Sonia Greenfield's Passionflower (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Today's Tattooed Poet is Sonia Greenfield, who I met last fall at the Best American Poetry 2018 launch reading. She subsequently sent us a few photos of one of her tattoo experiences:

Sonia told us the following story of her passionflower tattoo:

"I got this tattoo at the Sacred Rose (@sacredrosetattoo), which used to be in The Mission in San Francisco. My tattoo artist was Bryan Randolph (@bryanrandolph), and I feel so lucky to have had him do my artwork. This tattoo-- its bold lines and strong color-- have stood the test of time. The tattoo looks as fresh as a new blossom, still, yet it is twenty years old. Bryan is now tattooing at Spider Murphy's (@spidermurphystattoo) in San Rafael if you're in the Bay Area and looking for new ink. I can't recommend him enough if bold is your aesthetic.

I chose a passionflower for a few reasons-- I like the intricacy and architecture of this flower, its colors and textures. I like it as a symbol for passion, which is what drives us towards whatever it is we wish to acquire or achieve. Funny story about the location of this flower: My now husband couldn't remember the term 'tramp stamp,' which this tattoo certainly is not, but he came up with an even worse term for a tattoo located on the small of the back: 'Wait, what do people call a tattoo that's just above the butt? People call it a hag tag, right?' No, dear, it is neither tramp stamp or hag tag. It's art in a place of intimacy." 

Sonia also sent along her poem....


Lord's Prayer

dear lord
please grant me a spot
in the sand
on a Tunisian beach
with water so blue
it makes my eyes ache
and tiny crabs
that tickle the length
of my legs
but never pinch
and a novel
in my hands
about a woman
whose regrets match mine
but who finds contentment
on a swatch of beach
in Tunisia
where she reads of sadness
much like her own
yet moves on
dear lord
all I ask for
is a dog who will live forever
one who will rescue my only son
from wells
from the waves
of an ocean that cares little
for what it sucks in
or spits out
from the spiteful girlfriend
who breaks his five
prized possessions
because the boy could never
sniff out her cruel streak
dear lord
please let me finally
write the one poem
that will bring peace
to the Middle East
oh lord
I ask these
simple things of you
here in an American town
far from a Tunisian beach
my best dog dead
almost a year
and my child
only as tangible as hard sun
on unfeeling waves
where the glare
brings tears to my eyes
as I ask for your mercy
amen

~ ~ ~

Sonia Greenfield was born and raised in Peekskill, New York, and her chapbook, American Parable, won the 2017 Autumn House Press/Coal Hill Review prize. Her first full-length collection, Boy with a Halo at the Farmer's Market, won the 2014 Codhill Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in a variety of places, including in the 2018 and 2010 Best American Poetry, Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, and Willow Springs. Her collection of prose poems, Letdown, is forthcoming in 2020 with White Pine Press as part of the Marie Alexander Series. She lives with her husband, son, and two rescue dogs in Hollywood where she edits the Rise Up Review and directs the Southern California Poetry Festival.

Thanks to Sonia for sharing her passionflower and poem 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.

Amy Glynn's Wreath Wraps Up National Poetry Month (The Tattooed Poets Project)

I am proud and honored to end National Poetry Month 2015 with the amazing work of Amy Glynn.

When we first started discussing tattoos several years ago, Amy was un-inked, and gave me the impression that tattoos were not for her. Not only did she change her opinion, she went big and startlingly beautiful.

For a while, it was doubtful that Amy would contribute, because of the location of her tattoo, and the desire to showcase it only if it was photographed artistically. Finally, this year, the stars aligned, and Amy sent me some wonderful shots of her tattoo in all its glory. Enjoy:

Photo by Vincent Louis Carrella

And a different, closer perspective:

Photo by Vincent Louis Carrella

What makes Amy's ink even more remarkable is how it ties in with her work as a poet. I'll let Amy explain:

"The botanical images in the tattoo reference poems in [my] book 'A Modern Herbal' (Measure Press, 2013). The white-throated swifts reference a poem published in Poetry Northwest in 2009 which will appear in a subsequent publication.

