Amie Whittemore and Her Kankakee Mallow (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Today's tattooed poet, Amie Whittemore, is also a prior contributor. She appeared here before, in 2018. She sent us this photo:

Amie tells us:

"This tattoo is special to me on several levels. First, it is of a Kankakee mallow, the only extant wildflower native only to Illinois; it was considered extinct before a pocket of it was discovered on Langham Island in the Kankakee River a few years ago. Kankakee is my home county and my parents live on the river so it felt like the perfect tattoo to get to capture my love of home. Obviously, I also wrote a poem about this magnificent flower.

I also got the tattoo in a former home. A house where I lived in Portland, Oregon in 2003-2005 became a tattoo studio (Oddball Studios @oddballtattooery) after my roommates and I moved out. While I was in Portland for AWP 2019, my old roommate and I visited the house-turned-studio and Sarah Crosley (@sarahecrosley) worked her magic. It was surreal seeing how the house had transformed; and now that past life, even the idea of getting a tattoo, feels even more distant, on the other side of the chasm of the pandemic."

Amie also sent the following poem, which originally appeared in The Heartland Review:

Don’t be Shallow, Vote for the Mallow

Slogan promoting the Kankakee mallow, the only surviving wildflower native to Illinois, found in Kankakee County and considered endangered, as its state flower (Habitat 2030).

Bright blister, bold break

in the brush of alien

honeysuckle, rarest

perfume in a disaster

of farmland, groping

for sunlight, recluse

requiring fire

to suss your seeds

dormant for decades

on Langham Island,

chewed bubblegum,

pink cap, drowsy

trumpet, your fan club

guards, films, and undresses

your flanks of scrub

so you’ll sidle up the sky.

These weekend naturalists

arrive by canoe to strip

weeds, count your seeds,

then eat bologna at noon—

faux meat the same color

as you. Hinge in the thicket,

foxed cream, leaves

the champagne of green things,

like any secret, your needs

outpace your means—

as you know. You’re no

fool. You shimmy

as if your near extinction

was a dream. The crew

goes to bed smelling the hem

of your pink skirt, lips

buttered with your velvet.

Nice work, you lucky flirt.

~ ~ ~

Amie Whittemore is the author of the poetry collection Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press) and the 2020 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the Reviews Editor for Southern Indiana Review and teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University.

Thanks to Amie for coming back to us and contributing more work 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.

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.

The Light Shines in the Darkness (Courtney Thrash on the Tattooed Poets Project)

Our next tattooed poet is Courtney Thrash, who sent us this photo:

Courtney recounted how she got thi tattoo:

"Several years ago, I endured a very difficult period in my life. After the dust settled, I looked over my journals and poems from that period and found dozens of instances where I had written about the concepts of darkness and light and their interactions--with no conscious realization of the theme. Once it was part of my awareness, I could trace the thread of light (hope) shining in and bringing me out of many varieties of darkness throughout my life. The light, for me, has a very specific and religious meaning, which is why I chose this phrase from the gospel of John for my tattoo. In its entirety, the phrase reads: 'The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.' My tattoo serves as both memorial and prescript, totem and prescience, proclamation of truth and victory and desperate prayer for times of doubt and defeat. The tattoo was done by Betty Rose (@bettyrosetattoos) of Rose & Crown Tattoos (@roseandcrowntattoos) in Austin, TX."

Courtney sent us the following poem, as well:

Mama, I Don’t Believe  

After C.D. Wright’s More Blues and the Abstract Truth  

  

The first freckles appear on his nose.  

Nerf gun bullets whistle like real ones;  

He shares a birthday   

with his great grandfather.  

And I say, No, he didn’t come  

to the party. He was already dead.  

  

In early April, we thumbed seeds into the dark;  

At the end of June he asks after  

the watermelon vine absent from the sill.  

I bury the tiny planter in the trash  

and say, I’m still learning  

how to grow things.  

  

Then there are the jokes he tells, doesn’t get,  

the legos in my purse, the toes  

rubbing holes through his shoes, moving  

notches up the door frame.  

He tells me his love in numbers.  

And I say, love is infinite  

or nothing.  

  

Well, mama, he says.  

What about apologies. What about waterfalls  

that never end. And superheroes who stop  

bad guys. Lock them up in vaults  

like your papers and Mamaw’s brooch,  

day. after. day. And will Papaw Richard  

come back to life with Jesus?  

He cries when a cartoon robot longs for love.  

And I say, a hornworm will strip a tomato plant  

Faster Than You Can Say Famine.

~ ~ ~

Courtney Thrash is a poet, writer, editor, mom, and wife in Austin, TX. You can find her work on the American Scholar’s poetry column “Next Line, Please,” in Rascal, and on Instagram @courtneythrashwriter, but mostly in notebooks and word documents.

Thanks to Courtney for sharing her tattoo with us on Tattoosday's 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.

TC Tolbert: A Joy To Be Hidden/A Gift to Be Found (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Our next tattooed poet is TC Tolbert, who sent us this photo:

TC explains:

This is a riff on a quote by psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott. He said: It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found, and while I wholeheartedly agree, I just did not want to tattoo the word 'disaster' on my chest (for many reasons) and so I tweaked it. It now reads It is a joy to be hidden and a gift to be found.

I’m trans (FTM) and I decided not to have top surgery about a decade ago but I often wear a compression shirt (though not always) and I’m on testosterone. This piece is the decoration that most accurately celebrates and speaks to the both/and of so much of my experience and especially my chest. It was inked on me in Santa Fe by Dawn Purnell – an incredible artist I’ve been to for several pieces (including Duchamp’s Fountain and Magritte’s Treachery of Images).

