Darren Demaree and Emily (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Our next tattooed poet is Darren C. Demaree, who first appeared on Tattoosday in April 2013 (here) and, again, in April 2014 (here). Darren heeded my call for returning contributors and sent the following photo:

His tattoo, which reads, "Emily says I'm a good man," crosses his ribcage. He tells us that he got the inscription "at a shop on High Street in Columbus that has since changed their name a couple of times."

Darren sent us the following poem from his Emily series:

EMILY AS A SMILE WOULD HAVE RUINED THE PICTURE

There was one look, one picture

of Emily in a bathtub right before

we got married, she was travelling

with her family, she was in Madrid

or Paris or Istanbul, she had been gone

for a couple of weeks, so I had been

drunk for a couple of weeks

& she knew that I had been drunk

for a couple of weeks, so she sent me

a picture of her in the bathtub, one

breast covered, hair in a way I’d never

seen before, looking directly at the faucet

& so surely the tatters of my world 

collected into a whole woman

so beautiful that when I got the picture

I accidently deleted the picture.

I remember it clearly though, her face,

elegant, angry that she didn’t have

her hands wrapped around the back

of my head to pull me off of the bottle.

She wanted to bury me in her beauty

& that almost worked too well.

I am sober.  I don’t have that picture.

I have Emily.  She looks at me now.

~ ~ ~

Darren C. Demaree is the author of thirteen poetry collections, most recently So Clearly Beautiful, (November 2019, Adelaide Books). He is the recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louis Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children. @d_c_demaree (www.darrencdemaree.com)

Anyone interested in the collection of “Emily as” poems can get it from Harpoon Books here.

Thanks to Darren for returning to Tattoosday to contribute to the Tattooed Poets Project!

This entry is ©2020 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.

Rosemarie Dombrowski's Phoenix, and More (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Our next tattooed poet is Rosemarie Dombrowski, who shared several of her tattoos, beginning with this stunning phoenix on her right leg:

Rosemarie elaborated on this piece:

"My connectedness to the phoenix is multi-faceted. When I was 14, I moved to Arizona after having suffered some trauma back in Missouri. Three months after arriving, my father died (back in Missouri). I had a son in my early twenties who was born with three congenital heart defects and later diagnosed with severe Autism. He’s nonverbal, but he’s also a pretty healthy 19-year- old now. In short, this city has re-birthed me and my son multiple times. And it keeps resurrecting so many of us. And then there’s Plath, rising from the ash 'and eating men like air.' Plath’s Phoenix represents the feminist in me. And the poet. And though I love this city dearly and was so ridiculously honored to become its first poet laureate, I already had the tattoo at that point. But it’s so fitting on so many levels now

Like all of my large artwork, this piece was done by Alex Empty (@alexempty), owner of Copper State Tattoo (@copperstatetattoo). It was outlined with a machine and filled using tebori, the Japanese hand-poke method."

Rosemarie also sent this collage of some additional pieces on her wrists and forearm:

Pictured are tattoos of  Walt Whitman’s signature, Allen Ginsberg’s signature, and the kanji for
poetry (aka word temple). Rosemarie explained their origins:

"I’ve been an acolyte of Whitman for as long as I can remember. And at some point in grad school, I started to believe this ridiculous poetic narrative that I’d constructed—that Ginsberg was somehow my grandfather. I never really believed it, but I said it pretty often at readings. I still do. Because in some psychic way, I feel very connected to both of them. I fervently believe that it’s the responsibility of the poet to be the mouthpiece of his/her culture, to be a voice for the marginalized and disenfranchised, and to empower others to use poetry as a means of resistance, a source of agency and healing. I think Whitman and Ginsberg had similar notions of poetry and their socio-political role as poets.

