The Tattooed Poets Project: Erica Mena

Among this year's Tattooed Poets' submissions, this is one of my favorite photos:

Photograph by Julie Chen

This was submitted by the poet Erica Mena, whose tattoo was inspired by the great Pablo Neruda.

Erica gives us the detail behind these wonderful tattoos:

 "This is my most intimate tattoo, my Neruda tattoo: 'Love is so short, forgetting is so long.' It's a full line (punctuation included) from Poem XX of Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair in translation by W.S. Merwin. The fish in concentric circles is the symbol printed on all of Neruda's books from mid-way through his career, and was drawn from the bronze statue at his most famous house in Isla Negra. The other two images were drawn by the tattoo artist, in response to two other lines from the same poem: 'The same night whitening the same trees. / We of that time are no longer the same.' and 'Write, for example: the night is shattered / and stars shiver blue in the distance.' The design and work were done by Ram at Fat Ram's Pumpkin Tattoo in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. 

I read Merwin's translation of Neruda's Twenty Love Poems when I was fifteen, and had that conversion experience, the moment when you realize this is what you want your life to be about. Not the sentiment, but the poetry. These poems, and this line in particular, convinced me that poetry can move between languages, times and places, freely and with no loss, when put into the right hands. When getting the tattoo, I considered getting the Spanish line: 'El amor es tan corto, el olvido es tan largo,' but chose the English because that was how I first encountered it. Out of all my tattoos it also hurt the most to get, fittingly I suppose--there was a moment where Ram was outlining the circles where it felt like my entire leg was on fire. Totally worth it."

I would add that I concur with Erica completely and offer up, as proof, my post over on BillyBlog in April 2008 here. I was running down my favorite poems for National Poetry Month and #28 was any of the poems in the book, and it just so happens I pointed to Poem XX as one shining example. The original edition translated by Merwin and illustrated by Jan Thompson is a must-have in anyone's library. But, I digress.

Erica offered us two poems, one of her own and one she translated. We'll share both:

(no subject) (spam poem #3)

good evening websit
Stop being a nervous wreck

I will like you to accept this token
So hard you can break an egg

hoping you will understand my point
this is not a myth

Every person dreams about meeting someone

~ ~ ~ 

Deus ex Machina

Throw the dice, Lord, your turn has come and it is winter. The trident is cornered, the mountains covered with a skin of ash. Lord, behold light’s song here, your due, in the stillness of the sea and the pure discretion of the endless night. Behold your son, Fire, burning the whole surface with his touch and seducing the water with his gilded tongue. Look here, Lord, his stepsister Dawn, liquid hierophant, maker of shape. In their terrible language they tell of celebrations, obedience, sin. This time, Lord, throw to us the seed and the male of the healthier species. Don’t announce him by chance, because he will become a cry and rise up with the warm murmur of pavement, and once again be lost to us, punished, denied. Let none but you, oh Lord, wield the butcher’s knife this time; mature a chord when life ceases and rain unexpectedly cleanses the lovers’ yoked hips. Throw the dice, Lord, your turn has inevitably come. Cast them without fear from your wide hand, because luck’s twelve sides won’t wait, and the sky points towards multitudes and disaster. Throw them, Lord, your turn has come and it is burning summer.

Translation of “Deus ex machina.” From La invención del día [The Invention of the Day]. © José Mármol. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2011 by Erica Mena. All rights reserved.
Published in Words Without Borders, November, 2011


Erica Mena is a poet, translator and print designer, not necessarily in that order. Her poetry and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Vanitas, The Dos Passos Review, Pressed Wafer, Arrowsmith Press, Words Without Borders, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, PEN America, Asymptote, Two Lines and others. She is the coordinator and co-host of Reading the World Podcast, a monthly conversation about literary translation. She is the founding editor of Anomalous Press.

Thanks to Erica for contributing this wonderful entry of 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.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Shannon Phillips

Today's tattooed poet is Shannon Phillips. She has five tattoos, none of which are in color. All of them are on her back. She sent us a few photos so we could appreciate them:

I'll let Shannon tell their stories:

"I knew I wanted a tattoo, but the commitment to one idea was freaking me out.  However, I took an Art of Mexico class and when I learned the term 'Nepantla' I knew that was it. Nepantla is a term in Nahuatl that roughly means 'on the border' or 'in between.' It seemed perfect. I got the tattoo done at a place off Pacific Coast Highway in Sunset Beach, California. It was a birthday gift from an ex that I was still friends with.

