

like the cicadas that are covering it.

I quickly tuck my rent money into my pocket

and get the fuck outta there--

back to my mattress on the floor

and my fire-ant infested cardboard box

that’s acting as my laundry hamper.

II.

My first week at the bookstore

is the first week of my life.

When you smile at me

at the cashwrap

and Hultberg invites us over

after work. 

My clothes still covered

in stray cherry blossoms.

My frame slowly filling out again

after more than a year

of fish and seaweed.

We three debate

punk records over

Lone Stars and steaks,

and I feel myself

weaving into you. 

~ ~ ~

Josh Medsker is a New Jersey poet, originally from Alaska. His work has appeared in many publications, including: The Brooklyn Rail, Haiku Journal, Dissident Voice, and Contemporary American Voices. (www.joshmedsker.com)

Thank to Josh and all of our other contributors this month, who shared their tattoos and poetry this month on the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

The list of poets who appeared this April, and in years past, can be found at www.tattooedpoets.com.

This entry is ©2019 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

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.net 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.

Vincent Cellucci on the Tattooed Poets Project

Our next tattooed poet is Vincent Cellucci, who shared the following photo featuring several tattoos:

Vincent describes how these tattoos came to be:

"This chest piece began with the script 'P' over my heart, a memorial for my mother, Philomena, who died when I was young, so I knew I would never regret the tattoo. I got it when I was 17 on my first trip to New Orleans from a pretty sketchy parlor that used to be located across from Le Bon Temps Roule Bar, after drinking and dancing to Kermit Ruffins all night. My friend and fiction writer, Peyton Burgess got one with me; in fact, it was the first time we met.

The tattoo continued with the two signatures, one of my maternal grandmother, Jowena, and one of my paternal one, endeared Nemom. Both matrons of my family passed rather close together during the early rebuilding days of Katrina, while I was managing Theo's Pizza (one of the first places open after the storm) and pursuing my graduate school studies in poetry at LSU.

Nemom was an avid letter writer, world traveler, autodidact, polyglot, opera aficionado, and wise, little Italian grandmother—most of which she redefined herself as after raising a large family and being widowed. For a girl that worked at a sewing factory in the Bronx and never finished high school, she developed into a real Renaissance woman. She reminds me to never stop learning and pursuing new passions.

Nana Jowena corresponded with me frequently, but her profundity leans more towards vitality than letters. She embodied both strength and joy to me. This woman had a lonely and tragic life: losing two daughters, caring for her ill mother, and dealing with a bitter divorce to allude to just a few of the adversities she overcame. I never once heard the woman complain. Quite the opposite, she was the warmest, funniest entity you would ever meet. She was always strong. She never wallowed. In fact, she laughed constantly, never preventing herself form 'busting out.' She cooked daily too (with no money for groceries) and shared her food and joy with anyone that she interacted with, while confined to her small house in Philly: the mail people, the neighbors, the nuns that brought her communion. I strive to always maintain her disposition, the greatest of her many life lessons.

The large inked figure was done at Electric Ladyland (@electricladylandtattoo) on Frenchman St. I remember going with poet Christopher Shipman [appearing later this month on the Tattooed Poets Project!] as he was getting a memorial tattoo for his grandfather. Based off a detail of an oil painting of mine [see below], this mysterious gesture both resembles a bird and an angel. 

The lore of the Cellucci family name is that it means 'little bird.' I also know these women are my guardian angels and I would not be, nor be the person that I am, without them. I had the idea that it would tie the family memorial chest piece together and the artist watered down the ink to try to get that faded, dry brush-like effect. He was a cool guy and up for the challenge to try adapting the painting to skin. Poetry is such a glorious space for ambiguity, multiple meanings, and imagination, so I wanted a gestural, figurative tattoo too.

This family memorial tattoo will never be finished as I'm sure it will only grow, unfortunately.