The Japanese character for poetry is made up of word and temple. I’ve always said that I preach the gospel of poetry, that poetry is like a religion for me. It’s certainly a place of worship. It’s also the source of my spirituality. For me, poetry is the place where divinity resides, which is sort of an adulterated version of Transcendentalism, the 19th century American philosophy espoused by Whitman and based on the notion that divinity resides in all of us. Yogic philosophies are also rooted in this same belief, hence namaste, which means I recognize the divine in you. Sometimes I feel like a new age cliché. Regardless, I feel like I’m onto something.

Alex Empty did the Whitman signature and a guy at Gypsy Rose (@gypsyrosetattoos) did the Ginsberg. (I write about it in the poem below.) My kanji was also done by Alex using the tebori method."

The following flash/prose poem, Rosemarie tells us, "is about the time I went on a blind date to a local tattoo shop, Gypsy Rose, and got my Ginsberg tattoo." She notes, as well that, "Matt, the guy who I had the blind date with, is now my partner."

Gypsy Rose

Lloyd the tattoo artist is talking about Hunter S. Thompson and Robin Williams, more so the
HBO documentary than the man, so I mention Hemingway and David Foster Wallace and the
confessionals without calling them by name, and I say something like they all had electroshock
therapy assuming that nobody will know exactly who I’m referring to, which is fine because
Lloyd wants to tell us a story that reminds me of a chapter of Jesus’ Son by the late Denis
Johnson, a part-time Phoenix resident and friend of a friend, and Lloyd’s yarn rivals Denis’,
which is almost unbelievable since Lloyd’s is basically about dropping acid and watching The
Wall, but it’s also about skating down 40th Avenue and staring at a golf course that he and his
friends eventually decide they need to cross because they need a lighter from the mini-mart on
the other side, and while they’re crossing it think they hear little girls laughing, and they think
they see suspicious men following them, and they start to think that maybe it’s “the set-up” that
their one friend keeps talking about. And maybe they get the lighter and maybe they don’t, but
by the end of the story, the golf course is covered in trash and time has stood still and Lloyd
realizes he’s had a lighter in his pocket all along. And this is when I realize that I’m standing in a
tattoo shop with a guy named Matt who’s brought me a book wrapped in basil leaves even
though it’s not my birthday and we’ve never met. And maybe I’m still high from last night or
maybe this is just surreal, but I suddenly notice the distance between us and I want to close the
gap, so I slide over to his chair and I almost lean in as he starts to lean back and it’s almost
something—like when he busses the table at dinner, or when I notice his mohawk in the sun, his
shirt buttoned to the collar as we walk to my car, the Fibonacci Sequence that he just had
tattooed on his left forearm. How I’m afraid to lean in the second time and the third. How the
gravel in the parking lot feels unstable. How humans seem too human to do anything but tell
stories.

~ ~ ~

Rosemarie Dombrowski is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix, AZ, the founding editor of
both rinky dink press and Write On, Downtown: A Journal of Phoenix Writing, as well as the
curator and host of the Phoenix Poetry Series and First Friday Poetry on Roosevelt Row. She is
the recipient of five Pushcart nominations, a 2017 Arts Hero Award, the 2017 Carrie McCray
Literary Award in Nonfiction, and a fellowship from the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics. Her
collections include The Book of Emergencies (Five Oaks Press, 2014), The Philosophy of
Unclean Things (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and The Cleavage Planes of Southwest Minerals [A
Love Story], winner of the 2017 Split Rock Review chapbook competition. www.rdpoet.com

A hearty thanks to Rosemarie for sharing her wonderful tattoos and poetry 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.

J.P. Grasser on the Tattooed Poets Project

Today's tattooed poet is J.P. Grasser. 

J.P. elaborates on the tattoo, which reads "Our almost-instinct almost true:/What will survive of us is love":

Recently, I read a beautiful little scrap from Rebecca Solnit: 'The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. This unfinished work of becoming ends only when you do, if then, and the consequences live on' (italics, mine; from The Faraway Nearby). This is wildly out of context, but it holds up just the same, to my ear. The most important phrase in there: 'if then.'