The photo of my chest is a selfie with my partner’s fingers covering my nipples.

TC shared the following poem, as well, which was first published in The Nation in July 2019:

felo-de-se—Melissa

physicists say we change an object simply by turning
our attention to it—really I am a grandson
only when we are eating at Panera—one of us is lying
always about her particular hunger—I love the children outside of me
counting to 30 while covering their eyes—whose body
will we sacrifice to be in the company of another—each
day across my ongoing—I haul the husk of her—fire
towers are designed for distance viewing—and I am right
here—mothering you into the next life—call me cover
when you don’t know who I could be—time’s
psychologic and legal assault—no one is listening to
ice become water—burying you to keep us alive—

~ ~ ~

Photo by Shawnte Orion

TC Tolbert identifies as a trans and genderqueer feminist, collaborator, mover, and poet. And, s/he’s a human in love with humans doing human things. S/he is author of Gephyromania (Ahsahta Press 2014), five chapbooks, and co-editor of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books 2013). TC was recently awarded an Academy of American Poets’ Laureate Fellowship for his work with trans, non-binary, and queer folks as Tucson’s Poet Laureate. S/he is Writer in Residence at Pratt Institute, 2019-2020. www.tctolbert.com

Thanks to TC for contributing 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.

Rochelle Hurt on the Tattooed Poets Project

Our next tattooed poet is Rochelle Hurt, who offered up these tattoos:

Rochelle explains:

"The girls in the tattoos are from Dorothea Tanning's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

Tanning is one of my favorite visual artists. She was a surrealist who made incredibly strange and moving paintings, sculptures, and poems. She once wrote that this painting in particular was about confrontation and depicted the ways in which our fear of the unknown is 'a projection of our own imaginations: our own private nightmares.' In it, one of the girls looks wild as she contends with a giant sunflower, while the other seems to have already struggled with it. In my mind they were always the same girl on either side of her private nightmare. Both states seemed important, necessary to the whole. That's why I had to get them tattooed together. (Only later did I read that one of the girls is perhaps a doll, which opens a whole new world of thought on the private nightmare.) The tattoo was done by an amazing artist named Kaitlyn Anne (@kaitlynxanne).

Rochelle also sent us this poem, which was first published in Grist:

Prayer for Exposure

O my hallowed CAT-scan, my X-ray of hope,
my moral microscope, my consecrated blood draw,
my pious pee test, my forensic father almighty,
my soul-seeking sleuth, my perpetual black light,
my sublime radar, my most private eye of eyes,
my silent paparazzo, my righteous nanny cam,
my reverse peephole, my sudden curtain pull,
my MagLite in the back alley of bedtime prayers,
my spiritual lock-pick, my sacred search warrant
my heavenly two-way mirror, my holy wiretap,
my giant ear to the wall of this profane heart,
my magnificent magnifying glass, my magic decoder:
look quick while I write all my sins on my skin
with the disappearing ink of your forgiveness.

~ ~ ~

Rochelle Hurt the author of two books of poems: In Which I Play the Runaway (Barrow Street, 2016), which won the Barrow Street Poetry Prize, and The Rusted City: A Novel in Poems (White Pine, 2014). Her work has been included in the Best New Poets anthology and she's been awarded prizes and fellowships from Crab Orchard Review, Arts & Letters, Hunger Mountain, Poetry International, Vermont Studio Center, Jentel, and Yaddo. She lives in Orlando, where she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida and runs the review site The Bind.

Thanks to Rochelle for her contribution to the 2020 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.

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.

Francesco Levato on the 2020 Tattooed Poets Project

Welcome, friends, to the twelfth annual celebration of tattooed poets on Tattoosday! Here's hoping everyone is well and looking forward to enjoying a month of poetry and tattoos!

Francesco Levato is our first tattooed poet, who actually sent this to me back in June 2018. He got lost in the shuffle last year, so I wanted to have him lead the way in 2020 with the following tattoo:

Francesco tells us that this tattoo is from the cover of his chapbook jettison/collapse (AngelHousePress, 2015). He notes that "the graphic is meant to be evocative of redaction." He credits Garett (@gj619nca) at Vivid Tattoo (@vividtattoo) in San Diego as the tattoo artist.

Francesco also sent us the following poem, from jettison/collapse:

[Sidenote] The practical activity of externalization.

I sing myself, divine and unbleached, free of external determinant, of the bondage of ambiguity. I am bone and blood. In the maelstrom of affect I am concrete. I speak, and through me speaks the lexical. I name: white bull, vulture, suture, stone, ribcage, flame, smoke, sword. And in turn I am constructed: not stone, but susceptible to, not ribcage, but assembled in part, missing part, not sword, but one capable of wielding. If I say I took up sword against my brother, you can be sure “I” signifies the concept of my physicality, “sword” the material form of the sign, the action, though not illustrated, can be heard, felt, tasted. You can be sure “I” did.

~ ~ ~

Francesco Levato is a poet, a literary translator, and a new media artist. Recent books include Arsenal/Sin Documentos; Endless, Beautiful, Exact; Elegy for Dead Languages; War Rug; Creaturing (as translator); and the chapbooks A Continuum of Force and jettison/collapse. He has collaborated and performed with various composers, including Philip Glass, and his cinépoetry has been exhibited in galleries and featured at film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Poetry, a PhD in English Studies, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Literature & Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos.

Thanks to Francesco for helping us launch the 2020 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.