Everyone should get the tattoos they want, but I get the tattoos I have to—"

Vincent also sent us the following poem, from his newly-released Absence Like Sun, re-published with permission from Unlikely Stories and Lavender Ink:

send someone close   second to none

right back to the mugging hum drum

of living life silent as an order for one

instead of a loud hand molding fantasies

into being maybe that was god’s error

the audience of his mission

couldn’t forgive him for setting the garden

with a naked awakening

craving for like company

children now too doped up to redeem

humanity may be the most fragile medium

this planet sympathy symphony

in a minor key that the poets sing

been battling the abyss since the beginning

been tattling on our brethren for a pittance

I can’t scrape my soul off the bleached coral

I can’t escape the mortal

mortar I’m afraid binds nothing

oversaturate the roots and see what grows

compost the roses like brown banana peels

I meant it when I ripped open my shirt

you watched the fault line form

down the middle of my crypt heart

inked with the tears I held in

over the plucked feathers of my family

I still talk to every day

yesterday my father promised me

he would be there to talk until his death

and while I plan to take him up

on such a gracious guarantee

I reminded him that even when he’s dead

I will be speaking to him

I’m not sure how he took that

because that’s when we both hung up

but that’s how I live fully in this world

and fully in the next

until the whole fucking geode crumbles

to gleaming debris

and my graveyard gets folded

into a greater graveyard lapping behind

~ ~ ~

Vincent Cellucci wrote Absence Like Sun (Lavender Ink, 2019) and An Easy Place / To Die (CityLit Press, 2011). He edited Fuck Poems an exceptional anthology (Lavender Ink, 2012). He also has two collaborative titles: come back river (Finishing Line Press) and _a ship on the line (Unlikely Books), which was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Vincent performed Diamonds in Dystopia, an interactive poetry web app at SXSW in 2017, and the poem was anthologized in Best American Experimental Writing 2018.

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

This entry is ©2019 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

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.net 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.

Emily Wolahan on the Tattooed Poets Project

Our next tattooed poet is Emily Wolahan, who shared her ink with us:

Emily tells us:

"My first tattoo was one of the birds in the flock I've got on my arm (the one at the bottom). They are all swallows and this first one I had done immediately after my daughter was born. I was living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England—the first time I'd lived permanently outside the US in over 10 years. As a kid who grew up moving around internationally, I never felt like I had a home and when I relocated to England, the sense of being unmoored hit me again. I chose the swallow because sailors would get a swallow for each 5,000 nautical miles traveled. I felt I'd earned at least one. Later, I liked the idea of having a swarm. The swallow can also symbolize a successful journey and when I had the other swallows done, I was on my way out of Newcastle and headed back to the US."

She also shared the following photo with a couple additional pieces:

Emily added:

"My next tattoos are for my family. On my wrist is an ornate "S & F," my kids Sylvie and Franklin. The band further up that arm is the same design as on my wedding band. This tattoo was done by Greg Rojas at Ed Hardy's Tattoo City in San Francisco. Greg was recommended to me, but I hadn't really put the whole 'Ed Hardy' thing together until I was at the studio. Ed Hardy himself came in while I was on the table for a chat. Greg's since moved up to Petaluma, but I hope I can have him do my next, as-yet-undecided tattoo—he's incredible."

In addition to her tattoos, Emily shared " old poem, in honor of when the tattoos happened," noting that "the title is from Thomas Hardy—the 'sly and unseen' day is the one when death comes:

SLY AND UNSEEN

The infant cannot stop laughing. 

In the white gallery, his mother inspects 

where concrete meets a burst of dirt feeding 

blades. Freshly painted walls abut 

the grass line guttering. 

She watches it fed synthetic sun.  

Exhibit: new air, new cycle. 

The infant laughing. 

Below a flat gallery of clouds, the city pigeon 

must rise, beating against the volume 

of empty space, its intricate layer, 

feather moving air.  

Hollow bones espouse its inaccessible landscape, 

push higher, higher, until pressure changes, 

oxygen changes and turn then to

plummet in an open marriage to the core.  

The backward pump of a bird landing 

in the full sway of pregnant trees, 

their acknowledgement of captive air. 

To step barefoot on the grass,

to change limbs' mobility, lightness in bones, 

coolness between toes and tickled ankle. 

The infant, laughing, 

bids goodbye to the room. The room collapses.  

It seems phenomenal an animal 

can hold still in that air.  

That some solutions 

become answers, their spatial disclosure 

a forklift of readiness. And the rest: 

our unseen day 

carried on and up and away.

~ ~ ~

Emily Wolahan is the author of HINGE, published by the National Poetry Review Press. Her poems have been published in Oversound, Boston Review, Volt, DIAGRAM, Tinderbox, and other places. Her poems have won the Georgia Review Loraine Williams Poetry Prize and the Arts & Letters Unclassifiables Contest. She is Senior Editor at Two Lines Press, Editor of JERRY, and lives in San Francisco. She is currently an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

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

This entry is ©2018 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

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.net 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.