There's the old thinking on tattoos—the permanence, the body-as-canvas, the self-expression. 

There's the old thinking on tattoos—the symbology, the beautiful reversion to atavistic modes of communication: pictographs, etc., where image, meaning, & sound are inexorably bound, are undivorceable from one another. 

There's the old thinking on tattoos—something visible, something totemic, something to reflect the inner-self. (All reflection: distortion.)

The old thinking is good enough. But put in context, wildly so, vis-à-vis Solnit's case, it doesn't hold up as well to my ear. Or, at least, it's not the whole picture. Every/one: an artist—agreed. Every/body's magnum opus: the self—agreed. So the act of tattooing, to my mind, is the act of self-forging (self-forgoing?). They don't conflate, they don't co-exist, they collapse, together. Both. The skin is both canvas and paint, or so the metaphor goes. 

Go listen to Kelly McFarling's "Both." It will help you understand me. 

What I'm trying to get at, however obliquely, is this: neither a tattoo nor a poem is expression. They're experience. They're temporal & atemporal, all at once—they happen in time, but don't live in time. Sounds a bit like Memory, eh? Like Love, almost?

Which is all to say: the tattoo I have now is not the one I got Spring of 2015. It's neither the same to me, nor the same in appearance. When I got it, I remember Jesse saying, with that flair of wily gratitude, Come back any time, he said, touch ups for free. Any time, touch, free. 

But I want the ink-object, the poem-object, like the self, to be of-&-for entropy, to be its own recreation, daily. Let the edges fray; let it bleed. 

The homespun-piece referenced in the poem, that's long gone, just a few little scars now, layered under the one pictured. 

The lines themselves come from Larkin's 'An Arundel Tomb.' The most important phrase in there isn't 'love.' It isn't 'what will survive of us.' It isn't 'true.' There is no finitude to the self—to its gulfs, slash-piles, glaciers, xeric crags, tectonic fissures. We are human-animals. We are reason-beasts. We are hybridity incarnate & as such, if/then, the only phrase that can really matter is: 'almost-instinct almost.' & That—that is the experience of Negative Capability. Isn't Love always a consequence, always? 

J.P. mentions Jesse above, referring to his artist Jesse Kuzniarski (@jessek_tattoos) at Brightside Tattoo Shop (@brightsidetattooshop) in Baltimore. 

He also shared the following poem:

THIRD DATE 

  

for Maggie

  

Remember how we lay, naked, the usual silt

of hardwood floors clinging to our elbows,

our hips? You dipped the needle, dragged

St. Augustine’s symbol for non-linear time

(your idea) into my arm. Didn’t I try to be stoic

for you?—I feel no pain; I feel nothing. I admit,

I was sure once that love meant being jealous

of oneself. I admit it. I wanted to clutch

that instinct for recklessness, to own it & forever,

& I wanted you to hold me the way skin holds

an iron splinter. Remember the perfect sphere

of my blood, balanced on the needle’s tip?

How you licked it clean, returned it to pure

gleaming, without so much as a second thought?

I keep coming back, you said, back to this shape.

~ ~ ~

A current Wallace Stegner Fellow, J.P. Grasser is a PhD candidate in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Utah, where he serves as Editor-in-Chief for Quarterly West.

Thanks to J.P. for sharing his tattoo and poem with us here on the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

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.

