Heather Lang Cassera and Her Stacking Doll (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Today's tattooed poet is Heather Lang Cassera, who shared this cool photo of her awesome tattoo:

Heather had this tattoo done at Slave to the Needle (@slavetotheneedle) in Seattle. She tells us:

"The stacking doll is in memory of my great grandma who inspired me in many ways. For example, she always wanted to go to China, and I've had the opportunity to study Mandarin in Tianjin and Beijing. I inherited a set of stacking dolls from her, and I am so grateful to have them."

The poem she sent along is also in remembrance of her great grandmother. Versions of this poem were previously published in volume 8 of the anthology Back to Where You Once Belonged: Las Vegas Writers Weigh The Power of The Past (Huntington Press, 2017) and in her chapbook I was the girl with the moon-shaped face (Zeitgeist-Press, 2018).

Tradition

When I was young,
I’d ask for Grandma Busha.
Pick one or the other,
the adults would say.
You don’t need to say Grandma Grandma.
But there’s something about redundancy.
Some folks put cinnamon on their tongues,
& they call it a dusting.
They call it anti-inflammatory.
To me, it’s the soil of certain memories,
sprinkled over sugar & over butter
& on top of Wonder Bread.
It is something that is constant.
It is something that is passed down
from mother to child even though
we no longer speak the language.
Busha isn’t Polish,
a man once told me.
Apparently, it’s Polish-American slang,
& no one knows where or when it began,
but even when our throats
are sore & red,
we still toast
our cinnamon-sugar bread
because some things
need to be repeated.

~ ~ ~

Heather Lang Cassera holds an MFA in Poetry with a Certificate in Literary Translation. In 2017 she was named Las Vegas' Best Local Writer or Poet by the readers of KNPR’s Desert Companion. Her poems have been published by or are forthcoming with The Normal School, North American Review, Pleiades, South Dakota Review, and other literary journals, and have been on exhibit in the Nevada Humanities Program Gallery. Heather curated Legs of Tumbleweeds, Wings of Lace, an anthology of literature by Nevada women, funded by the Nevada Arts Council and National Endowment for the Arts. She serves as World Literature Editor and book reviewer for The Literary Review, Faculty Advisor for 300 Days of Sun, and Co-Publisher for Tolsun Books. At Nevada State College, Heather teaches Composition, Professional Writing, World Literature, and more. www.heatherlang.cassera.net

Thanks to Heather for sharing her cool tattoo and lovely 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.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Izzy Oneiric

Today's tattooed poet is Izzy Oneiric, who sends us this amazing shot of her sleeve:

I'll let Izzy take it from here:

"My sleeve took 11 years to complete. The figure in the center is Dream from the Sandman graphic novel. I first saw it when I was 14, and knew instantly I wanted it tattooed. I got it a few months after I turned 18 by Steve at the Lion's Den in Salem, New Hampshire. Eight years later I was living in San Francisco, and wanted to add to it. I knew it needed some sort of dream imagery, but it was difficult to narrow that down. I began interrogating the basic elements of dreams, and thought one day: 'If DNA is the basis for all human life, could it also be the basis of dream life? What would a strand of dream DNA look like?' Using the work of Patrica Garfield, a clinical psychologist who's identified 12 universal dream themes that transcend age, location, gender, etc. I started designing the double helix; quickly realizing not all 12 would fit on my arm. On my shoulder is a blue moon; in a double-helix pattern around my arm are Royal typewriter keys with hobo symbols (representing communication/ miscommunication), weaving into a peacock from the Russian Tarot of St Petersburg (representing mythical creatures/animal friends). This was done by Natalie Chandler, at the time working at Black and Blue Tattoo. 

I wanted to fill in the background, but didn't want to disrupt the double-helix shape. I couldn't figure out how to do that, so I left it alone. A few years later, I was working at Cold Steel Tattoo & Piercing. On a whim one evening I googled 'double helix,' and one of the results was the image of a nebula in the shape of a DNA strand!

The colors and the shape were perfect. I brought it to my friend Vincent Weiner who was tattooing there, and we worked on it in bits and pieces. I tried to pay him, but he refused my money. I asked how I could compensate him for several thousand dollars worth of work. He was waiting for his wife to get her green card, so he said 'Nobody's baking for me right now. I'd really love some chocolate-chip cookies.' For every session I brought cookies, banana bread, cranberry muffins, some weird chocolate-coconut drops... 

I'd always dreamed of having stars on the piece, and in Morpheus' eyes. I'd tried surface piercings with PTFE bars, but they all rejected, so I was greatly excited when people began experimenting with dermal anchors and reporting success. About a year later I was living in New Orleans and learned that Adam at Electric Ladyland (now at Slave to the Needle in Seattle) was doing them. 

We 'bedazzled' my arm with six Swarovski crystals. They healed nicely until I moved to Chicago, when they suddenly all rejected. Now that I'm back in New Orleans, I'd like to get them reinstalled."

This is definitely the first time we've highlighted body art which included dermal anchors. Very cool!

Izzy sent along this prose poem to accompany her contribution:

Blue Roses are Blooming in Safeway

Oracle asses were tickled by gas plumes. We know now—what of it? Ethylene case closed diminished returned to sender . . . send her Erato Echo Glossalalia babble bury shovel stop. I. I. I. Decline. To state. To play. So there. Repeat. Blue roses are blooming in Safeway. Champagne ruby is slang for magnum. Artaud’s black crucifix pupils ablaze in golden eyes I plagiarized because I want to see so badly but I gotta walk past flooded lottos, plainclothes Cutlasses, Dinner, Linner, 4th meal, Dunch—neologisms like I am a woman, half eaten mosquitoes and Teardrop Mike wanting guilty date, a guilty beer, because all American women drink and don’t have any Mexican friends.

Animist, manimal, my keys do not break. There are escalators in my head watering flowerbeds with ropes of crystal spit, burping readymade Rubbermaid green baby coffins, smoking Christmas in a jaundiced sky. 

Over beef tea and sheepish mirrors, defective alexandrines tell me it gets easier with practice, hurts a little less each time. Like so much decapitated obsidian, we know not now how high the ledge is very high, this crisis not of poetry but concrete and well, since Pythia choked on the geyser she’s gone now, my hair caught on fire, please tune my viola, I know a few songs from when I was a child. Stardust Memories—yes, I can play that piece quite well.

~ ~ ~

Izzy Oneiric's writing has appeared in publications such as Wheelhouse Magazine, Source Material, and Phantom Limb.  A series of visual collages were published in Plath Profiles. She is the author of the chapbooks Dabbling in Babylon, and From the Bombshell Shelter.  For several years she was the poetry editor of other magazine. She holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the California Institute of Integral Studies and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago. She currently lives in New Orleans with her loving partner and their spazzy black cat.

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

This entry is ©2012 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.