Rajiv Mohabir Helps Launch Our Tenth Year of the Tattooed Poets Project

It is amazing to me that we are in our tenth April, celebrating tattooed poets during National Poetry Month.

We're launching this year's parade of poets with a special contribution from Rajiv Mohabir!

Rajiv sent us two tattoos, beginning with this one, on his forearm:

He tells us:

"The square tattoo is in honor of my Aji, Gangadai Mohabir (my paternal grandmother) who mothered thirteen children in Guyana. It was a long-time tradition for people, and especially Bhojpuri women, to tattoos their husbands’ names on their forearms. There was a belief that people’s names held magic, that by using someone’s name you would disrespect them by giving their power away. My family’s naming traditions are mystical still, albeit changed somewhat.

Here’s a photo of my Aji’s tattoo:

My Aji tattooed her husband’s name (Sewdass) on her arm with and Om above it, so when people asked who her husband was—which seldom happened in the small village of Crabwood Creek—she would be able to show them. My Aja did not have my Aji’s name tattooed on his arm though.

Tattoos were thought to be important, signifying social standing. My tattoo is also in homage to this tradition of 'godna' and the Devanagari script says my ancestors’ names in four generations in the shape of a square. The names are Chandranarine, Sewdass, Mahabir, and Lachchman.

People ask why I don’t tattoo my own name on my arm. My answer is always 'It’s on my

skin—that’s my contribution.'

Rajiv also shared this tattoo:

Rajiv explained:

"Since this is so hetero-patriarchal and on my right arm (cosmologically significant for the masc energies of the body in Vedantic thought), I thought to balance out my energies by tattooing a lotus yantra with the word 'Ma' in the center to keep the women I descend from touching my heart. The left side of the body is believed to be the femme side. My mother was low-key offended that I didn’t have her on my arm. But I told her I have you all over my poems, which will exist longer than my skin. Did I mention that I’m a huge mama’s boy?"

Rajiv shared the following poem, which appears below in its original form in Guyanese Bhojpuri, followed by his translation:

Godna

godna walle ta bulawe
aur baja pe aike kantak leke
hathwa ke juk-juk kare hai
ho rama
hathwa ke juk-juk angrej mein hai
angrej deswa mein inglis bole
hamar paglapan bhulo lalana
ho rama
nu yack mein godna lagal saanwar,
hamar hath pe ii godna lagal,
aapan khandaan-chhap lagal
ho rama
tohar nam likhal hai pitrwa
aapan chamriya pe ajawa
gulaab kantak se nam nam likhal hai
ho rama
koi gaaye walle nahin rahi ohar
jab khoon nikal lage rahi, dard lage rahi
koi rahi nahin dardwa uthaiyeke
ho rama
Kaise bhulye aapan dukh-sukh bhala
kantak ke nisaanwa rahejai
hamar dohe gaayke bataihai
ho rama
kaun jaane hamar muluk
kahan kahan hai hamar gaon
galli galli ghumeli galli galliya
ho rama
kaun batawe kahan kahan pe
ghumeke hai, Rama Rahim ke khoj mein,
kaun bataihe hamar deswa andar hai
ho rama

Godna

You call the tattoo artist
to your door who comes with his needles
to poke your arm

ho Rama
His scoring your skin is in English
In English country speak English
forget my madness

ho Rama
In New York I mark my dark skin
on my arm I inked
the signature of my descent
ho Rama
Your name he wrote, dear ancestor
on my flesh, dear Aja
with a rose’s thorn he wrote your name
ho Rama
No singer played a folksong
when blood erupted and pain began
no song to ease the hurt
ho Rama
Who knows where my country is
where my village is
from gulley to gulley I roam
ho Rama
Who will tell me exactly where
I must wander, searching out Rama-Rahim
Who will tell me my nation is inside me
ho Rama

~ ~ ~

Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press 2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books 2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize, Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017). In 2015 he was a winner of the AWP Intro Journals Award. His poetry appears and is forthcoming from journals like POETRY, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Quarterly West, and Prairie Schooner. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from at Queens College, CUNY and his PhD in English from the University of Hawai`i. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of poetry at Auburn University. To read more of his work, visit www.rajivmohabir.com.

A hearty thank you to Rajiv for his contribution and his participation in the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2018 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoos are reprinted with the poet's permission.

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.net 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.

Jonce Shares His Permanent Wedding Band

I met Jonce on Broad Street while leaving work yesterday. I stopped to talk to him when I noticed his hand and the name tattooed on it:

Jonce explained:

"This is my wife's name, Kate. We've been married ten years and I got it three, four years ago, I think now ...  I used to wear a wedding band but I used to do a lot of rock climbing ... so I would take it off a lot, so I just decided to do the tattoo."