The wreath of interwoven fruits and flowers echo the primary preoccupations of the book – morning glory and salvia divinorum are powerful entheogens; brugmansia is a hallucinogen with a tendency to induce the belief that you can fly. The wine grapes represent alchemy and nod to a lifelong fascination with Sufi imagery. Ginkgo biloba represents tenacity; opium poppies are of course common tropes for oblivion. The pomegranate represents mortality and fertility; the apple, cultivation and waywardness. Sunflowers are an expression of the Golden Mean and represent order and design. Walnuts stand for memory. The white-throated swift is believed to be the fastest animal on earth with air speeds of up to 200mph."

Karen Roze of Sacred Rose Tattoo in Berkeley, California is responsible for the botanical images. Her work appeared yesterday here on another poet. Danny Chong of Black and Blue in San Francisco did the birds.

Amy sent me several poems from the collection and asked me to choose. I selected two that I thought most wonderful:

Opium Poppy

Papaver somniferum

You would’ve loved this moonrise: creepy

orange-on-purple, swollen, cloud-

occluded. It’s October’s last

gasp, litanies of rattling stuff

and the dry rain of bloodied leaves

and air a grassfire’s ghost has haunted

all day. And all of it

echoes so, darling. Quit

hanging around. Yes, I said I wanted

you always with me. But love’s

cruelly shortsighted. No, enough:

bring on the narcolepsy: vast

figureless rivers, a cold, loud,

sedating rush. I’m just so sleepy.

Last season’s stands of double poppies

still stand here, though by now the lavish

silk petals are mere memory. Not

so fragile as they looked, I guess,

and somehow more themselves like this,

as if the blossoms always were

a smokescreen for

a darker, truer, more

essential form, the cynosure,

the censer, the ripe cicatrice 

sleep wells from, black and bottomless.

Go. I’ll be all right when the thought

of you no longer wants to ravish

me with its endless, morphing copies.

~ ~ ~

Apple

Malus domestica

Where do desire and fulfilment meet?

It’s here. The place where one bite makes you need

the next. Sweet. Sweet: desire’s prototype;

sweet meaning perfect, meaning ideal. It’s

a feedback loop, look: lick the sugar from

my lip, see for yourself if it’s satiety

or lust for more. Or both, a branching, each

leaf-tip light-bathed and glaucous, reaching, and

at last at last we taste it, or at least

are so lost in the dream of it we never

detect the molecule of cyanide

at the center of the thing. This is forever.

Bitter unkillable seed. Eternal return

with a twist.

~ ~ ~

Amy Glynn’s poems and essays appear widely in journals and anthologies including The Best American Poetry. She has been a James Merrill House Fellow, a six time alum of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the inaugural recipient of Poetry Northwest’s Carolyn Kizer Award. Most recently her essay “Apples” (northeast quadrant of the tattoo) won Literal Latte’s 2014 Essay Award.

I always thank the poets who have contributed here but, in Amy's case, to do so in a single line doesn't sit well with me.

It has been a journey working with Amy on this submission and, even though I have never met her face-to-face, I feel that I have. We've had many conversations over the years and I am eternally grateful not only for the beauty of her submission (the tattoo and the poems), but for the whole process.

I offer up my profound gratitude to Amy Glynn for her amazing contribution and for her entrusting me with sharing her tattoo and words with all of my readers.

This entry is ©2015 Tattoosday. The poems and tattoo photos 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.

Melissa Eleftherion's Strawberries (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Our next tattooed poet is Melissa Eleftherion:

Melissa tells us:

"...My strawberries ... were done over the course of two years by Karen Roze of Sacred Rose Tattoo in Berkeley, CA. She & I collaborated on the general design of the piece, and discussed ways Karen might integrate the strawberries with the nearly-20 yr old & slightly misaligned medicine ring I already had on my upper arm. A lesson to trust my instincts, the medicine ring was artfully designed but carelessly tattooed on me in the kitchen of a tattoo artist named Steve around 2am back when I was seventeen in Brooklyn, before tattooing was legal, before I learned to advocate for myself. My strawberries will always symbolize the many ways we can branch out from past traumas & pain to create beauty in the world. How we can make art from horror, and take little starts toward new growth and make spaces for healing. The strawberries are also a companion piece to those of my husband's whose fascination with strawberries alighted in me the possibility that kinship & love might just be possible."