The next tattoo I got was of a coyote ouroboros. I love the coyote as a trickster symbol in Native American myth and I was also very drawn to the symbolism behind the ouroboros, the life-death-life cycle. I did not relate to the more classic ouroboros images of a dragon or a snake so I asked a young artist named Natalie Robles to design the coyote ouroboros for me. The tattoo was done at Atomic Tattoo off Hollywood Boulevard [in Los Angeles].

On the drive to a wedding in Arizona, my friend and I decided to get almost-matching tattoos. It seemed that since we were both people who had tattoos that we should have at least one on a whim. It had to be something simple since we didn't have a chance to research the tattoo shop. We settled on cat silhouettes.

The next tattoo I had done [seen at the bottom of the back in the top photo above] was at a shop in Lake Forest, California.  While walking to class one day at Cal State Long Beach, a flyer grabbed my attention – it depicted an awareness ribbon ... I saw it and I simply knew.

My quid pro quo\ tattoo was done at Wicked Ink in Knoxville, Tennessee.  I had heard the phrase literally translated to 'what for whom' and I had known for some time I wanted a tattoo that embodied my fascination with the structure of power. Again, I wanted something simple because I hadn't researched the tattoo shop – I was on another trip. I chose a female tattoo artist because it occurred to me that all my previous tattoos had been done by men."

Shannon sent us three poems to consider and I selected this one:

To My Stretchmarks

Fossilized jelly fish tendrils.

Moon-colored veins,
chalk-scrawled tree roots,
icicle milk.

On my hips,
Nature tattoos lightning.

--originally published in RipRap #30, 2008

~ ~ ~

Shannon Phillips earned an MFA in creative writing from Cal State University Long Beach. Her work has been published in Pearl, Verdad, RipRap, Rectangle, and her poem “Plum” placed second in Beyond Baroque's First Ever Poetry Contest. She previously taught ESL for two years and now edits Carnival, an online literary magazine.

Thanks to Shannon for sharing her poem and all of her tattoos with us on Tattoosday. I'd also like to thank her for referring us to Eric Morago, who appeared on the Tattooed Poets Project here, earlier this month.

This entry is ©2012 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoos 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

The Tattooed Poets Project: Chris Siteman

Today's chapter of the Tattooed Poet's Project features the work of Chris Siteman.

Chris sent in this poem featuring these literature-based tattoos :

Chris explains:

"The pieces on my chest were my first two tattoos. I got them when I was twenty, and was working as a doorman at The Rathskeller, Boston’s now defunct rock bar better known as The Rat. The pieces were originally inked by Jason Sexton (Patience) and another tattoo artist (LABOR) whose name I do not recall, but who was then best known around the scene for the fact that he taught himself to tattoo by inking his own arm in a rendering of robotics from shoulder to fingertips. The work on the tattoos was performed before the legalization of tattooing in Massachusetts, and so the work on the word 'LABOR' was performed across the street from Fenway Park in an acquaintance’s apartment, and the work on the word 'Patience' was performed in the apartment I then rented with another doorman and a bartender who both also worked at The Rat.

The tattoo was inspired by something my older brother, William O’Keefe (the painter better known as W.O’K.), said to me often throughout my upbringing. He would repeat the phrase, 'learn to labor and to wait' at various moments during my childhood when I experienced some kind of setback or difficulty. As I entered my early teens it came to my knowledge that the line was from the last stanza of a poem, titled 'A Psalm of Life, or What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist,' by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. As I came to find out, our cousin (Richard Chetwynd, also a professor and a writer of poems) shared the poem with my brother years before. Some time in the year or so before the choice to get the words inked on my chest, a period of my life that seemed to be particularly lacking in answers of any kind, I came to the realization my brother had been whispering the 'answer' in my ear since I was very young."