The artist was his friend Keith Johnson, currently working out of Suicide J.A.C.K. Tattoo in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Thanks to Jonce for sharing this cool tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2014 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.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Megan Burns

Our next tattooed poet is Megan Burns, who sent us this beautiful work of body art:

Not only is it a big tattoo, but it's on the ribs, one of the more painful spots to get inked. Megan explains, "It's a pirate ship with the names of my three kids."  She added, "I'm going through a pretty ugly divorce and since I only get my kids half as much as I used to, I wanted to get this piece done."

She credited the work to Terry Brown, one of the owners at Downtown Tattoos in New Orleans.

Megan sent along the following poem to accompany the ship:

Goodnight, Moon

when a woman disappears
it’s a permanent stake
under night, this sky, bodies in a slipping
what you wrote: a secret is a way
of pulling a person apart
pour in like a poison, you feed it
poor excuse, a just score
a domestic failing
pulled force abutting angles
so we dropped a degree of fencing
made adjustments in parallel confines
braided down this writ
this work of medium thumbprints
I put palms to each side of your sweet
face & pretend to be of a gentler nature
absconded, a beauty of break, do you
know what a parade is for?
it’s a way of walking around grief
try to rendezvous this lesser
try not death comes like a desert
you my most thirsty, I was coming along
remember once the children huddle
three a bed where we lullaby
and they ask questions I have no answers
mother is a new “never-was”
if he wants a bed time story
tell him I have no feeling for you

~ ~ ~

Megan Burns is the publisher at Trembling Pillow Press and edits the poetry magazine, Solid Quarter. She has been most recently published in Jacket Magazine, Callaloo, New Laurel Review, Trickhouse, and the Big Bridge New Orleans Anthology. Her poetry and prose reviews have been published in Tarpaulin Sky, Gently Read Lit, Big Bridge, and Rain Taxi. She has two books Memorial + Sight Lines (2008) and Sound and Basin (2013) published by Lavender Ink. She has two recent chapbooks: irrational knowledge (Fell Swoop press, 2012) and a city/ bottle boned (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Her chapbook Dollbaby was just released from Horse Less Press.

Thanks to Megan for her contribution to the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2014 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

If you are reading this on another web site 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.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Terri Witek's Pessoa

Our next tattooed poet is Terri Witek, who shared this photo:

Terri tells us this

"was inked by Ron Nelson of Mission Street Tattoo, in Santa Cruz CA. Most of my family have sleeves and other major body-work by Ron, who is married to one of my daughters. Some of his most beautiful imagery on the family skin is ongoing and unfinished--a slowly filling- in ship in full sail, an outline of a name. So it seems almost reasonable that I took so long --two decades-- to decide what I wanted. It’s no accident that I was reading Fernando Pessoa’s great Book of Disquiet when a shadow thought finally appeared. Pessoa’s name just means 'a person'—my tattoo could be both tribute to the poet who chose to remake himself in so many heteronyms and a kind of classifying stamp (like 'animal, vegetable, mineral' ) for the end of the world. As I now lead The Fernando Pessoa Game in Lisbon for Disquiet, International ( a workshop with Cyriaco Lopes, the visual artist who first showed me Pessoa’s work in Portuguese) , my tattoo is also part of a more-than-skin-deep, ongoing translation game. For this, and maybe because it took so long to arrive, I love unfolding my arm to it."

Terri also sent us this poem, which closes out her book, Exit Island:

Caravelle

                                with two lines by Fernando Pessoa

Cresce a vinda da lua                                  (but what is gained by the moon’s return?)

                                   

Teu corpo, teu limite.

When will o rio dovetail nas ruas                and which ainda arrives too soon?

                               

Cresce a vinda da lua.

While the drunken dogwatch pities                   another far-off monsoon,

                               

Teu corpo, teu limite.

Something pulls against day’s patois.          Something restrings the body’s loom.

                               

Cresce a vinda da lua.

Who would leave your side for comfort?    Who would row against the moon?

                               

Teu corpo, teu limite.

