Gabriela Garcia's Cuba Tattoo (The Tattooed Poets Project 2020)

Today's tattooed poet is Gabriela Garcia, who shared this little palm tree:

Gabriela tells us:

"This is a very rough tattoo but perhaps my favorite because of its connection to my favorite places and people. It’s a stick-and-poke I got in a living room in Cuba. Nowadays, there are lots of privately owned tattoo shops popping up all over the Havana, but in the early days, it was more of an underground affair. This was done by a neighbor of a family member as we drank beers and chilled on the couch and watched the world bustle by through the open door."

Gabriela also sent us the following poem, which originally appeared in The Cincinnati Review and the Best American Poetry 2019:

GUANTANAMERA

Nothing lingers on the lips like a death song,

my mother says, while shredding cassava

and invoking the spirits—

    Celia Cruz    José Martí—

or singing blood verse, a church lady

working the line, refugee intake.

Celia rolling pride through a gap

in her teeth, a cry that is palm tree split

middle-of-night lightning, 

and my mother, hands full of seashell witchcraft,

hands full of rooster feather prayer, 

says the ocean tastes different

once we’ve drunk it all, once we’ve bongo beat

to water bumping on a home-baked raft: we

pilgrims who sway and dip to the sky because

how close to almost-death is our trombone shriek

and even if we deny it—our blackness

our fufú plátano quimbombó-ness, 

we end up riding the rhythm

on the right pause, roaring lineage on our hips

and in our swings when

we are dancing across the oceans like gods. 

~ ~ ~

Gabriela Garcia is the author of the novel Of Women and Salt, forthcoming from Flatiron/Macmillan. Her fiction and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Tin House, Zyzzyva, Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a Steinbeck Fellowship from San Jose State University, and has an MFA in fiction from Purdue University, where she also taught creative writing.

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

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.

Caitlin Roach and the Letter J (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Today's tattooed poet is Caitlin Roach, who shared this very simple tattoo:

Caitlin tells us about her ink:

"When I first met my husband, transcendent essayist José Orduña, we fell fast and hard in love. A couple weeks in he told me he wanted me to tattoo him–something boundless and chaotic, whatever I thought of in the moment–an infatuated request of pure impulse. The only calculated part of the plan was that we would tattoo one another. We had a no. 2 pencil, a sewing needle, thread, and some India ink, and Bill Callahan played from tinny laptop speakers as I scribbled something on his arm as an outline. The tattoo I started that night (it really was a scribble, a non-thing) didn’t get finished. The popping sound of the needle entering his skin with each poke nauseated us both. We never switched turns, and we decided we would finish another time. 

Four years later we were married, his tattoo still unfinished and mine yet started. The night of our one-year wedding anniversary, in Albuquerque where we were living at the time, on another impulsive whim, we sat at our kitchen table with a needle, a pencil, some thread, and the same bottle of ink. We would finish the job we started and add something additional to mark our first year of marriage. I ended up with a small, lower-case j on my wrist, he with a c on his. I never completed his scribble, and it’s still unfinished. 

A friend of ours noticed them once and asked if we 'paid about 50 cents' for them, noting they looked like they’d fallen off the table and landed in our laps. Mine’s gritty and inexact and looks more like a fish hook than a j. But it’s a permanent artifact of that night and I love that. It’s like its own little voice on my wrist, always calling my attention and getting it because I notice it several times a day. I love that, amidst all the rational calculation that directs so much of our lives, there’s still an impulsive spontaneity that surfaces up between us. My husband swears he’s done with homemade tattoos, but I’m not so certain. I just need to upgrade on materials–maybe learn how to make a proper (still homemade) tattoo gun."

Caitlin shared the following poem, as well:

Dirge for ice sheets receding

Everything bends to you. Even the creeping

sedum slows to apprehend you, splitting cracks

more open at your passing to wrest what notice
might still exist inside you. The last living box

elder, hunkered resolute in the corner, flickers
in its moldy hull like a twitch, knowing nothing

but awaits you. Somewhere yarrow readies itself
to stanch the blood you’ll let from it and airs its

sweetness still to solicit even your indifference.
All those Julys spent damp in the fern room

where the egg fruit swelled and swung adjacent
to the drunkard’s dream, dancing bones glutting

deep yellow bells swinging, kept me on my knees.
The weeping fig never clapped a tear from its glossy

stem then. Still you bent to stroke forth shame from
the touch-me-not to see the plant’s spines rise,

to watch it live up its name round your finger.
Haven’t I been this sensitive. I’ve seen black

blacken in the center of you. I’m not trying to
capture light. I’m after the dark bit dumbed by

the brightness flanking all sides but still whirls
around its own dark heart, purging impractical

fractions. That, or the velvet ice slats slipping
away from their silver throats so surely I cannot

buck the thawing, I can never remember. Anything
but the clasp. But the bells’ wet din.

Copyright (c) 2018 by Caitlin Roach; first appeared on TinHouse.com.

~ ~ ~

Caitlin Roach earned an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems appear or are
forthcoming in Best New Poets 2017, Poetry Northwest, Tin House, Colorado Review, The Journal, West Branch, Copper Nickel, Prelude, Handsome, and The Iowa Review. You can find her at caitlinroach.com.

Thanks to Caitlin for sharing her poem and tattoo 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.

Jenn Hart and Her Petrol Girl Let Loose on the Tattooed Poets Project

Although we focus predominantly on American poets, we are occasionally blessed to see work on poets from elsewhere.

One such poet is Jenn Hart, a poet from the UK. Here is a tattoo Jenn shared with us:

She tells us this is "one of my stick and poke tattoos of a petrol girl." Jenn notes that "this tattoo is very important to me because it signifies not only radical feminism but also the period of time which I started to really empower myself with DIY punk communities."

Jenn tells us that "my poetry covers a range of things, including what it is like to be a woman in punk, growing up at gigs and fighting tooth and nail to be visible."

One of the fun aspects of the Tattooed Poets Project is the range of types of poems we read and here. In Jenn's case, we don't have the written word, but a performance of her poem, "Let Loose, Lucy":

Jenn Hart is poet, musician and activist who finds it hard to hold anything back. Her poetry is sharp and and honest as she tackles mental health, female relationships and being a woman in a punk band.

In 2013 Jenn released a zine of poems Scraped Knees and Sob Stories and it was so good someone got the cover art tattooed io their leg. She set off on a DIY spoken word tour (Riot Nrrrds) with fellow punk poet Henry Raby in 2014 and is set to release her first official pamphlet of poems Better Watch Your Mouth with Burning Eye Books in April 2017.

You can find Jenn in these very places, on her website here, more of her spoken word on Bandcamp here, and on YouTube here.

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

This entry is ©2017 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.