The last stanza of Longfellow's poem proclaims:

Let us, then, be up and doing,
     With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
     Learn to labor and to wait.
          ~H.W. Longfellow (1838)

Chris offers us the following poem, "The Father of All Lies," which was originally published in Consequence Magazine Vol. II, and then subsequently published in Ditch Poetry in September of 2011:

The Father of All Lies

1.
the murder

My father ghosts onto the trail, moon-lit sand—

                                                                         Darkness the distance he hears them yell,
but he glides, burns in moon fire, & her old woman eyes open wide, shrink at the same time;
her tracheal cartilage fractures the air.

After he drinks so he cannot feel her last breath against his cheek, his grip
on her boney neck, can’t hear her gurgle.

Taut as strings on a lyre, he sees our mother’s silhouette in green
alarmclock light. Arm’s distance, she gasps—

She walks where the moon woman died. He’s a young man, her throat under his hand.


2.
complicity

I remember a black trunk at the foot of my parents’ bed, five stacks of letters tied with red
string, black & white photographs scattered in the removable drawer
where a short sword, flat across the toes of his boots, shone.

How the glint of steel caught my eye—

Running a finger along the edge, I sensed that blade deep in my marrow.
I heard steps on the stairs, but burned with the image of a young man standing like a cross,
smiling, head dangling from each hair-clenched fist—

Their two faces looked asleep forever.


3.
childhood

A seven-year-old I saw a hero in my father, though I didn’t know his name, & my father bound
his life to lies, a story-line, ideas how that hero’s name should sound—

Home, a mother who didn’t send him to a workfarm at eight, a life where he escaped sentencing,
where he never hung on the corner of Somerville Ave. in Winter Hill, never—

He attended Saint Mary’s for boys run by Jesuits & nuns who measured Christ’s love
with yardstick & ruler edges, & Father Mike’s marred knuckles
dealt penance enough.


4.
his whole life

At dances, my father kissed girls in plaid skirts until the Holy Ghost gave way to canned beer
fistfights with public school boys from Cambridge.

His father lay dying as they held hands in a disinfected hospital room.

He played guard for his high school’s basketball team, before that book binder’s job
to support his mother, before friends died for God & Country,

rather than having skulls caved in with a sixty-five pound barbell in the yard mid-day
over smokes, a fuck, skin color, a look—


5.
elegy for a fallen comrade

He died there, same as we all did. His dying just showed more, killed him faster.
Sure as I speak now, saying this: in a field of fear & steel, fists clenched in mud,
writhing through stench, through mortar-churned graves, more bullets than bees
in spring, poppies everywhere, larks sang for sunset—

His body lies under grass, while brambles of razor-wire, forgotten toe poppers & I persist,
unholy love poems to those who died for reasons of which they spoke
no knowledge.


6.
inertia

A cold lung of air strikes me how close one never gets to a man whose shadow stands that tall;
there’s a black & white photograph from which my father grimaces.

When I was a child at the kitchen table we laughed together over funnies,
his steel bones softened & he turned his face away from his stone face—
Sometimes I see his crook-tooth smile, still hear him laugh,

                                                                                               but then a memory— Him breaking
a boy’s knee with a bat in front of our house; the boy crawls, blubbers; father whispers
before each blow: Time to pay the piper, kid. Time to pay.


7.
the long stare

My father told lies to soften his stare, to frighten me less & help me remember—
A black trunk of war memorabilia & other lies I wanted to be true.

He never told the shape of his loneliness:

Hatcheting heads from geese under January’s granite skies, hanging their little corpses on hooks
to bleed out, tenderness named the ache in the old farmer’s bones on the bitterest of days,

and the streets of Winter Hill before he killed.

~ ~ ~

Born in Boston, Chris Siteman grew up in a blue collar, predominantly Irish-Catholic, family. He’s traveled widely in the US and Europe, and worked extensively in the trades. In 2007 Chris received his MFA from Emerson College. Since August of 2010 he’s been pursuing his JD at Suffolk Law. He has taught in Boston University’s undergraduate writing program, Lesley University’s Humanities Department, and currently teaches in Suffolk University’s English Department. While the poem here was originally published in Consequence Magazine Vol. II, and subsequently in Ditch Poetry in September of 2011, his work has otherwise most recently appeared in Anomalous, The Fiddleback, Borderline and Poetry Quarterly.