Helen's Reminder for One Wild and Precious Life

Earlier this year, I spotted a new tattoo on my friend Helen's Facebook feed. She was kind enough to share it with us:

The phrase "one wild and precious life" are the final five words in Mary Oliver's poem "The Summer Day":

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

~~~

from New and Selected Poems, 1992
Beacon Press, Boston, MA

Copyright 1992 by Mary Oliver.
All rights reserved

Poetry speaks to everyone differently, so I asked Helen why she chose to inscribe these words on her body. She replied:

"I really wanted to remind myself – to have a permanent reminder readily in view – to be present, to be grateful, to be living in the moment. These are things that I regularly do anyway, but I’ve ended up in a number of quite challenging circumstances recently and was VERY depressed and really losing perspective...and it just came to me one afternoon that having this on me, in that type of font, right in the place where my pulse is taken, would be the perfect thing. Also, I had it done right before the Spring Equinox – I wanted to start new, like spring, like growth, like hope, like guess what everything comes back around and it’s all there even when you can’t see it, like seeds buried beneath the snow and the frozen ground... everything is not dead, there’s still hope, and time is fleeting and you better effing rise up and live again."

The font used is Courier and the words were inked by Berger (@tattooingbyberger) at Artful Dodger Tattoo and Comics (@adtcseattle) in Seattle.

You can hear Mary Oliver read in the recording below:

Thanks to Helen for sharing her awesome literary tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2017 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: 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!

This entry is ©2016 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.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: Adam Hughes

Today's tattooed poet is Adam Hughes, who is sharing this piece from his rib cage on his right side:

This is the complete text of the poem "And the Days are not Full Enough" by Ezra Pound.

It reads

"And the days are not full enough
and the nights are not full enough
and life slips by like a field mouse
not shaking the grass."

Adam tells us:

"I was tattooed by Benjamin Thornburg at Thou Art Studios in Lancaster, Ohio. I wanted some piece of poetry tattooed and found this particular Pound poem to be really profound in a surprising way. For me it's a reminder that we so often live lives of fluff, of immaterial things; lives that ultimately leave no trace and leave behind nothing that matters. It's a reminder that I don't want to live that kind of life. The I want to live a life that shakes the grass, that makes an impact."

With that sentiment in mind, Adam shared the following poem:

Hideous the Scars of Beauty and I, Impaled

for my daughter

the horses’ eyes are sad, but not
sorrowful—they look not with fear,
but with the experience of the long married—
they’re waiting patiently for the stars to fall
so they might eat them off the tips of the grass

do not cry about things beyond your fingertips—
the deaths of a thousand glinting wasps—
the frosted, the wilted, the broken, the rheumy-eyed—
the world is not dying—it is shedding its skin

do not fear the undergrowth beyond
the first row of trees—it’s dark but many have walked
there before you—their footsteps still crunch
if you stop your breathing long enough to listen—
you’re never far from something beautiful

when it rains for days, and it appears God forgot
to separate the waters that week, remember me
wherever I am and know that I tried—
the rain doesn’t win or lose—it just drops
when it’s told to drop, like baby robins from the nest,
some flying, some falling, all changed

~ ~ ~

Adam Hughes is the author of Petrichor (NYQ Books, 2010) and Uttering the Holy (NYQ Books, 2012). He was born in 1982 in Lancaster, Ohio. He still resides near there on a farm with his wife and daughter, two dogs, four cats, and four horses. He works as a drug prevention specialist with high school students. Should you google him, he is not the Adam Hughes who draws near-pornographic depictions of female superheroes. He cannot draw.

Thanks to Adam for sharing his tattoo and poem with us here on The Tattooed Poets Project!

This entry is ©2016 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.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: Sarah Rafael Garcia

Our next tattooed poet is Sarah Rafael Garcia, who sent us the following photo:

Sarah explains where the line "I struggle with the womyn I aspire to set free..." comes from:

"The tattoo is line out of my poem 'Without A Name.' When I started the MFA program in Creative Writing (Fiction) in 2012, I knew it would most likely make me doubt myself as a writer. So I started getting tattoos of my own published work. Little did I know then, the experience would also create doubt in my personal identity as a woman writer of color. I graduated from the MFA May 2015. In a way, my tattoos served as a daily reminder of affirmation.

'Without A Name' was first published in June 2012, in Label Me Latina/o: Special Edition: Latina Authors-Asserting Female Agency. Coincidentally, the artist of my first publication tattoo—Ernesto aka Et Tat Too who is currently a freelance tattoo artist in Austin, Texas—also did this one and other writing related images on my right arm. Most recently, 'Without A Name' was accepted in the 2016 In The Words of Womyn anthology, I guess might have to add another line somewhere..."

Sarah's aforementioned poem appears below:

Without a Name

I struggle with the woman you want me to be.
I struggle with the woman who is kept beneath.
I struggle with the woman I aspire to set free.

I struggle with the terms Mother, Chicana and Feminist.
Because I’m often judged for the seeds I lack to sow rather than the ones I have
cultivated and produced. I am a woman, I am Chicana, I am a Feminist, but I’m not the
traditional mother most have expected me to be. I am human, a community educator. I do
not need a literal term to define what I contribute to our world, I just need time to nurture
its existence and teach others to do the same.

I struggle with the woman you want me to be.
I struggle with the woman who is kept beneath.
I struggle with the woman I aspire to set free.

I struggle to be loved and let my love depend on someone else. My mother and
grandmother are both widows who have paved the road for my stubborn independence.
It’s the same independence that allows me to reach for my dreams while empowering
others to do the same. Don’t let this Aztec princess mislead you, I still long to share this
love with someone who understands my vision.

I struggle with the woman you want me to be.
I struggle with the woman who is kept beneath.
I struggle with the woman I aspire to set free.

I struggle with the idea that I’m not meant to indulge in my own sexuality.
Apparently, it’s not ladylike or part of my culture. As if passion could destroy my
reputation or ancestral being. In the loudest of all life orgasms, passion in all its forms
and origins has led my life to higher ground! It is my bodily curves, cultural will and
inherited free spirit that continue to remind me of what I am and represent. I am a woman
of Mexican heritage with the freedom to demand human rights! And if I have to disrobe
my identity before you, to help you understand, then, I stand naked and without a name.
See me for what I am, not for what you think I ought to be.

I struggle with the woman you want me to be.
I struggle with the woman who is kept beneath.
I struggle with the woman I aspire to set free.

~ ~ ~

Sarah Rafael García is a writer, community educator and traveler. Since publishing Las Niñas, she founded Barrio Writers and obtained a M.F.A. in Creative Writing. Her writing has appeared in LATINO Magazine, Contrapuntos III, Outrage: A Protest Anthology For Injustice in a Post 9/11 World, La Tolteca Zine, Lumen Magazine, among others and her piece "Without A Name" is forthcoming in the 2016 In The Words of Womyn anthology.

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

This entry is ©2016 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.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.

Julius and Jeff Share Some Ink

Last fall, after a reading at the New School for the launch of The Best American Poetry 2015, I met Julius and Jeff. They were leaning against the stage in Tishman Auditorium and, despite my fervent requests that they do so, they never e-mailed me their details, so all we have is some basic information on their tattoos.

Julius shared this literary tattoo:

The phrase "Darkness falls from the air" is a quote from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Jeff shared this tattoo:

That is from the 1922 silent film Nosferatu, and he got this at Daredevil Tattoo in Manhattan. He makes horror films and Nosferatu is one of the all-time early classics.

Thanks to Jeff and Julius for sharing their tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2016 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: Aimee Herman

Last summer at the NYC poetry Festival, I met Aimee Herman, after spotting her tattoo:

This reads "when silence creates pattern/remove the middle/and engrave/the opposite."

Aimee later explained:

"Out of the nine tattoos on my body, this is the only one whose words are mine. It comes from a poem in my second book of poetry, meant to wakeup feeling. (great weather for MEDIA). I’ve had many people see this and ask what it means. I never grow tired of the question, because I find my answer always changes. For the most part it means to carve out the quiet in silence, which tends to become a pattern in existence. Wanting to speak OUT our silence until the fear stops us. So, this is a reminder to untwist the repetition of silence and by engraving the opposite, one is encouraged to speak out and up. I do this everyday with my poetry. I speak out of silence and away from its cage. I like this inked reminder on my body because I’ve existed inside so many variations of myself that felt haunted by silence. Fear of being shamed. Fear of breathing life into my scars. But this tattoo empowers me. It reminds me why I write."

The following poem comes from her book meant to wake up feeling:

postulation

(

For cause of disturbance to bottom half of body, see page 143.

(enter mop, bucket and thunder)

Blood clot, 9

Gender peculiarities, 32

Suffocation through trauma, 12,

16, 17, 19, 24, 25, 27-

lesion’d sidewalks, disembowel’d filth, medicine'd memory, call them migrating flesh furnaces,  photograph'd bandages, remarks of sadness, shape for hunters, syringes of churned implants, unknown neck glass, wooden nude

despise loneliness/ flush refuge/ neuter. wounds.  119

"She is getting softer. Locate the alteration of

weather fumes. Are her feet wet. Does she have

a plan of entry. If she is olive-skinned, allow the

sun to arrive like a heated erection pressing pres-

sing pressing."

laziness of cartilage, 2,731

(admit a need for naming labeling absorption )

label:

That is anise. That is not meant to go away. That is a man

in the shape of a woman. That is a grapefruit. That is addiction.

That is a chin ignoring the rest. That is concrete. That is flimsy

and forever. That is a meal standing up. That is starvation.

That is a hurricane. That is bondage. That is clever. That

is intrusion of turnpikes and demolition. That is sexy.

That is the smell of cryophobia. That is a disrobing of blurs.

That is rust.

demand:

"You didn't even notice I scratched away my

hips and climbed skin out of my collarbone so you can hang there. Aren't you homeless. Don't you want to burrow your germs into my gender to see what mutated cells we can create?"

count teeth, 309

explore the function of magic, 241

impose queerness into wrists/earlobes/

back pockets, 64, 919

[ stage right /spotlight on the white space / the stiffness / enter  mammals]  

Person 1: (hopeful)  You can weave monsters into quilts for the wintertime.

Person 2: (disinterested)  What stitch do you primarily use?

Person 1: (with knowledge of rage)  The kind that pricks both of you.

(the understudy screams)

speak up, reproduction!

psychoanalyze how much you mishandle prisons

use    organic    cocks    only

compulsive transformations miss out on blemished whiskers

want we want what we want want half-moments because we cannot afford completeness   only red ugh red ugh

how much has been erased and if you steam open the body will you find what was really there

pound tiny scars into cumin, 880

violence the tongues, 17 18

fibrillate, 47

open indentations like flip books, 11, 753

write outside of prosthetics, 32, 34-

    

see.

          [

Blood and ailments in high school. New Jersey: 1990-. Action.

Desire chemical removal. Boulder: 2008. Memory.

Gulped dance relapse or the time I drank tea from shoveled belly button, Hartford: 2005. Memory.

Inflation of womb, worry and wind gulp. New York: ____. Memory.

Play hopscotch with inferior nasal concha and sacrum.  ____ : Memory. _.

Spill homes. ___: ___. Memory.

Staircase. Emptied throat cavity. New Jersey, 1991. Memory.

Herman, Aimee. to go without blinking. BlazeVOX books. New York: 2012.

~ ~ ~ 

Aimee Herman is a Brooklyn-based poet and performance artist looking to disembowel the architecture of gender and what it means to queer the body. Find Aimee's poems in Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (NightboatBooks), in the full-length collection, to go without blinking (BlazeVOX books), the recent chapbook, rooted, (Dancing Girl Press), and in the full-length book of poems, meant to wake up feeling (great weather for MEDIA). Aimee is an adjunct professor at Bronx Community College, a faculty member with Poetry Teachers NYC and a host for The Inspired Word’s open mic erotica series, Titillating Tongues. Read more at: aimeeherman.wordpress.com.

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

This entry is ©2015 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

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