Here is one of her poems, "little stem," which appeared originally in finery:

little stem

little combat flower

be strong in the overture

in the wave crash

too many shouting men

be strong be bold

yes yes

little feral light

moving

into

yes light

the wolf

the war

~ ~ ~

Melissa Eleftherion grew up in Brooklyn. She is the author of huminsect (dancing girl press, 2013), prism maps (dusie kollektiv, 2014), Pigtail Duty (dancing girl press, 2015), and several other chapbooks and fragments. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Bone Bouquet, Bukowski Erasure Poetry Anthology, Delirious Hem, Dusie, Entropy, Finery, Manifesting the Female Epic, Mom Egg Review, Open Letters Monthly, Poet as Radio, So to Speak, & TRUCK. She works as a librarian with Mendocino County Libraries, and created, developed, and currently manages the Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange. You can find her online at https://apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com/.

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

This entry is ©2015 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: Cheryl Dumesnil

Today's tattooed poet is Cheryl Dumesnil.

She offers up this lovely sand dollar tattoo:

Cheryl informs us that Amy Justen from Sacred Rose Tattoo in Berkeley did the work, three sand dollars on her lower left leg:

"Before my first son, Brennan, was born, I had three miscarriages. After his birth, I packed those losses away in a box marked “then,” and moved forward into parenthood. Or so I thought. Nearly a year after my second son, Kian, was born, old grief began seeping out of that box, coloring my days. While exploring how those miscarriages were still affecting me, as a way of integrating them
into my life rather than denying their impact on me, I had three sand dollars tattooed on my leg."

What folows is an excerpt from Love Song for Baby X, a memoir about Cheryl's circuitous route to parenthood, that tells the sand dollar story:

There is also a poem of Cheryl's over on BillyBlog here.

* * *

Sitting in meditation, I close my eyes and invite grief to appear. Now that I’m safely ensconced in parenthood, I can do this. Now that I know what I’m grieving: not the loss of parenthood, but the loss of three babies, I can do this. There, I said it: babies.

I breathe in. I see a meadow full of ragweed and green foxtails. I breathe out.

I wait.

Will grief enter as a mountain lion, all creep, shadow, and snarl? Will grief enter as a black-tailed deer, timidly nibbling the undergrowth?

I breathe in. I breathe out. I wait.

From the center of the field, something white and winged flickers up out of the grasses, flies like a lazy spring butterfly across the blue sky and lands on my left leg. It presses an image into my flesh then dissolves.

What I see there: three sand dollars sketched on my skin.

“Really?” I ask.

“Yes,” grief confirms, “really.”

“Okay.”

* * *

“I know what my next tattoo will be.” I present this fact to my wife Tracie as she is standing in the bathroom, brushing her teeth.

She spits a mouthful of foam into the sink, “Yeah, the cherry blossoms and humming bird, right?”

“Well yeah,” I say, “that one too, but first I need to get a different tattoo.” I touch the outside of my lower left leg, “three sand dollars, for the three babies we lost.”

Tracie looks at me, blinking, toothbrush held in midair.

When I speak it out loud, the tattoo plan seems weird, a bit extreme. I mean, were they really babies? Were they really important enough to warrant a permanent mark on my body? I say, “I’m gonna sit with it for a few days, to make sure the image sticks. But it arrived in such an authentic way, I feel like I need to do this.”

She’s not a fan of tattoos, my wife. And yet she knows tattoo is a primal means of self-expression for me. This conflict of interests—wanting to offer me her unconditional support, not wanting her wife to look like a circus freak—it hangs in the air. Until we burst out laughing.

A memorial tattoo. A monument to three spirits that passed through this body. A tribute to all I’ve learned through their passing.

* * *

A week before my appointment at Sacred Rose Tattoo, I walk Pajaro Dunes, the beach of my childhood, looking for whole sand dollars. I want to bring samples to the tattoo studio, to present my artist, Amy, with examples of the real thing.

I want her to feel their grit between her finger tips, to trace the gray veins that creep up their sides like fissures in concrete, to see how the five-pointed star is made up of hundreds of needle-thin lines, to break one open and release the three, tiny, porcelain-like doves that rattle around inside.

I know this length of beach like no other. I know where the waves cross over each other, creating pockets in the sand that catch sand dollars, a cache revealed at low tide.

This weekend, for the first time in my life, I can’t find a single whole sand dollar. This weekend, I carry home a small Tupperware bowl filled with bone-white fragments.