Thanks to Chris for his 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.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Emily Harrison

Today we have another tattooed poet from "across the Pond".

Emily Harrison sent us this lovely tattoo from the United Kingdom:

Emily explains:

"It was the first appointment of the day on my 18th birthday at Sinking The Ink in Swindon and I finally got to get the tattoo. I ignored friends and family warning me not to commit to such a lifelong commitment at such a 'young and impressionable age' and, being quite the goody-two-shoes for most of my life, went for it. My inspiration is Ted Hughes' collection of work, Crow (sometimes I can bend the truth slightly and give a nod if anyone asks Edgar Allen Poe) and I now have a perching taxidermy crow to match it."

By way of poetry, Emily has offered up this item for our enjoyment:

Instantly Your Biggest Fan

I want to hear you describe my look
as blood in the sugar bowl
my attitude as the paddling pool
blown onto the M4 causing a pile up
you don’t
love me
you should
when we go to the seaside
I wont even moan
when I drop my ice cream
and when you offer me yours
I wont accept
I’ll make your tongue ache
until its like you’ve been
sucking on fudge
you’ll have dreams
where you save me
from wreckages
burning freak accidents
the one you love
and the one who loves you
are never ever the same person
now fall in love with me
as if I were a French girl
on a postcard

~ ~ ~

I generally don't comment on the poems, but I like this one very much and am thankful Emily sent it our way.

Emily Harrison won the Christopher Tower Poetry Prize in 2010 and is set to be published in the April edition of Popshot Magazine. Her poetry is scarlet, penetrating, funny and honest. Emily does beautiful, stark and memorable words. She has red hair, perpetual lipstick and high heels. She adds, "I find inspiration from the men in my life; some painfully thin, most aggressively passionate, all with strange hair cuts."

Thanks to Emily 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.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Traci Brimhall

Today's tattooed poet is Traci Brimhall, who shares this single word with us:

Traci explains:

"I got my tattoo last April during the Little Grassy Literary Festival at Carbondale, IL. I was in Carbondale to do a reading from my first book, when I got the email that my second book had been accepted. I wanted to do something to mark the occasion, something both wild and permanent, and there was a poet and tattoo artist, Ruth Awad, at the dinner table who offered to give me my first ink. I spent that night celebrating in Ruth's kitchen getting my first tattoo.

I chose the word Duende, a word the Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca said represented "a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought." A guitar maestro had once explained it to him this way: 'The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.' When people ask me to explain it, I usually say it's an art that asks you to do battle with what is darkest in you, and what comes out is already baptized by black sounds."

Here is the poem Traci selected for us to read:

Aubade with a Broken Neck

The first night you don’t come home
summer rains shake the clematis.
I bury the dead moth I found in our bed,
scratch up a rutabaga and eat it rough
with dirt. The dog finds me and presents
between his gentle teeth a twitching
nightjar. In her panic, she sings
in his mouth. He gives me her pain
like a gift, and I take it. I hear
the cries of her young, greedy with need,
expecting her return, but I don’t let her go
until I get into the house. I read
the auspices—the way she flutters against
the wallpaper’s moldy roses means
all can be lost. How she skims the ceiling
means a storm approaches. You should see
her in the beginnings of her fear, rushing
at the starless window, her body a dart,
her body the arrow of longing, aimed,
as all desperate things are, to crash
not into the object of desire,
but into the darkness behind it.

~ ~

Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins: Poems (W.W. Norton), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry) (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Slate, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She was the 2008-09 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and currently teaches at Western Michigan University, where she is a doctoral associate and King/Chávez/Parks Fellow.

Thanks to Traci Brimhall for sharing her tattoo and poem with us here 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.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Gary McDowell

Our next tattooed poet is Gary McDowell. Here's what Gary had to say about his ink:

"I remember thinking as a teenager that I’d never get a tattoo. It wasn’t because I didn’t like them. I did. It wasn’t because I was afraid of the pain. I wasn’t. I think it had something to do with the fact that I had no idea what I would ever want permanently etched into my skin. But as I grew older and my obsessions and faiths and vocations started to align, I reconsidered, and now I don’t ever want to stop.