Tudo cresce, tudo pity                                  tudo rua, tudo moon

all is body, all is rowing,                 all notation is natacao

~ ~ ~

Terri Witek is the author of Exit Island, The Shipwreck Dress, Carnal World , Fools and Crows, Courting Couples (Winner of the 2000 Center for Book Arts Contest) and Robert Lowell and LIFE STUDIES: Revising the Self . Her collaborations with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes have been featured in galleries or site-specific projects in New York City, Los Angeles and elsewhere. A professor of English at Stetson University, her summer faculty positions have included the West Chester Poetry Conference, the Prague Summer Literary Program and the DisQuiet program in Lisbon, where she runs “The Fernando Pessoa Game.”

Thanks to Terri Witek for her contribution to this year's Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2014 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

If you are reading this on another web site 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.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Teresa Mei Chuc's Cross-Cultural Ink

Our next tattooed poet is Teresa Mei Chuc, who has had all of her tattoos done at Shogun Tattoo in Pasadena, California by Andrew Moore.

Teresa tells us:

"My first tattoo, in Tibetan script, is my dharma name, Rinchen Khandro, which means 'precious dakini or sky dancer' in Tibetan. The name was given to me by Wangchen Rinpoche of the Maha Vajra Center in Los Angeles during my Buddhist refuge ceremony. The name means a lot to me because it embodies my spirit and purpose in life...dancing in the sky has a deep metaphorical meaning to me. The sky also represents sunyata. I wanted it tattooed because I wanted to always remember it among all my other names (Vietnamese - Tue, Cantonese - Mei Wai, American - Teresa).

The other tattoo on my back is cherry blossoms. I found out recently through a mitochondrial DNA test that I was part Japanese and the cherry blossoms represent that part of myself. I had known that I was part Vietnamese and part Chinese; my Japanese lineage came as a surprise and I wanted to embrace that part of me and the history that is interwoven with it."

"The tattoo on my wrist is the word 'sunyata' in Sanskrit. Sunyata means emptiness, nothingness, openness. It is an important concept to me and a very important concept in Buddhism."

"The tattoo on my upper arm is a Vegvisir, a Norse protection symbol. It is a Runic compass and a symbol from the 17th century Icelandic grimoire called Galdrabok ('magic book'). I tend to get lost, so I hope this built-in compass will keep me from getting lost."

"On my leg is an endless or eternal knot, an important Buddhist symbol representing the interweaving of the spiritual path, the flowing of time and movement within that which is eternal.

I find these days, it is easier and easier to forget the important things and my tattoos help me to remember."

Teresa also sent along her poem "Pencil," which was previously published in the anthology Mo (Silkworms Ink, 2011) and in The Good Men Project:

Pencil

"In spite of everything I shall rise again:
I will take up my pencil, which I have
forsaken in my great discouragement,
and I will go on with my drawing."

- Vincent Van Gogh


A missile is shaped like a pencil -
its long, slender body and pointed
end creates history.

A girl walking down the street
a few steps ahead of her sister and friend,
two medics who were trying to help
injured people, the parked ambulance -
all were annihilated by the same weapon.

Above, drones - silent, unmanned planes.
A metal, predatory bird that shoots a missile
with precision, identifying the colors of a shirt,
the features on a face - the shape of a nose,
the color and length of a mustache.

In a room far away, in another country, a man
sits at a desk and looks at a screen; he strokes
his thick, dark mustache as he carefully
contemplates, then pushes a button.

There is a charred hole in the ground
where the girl once stood.

There are pencils that write and erase,
write and erase, so that there is nothing
to be read on the page. The page blank
as the desert sky, blank as the smooth shell of a drone.

There is a family drinking mint tea
in a living room.
The man holds a cup to his lips,
the glass touches his mustache.
A silent bird hovers above.
In a split second, everyone is dead,
the house is in rubbles - arms, legs,
splattered organs among broken concrete.

Soon, there will be no trace.

~ ~ ~

Teresa Mei Chuc was born in Saigon, Vietnam and immigrated to the U.S. under political asylum with her mother and brother shortly after the Vietnam War. Her poetry appears in journals such as EarthSpeak Magazine, Hypothetical Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Kyoto Journal, The Prose-Poem Project, The National Poetry Review, Rattle, Verse Daily and in anthologies such as New Poets of the American West (Many Voices Press, 2010), With Our Eyes Open: Poems of the New American Century (West End Press, 2014), and Mo’ Joe (Beatlick Press, 2014). Red Thread is her first full-length collection of poetry. Her second collection of poetry was just accepted for publication by FootHills Publishing and is forthcoming in 2014! Visit her at www.tue-wai.com.

Thanks to Teresa for contributing to the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2014 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

If you are reading this on another web site 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.