* * *

The electric buzz of Amy’s tattoo gun, the burn of ink needled between my epidermal layers, sends endorphins pulsing through me. Lying on her table, I float in and out of the room, memory playing its filmstrip in my brain.

Years ago, while walking along San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, troubling through a life-altering break-up, I recalled something my sister had found on the beach when we were kids: a dime-sized sand dollar. Logic questioned the accuracy of that memory: could that really have happened? I looked out at the Pacific: five tiers of gray and churning pre-storm waves. How could something so fragile have made it from there to here? Not possible. Then I looked down at the sand. There it was, not five inches away from my feet: another dime-sized sand dollar on the beach.

Now and then, Amy’s voice swirls into my dream-state: “How are you doing?”

“Mmm. Fine,” I hum.

And then the dream about my grandma returns—she and I standing in the shallow surf at Pajaro Dunes, sunlight glaring so brightly off the water, I couldn’t look directly at it. Reaching blindly into the sea, again and again, I grabbed up fistfuls of broken sand dollars, wanting the whole ones I couldn’t see. “Keep trying,” she said, “They’re in there. Just keep trying.”

As Amy works, etching the hair-fine, single-needle lines into my skin, I learn what the sand dollars are really about: hope and faith, trying and believing.

~~~~~~~~~~

Winner of the 2008 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, Cheryl Dumesnil is the author of In Praise of Falling, editor of Hitched! Wedding Stories from San Francisco City Hall, and co-editor, with Kim Addonizio, of Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos. Her poems have appeared in Nimrod, Indiana Review, Calyx, and Many Mountains Moving, among other literary magazines. Her essays have appeared on literarymama.com, hipmama.com, mamazine.com and in Hip Mama Zine. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and their two sons. Visit her at http://www.cheryldumesnil.com/.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Alexandra Teague

Someone recently asked me where I find all of these tattooed poets. A great question, and I owe thanks to many people, for most individuals come by way of word-of-mouth from other poets. But I also reach out on my own, often sending dozens of e-mails to writers around the country, and the world. It's like shooting an arrow into the dark, one can only hope the missive strikes a target.

I was recently poring over a copy of the anthology Poetry Daily Essentials 2007 and picking poets to e-mail. I stumbled across Alexandra Teague's "House Guest" and sent her my standard "ink-query." And sure enough, she became one of the few poets I wrote to out of the blue who replied because, not only is Ms. Teague tattooed, one of them is poetry-related. As she so aptly put it, "I sort of had to reply to you."

Without further ado, here are Alexandra's tattoos:

I was inspired to get the Japanese kanji for "poetry" after seeing a pin at the Poetry Magazine table at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in 1999.



I'd been thinking about getting a tattoo and couldn't decide on a design, but as soon as I saw the kanji, I knew it was exactly right. I see it not only as a symbol of the art of poetry but also as a reminder to live poetically. I got the tattoo at a shop in Miami (I don't remember the name). I did a bit of research to confirm that the kanji was correct (since I don't know any Japanese), but I didn't have it really confirmed until several years later when a new friend, from Japan, said, "Do you know what your tattoo says?" And I said, "I hope so." Fortunately, according to her, it really does mean "poem" or "poetry."

She also shared this lovely tattoo:

The other tattoo is a couple of years old. It was done by Amy Justen at Sacred Rose Tattoo in Berkeley, California. I've always loved the ocean and wanted to live by the coast, so the California seagull is symbolic for me of my migration out West. Amy Justen has a background in fine art and does some really interesting, painterly work with white and grey, which I love, but which made some people think the tattoo was a decal when I first got it!

Be sure to head over to BillyBlog to read one of Alexandra's poems here.

Alexandra Teague’s first book of poetry, Mortal Geography, won the Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and has just been published (April 2010) by Persea Books. Her work has also appeared in Best New Poets 2008, Best American Poetry 2009, and The Yale Anthology of Younger American Poetry, as well as journals including The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, and New England Review. She was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and has since lived in Arkansas, Missouri, Florida, Montana, Hawaii, and California. She currently teaches English at City College of San Francisco and lives in Oakland. For more information about upcoming readings and publications, visit www.alexandrateague.com.

Thanks to Alexandra for sharing her tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!