Both of my tattoos come from an artist, Blaine, at Baby Blues Tattoos in Bradenton, FL. My wife’s family has a condo on Anna Maria Island, FL, and so we visit every summer. In the summer of 2006 I got my first tattoo (the kanji for “poet/poetry” on my right wrist).

 

The impetus for it was simple: I’m right-handed and a poet, and so the thought of having poetry on my wrist appealed greatly to me.

Blaine did such a good job that in the summer of 2008, I went back and got my left calf worked on.

At the time, my wife was pregnant with our first son, and we planned to name him Auden; though his name was not totally derived from the poet W.H. Auden—my wife found the name in a baby book and dug it before she even knew it was a famous poet’s surname—I wanted to do something to commemorate my Auden’s impending arrival, and so I decided on two of my favorite lines from Auden’s 'The Question': 'And ghosts must do again / What gives them pain.' It’s a gorgeous reminder that we must conquer our fears, take a stance against what haunts us."

Gary sent us the following poem which, in his words, "exemplifies my work best":


THIS SUMMER WITH FISCHL

                                                       Waukegan, IL, June-July 2009

I must repent for this summer I’ve spent beyond creatures,

for the mysteries I’ve seen in a world

that thinks there are none, a world where we’ve named things—

garage, fence, robin, poem—so that we can feel

something when we destroy them.

I must repent for the chlorophyll in the leaves,

the time I’ve spent in the pool, no raft,

just my convexed back keeping me afloat,

for the hours wasted hoping the clouds above me

would form into something recognizable, something real

and weighted, so that I could be touched by something

other than a man begging for change outside the library.

I must repent for the sunflower, its aching, arcing

reach for light, for staring at the woman next-door,

her meticulous morning routine: compact the trash

in the can with a snow shovel, add a full bag from the kitchen,

return the lid to the can, and weight it with a ham-tin filled

with pennies. I too wouldn’t have believed it.

Every time I turn my head to look out the window,

I see a harsh light through the blinds, striping everyone with shadows,

I see Bad Boy: a teenaged boy, a purse full of money,

a nude woman (his mother?) on her bed, her leg bent, arched

toward her mouth—is she hungry, dreaming, bored?

John Yau says it’s the tiger stripes of light and dark

splayed across the woman that make her an animal, but I’m glad

she’s uncaged. What it must feel like to be stitched together,

thefted-after like a bowl of apples and bananas in a Freudian dream?

In another painting, a woman crawls naked through a backyard,

huddles against a row of hedges. While I haven’t seen that,

I must repent for the squirrel that fell from the tree,

for my dog who wouldn’t let go of its neck.

The hours I spent looking at beach scenes: I repent.

The incest, the drinking, the affairs, the nudity: I repent.

The thinking beyond line, beyond shape: I repent.

I repent: the patio tomato plants, watercolors, prints,

maquettes of the neighbor’s new garage, king crab legs

for dinner, a nude sunbather on her belly, her back damp,

her boombox sweating Shakira, Marc Anthony, and then silence.

The eavesdropping, the baseball on the radio, sweet peas and carrots.

For the old man across the street, his bad hips, his garbage can

that I move to the curb, his cane, too short for his arms: I repent.

In many of the paintings, I imagine a dialogue between

two quarreling lovers—or is it a monologue, a palette of yellows and reds

through the kitchen window each morning, their cups of coffee

barely settled on the counter before they begin. I must repent

for the unneighborly innuendos, the pile of dog shit

on the driveway that someone will surely step in, unaware that they have

until later, much later. I must repent for repenting, for repeating

myself, but this summer of recycling bins and large paper bags full

of lawn clippings has named me differently, and Fischl, his naked

eyes, have given me a hard-on for all things domestic:

gossiping, love-making, dog-walking, putting myself ahead

of myself only to find myself lost in myself, lost because

nothing is what it seems here. I must repent for spending so much

time with the mysteries of texture, with a book that weighs more

than my son, with my neighbors as if my neighbors were paintings,

as if their lives were canvassed, colored, hung on my eyelids.

The streets, the beaches, the neighbors: all starkly lit scenes,

a robust sense of everything having been played and replayed,

rehearsed like Sleepwalker, that skinny boy in the porch light, cock in hand.

The lawn chairs empty, and we watch him like we want to help him,

like we can touch him ourselves and make him stop, but he won’t stop,

not until the lights go out or the sun rises or we fall asleep watching.

I must repent for not watching more closely the bagpipe-lined

streets, for the way the doves peck at the window when they’re angry

or confused or cold or hungry. Perhaps I haven’t been

completely beyond creatures. Perhaps my creatures, destroyed,

I thought, before I started here, are merely lost in the lines,

the colors, the textures of a painting I have yet to encounter.


--originally appeared in Indiana Review, Vol 32, No 1

~ ~ ~

Gary L. McDowell's first full-length collection of poems, American Amen (Dream Horse Press, 2010), won the 2009 Orphic Prize for Poetry. He's also the author of two chapbooks, They Speak of Fruit (Cooper Dillon, 2009) and The Blueprint (Pudding House, 2005), and he's the co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice (Rose Metal Press, 2010). His poems have appeared in dozens of literary journals, including The Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, The Indiana Review, The Laurel Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, and Quarterly West. He lives in Nashville, TN where he is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Belmont University.

Thanks to Gary for his contribution to this year's 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.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Kayla Sargeson

Often people winder where I find all of our tattooed poets. Many come to us via word-of-mouth and through social media. This year, I found an anthology of poets "under 25," and figured that would be a good resource. Today's post, along with a few others, originated from that volume.

Today's tattooed poet is Kayla Sargeson. She is sharing this whimsical tattoo, which is her ninth:

This is Kayla's tattoo of an alien head that proclaims “I like chicken.” The artist is Pete Larkin at Kyklops Tattoo in Pittsburgh, PA.

I'll let Kayla explain the rest:

For the past year-and-a-half, I’ve been pursuing my MFA in Chicago, a city I’ve grown to hate. I feel like I don’t fit this city, or maybe it just doesn’t fit me. Regardless, I feel like an alien here that had to leave her home planet. Thus the alien tattoo. I go back and forth between Chicago and Pittsburgh often and during one of these visits, my mentor Jan Beatty was dropping me off at Kyklops [Tattoo]. She said “why don’t you have your alien say ‘I like chicken.’” I thought this was the funniest thing in the world, so I said “okay.” I walked into the shop where Pete was working on the alien. He showed me the sketch and I said “It looks perfect, except can the alien say ‘I like chicken’?” “Absolutely” said Pete and we were both standing in his little work station, cracking up. Because I have so many tattoos, I quit going for ones that have some soft, sentimental back story. I love to laugh and I like to be amused. I wake up to my alien every day and every day he makes me laugh.

Kayla sends us this poem:

Hellwave

Eleven tattoos and can’t stop
want my body covered/
no space for that night at the fraternity house:
body cracked open like glass.
I want a needle in my skin.
I’m the queen wasp thick and pissed off.
My friends say girl you’re on the fringe/
father likes to get me drunk/show off:
This is my smart daughter. The pretty one’s at home.
I know the push of a hand on the back of the head/
faceful of cock/baby no teeth
do what I tell you/stepfather’s raised fist: bitch I’ll hit you.
At the Rock Room, for a tit grab
it’s all-you-can-drink-all-night.
I’ll suck you off for a joint.
I’m looking for my studded Sid Vicious cliché:
skinny punk with the bass guitar.
He’s got the chain wallet, leans
against his amp and almost looks alive.
He rides a Fat Boy/he’ll get me out of here.
We’ll ride the hellwave screaming.

~ ~ ~

Kayla Sargeson earned a BA in creative writing from Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she was awarded the Award for Excellence in Creative Writing: Poetry. Her work has appeared in the national anthology, Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets under 25, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye, as well as Voices from the Attic Volume XIV, and Dionne’s Story. Her poems also appear, or are forthcoming in, 5 AM, Columbia Poetry Review, Chiron Review, Paper Street, Ophelia Street, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and phantom limb. She is attending the MFA program at Columbia College Chicago, where she is recipient of a Follet Fellowship and serves as an editor for the Columbia Poetry Review.

Thanks to Kayla 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.


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