empire
Changes & updates!
1. check out my and others’ writing in the Bosphorus Review of Books
2. This blog has been through countless iterations over the years, and I’m hoping to make it easier for me to post more frequently, by sharing work that is more immediate, and provides at least an idea of what I’m doing and where.
I’ve struggled over the last few years with a rather slow creative process, thus I’ve decided use this blog as a platform for more mid-process, lesser-edited, speculative work that I plan on re-working before submitting it to publications. Please read it as such, and don’t be shy in commenting if you think any part is particularly strong, or, usually more helpfully, not.
3. Anyway, here is something about my visit to the states this summer
I am a mess.
I am dead tired, delirious, crash landing through turnstiles to stand sleepily on, two feet, nibbling on dates and marveling at wifi on the underground.
Get up and out, out into the rain for your twenty-second hour, trade handsome strangers for men behind glass, stumble to the wine-warmth of IKEA and Alexa, of secrets and shit talk of that easy familiarity that comes with lane-blood.
It’s undeniably more comfortable under the guise of a national, and even though the roofs here don’t have the lines of satellite soldiers you fell for in Greece they’ve secret doors and complimentary trim, meticulously decorated in tags and mural and vandalism of the charming kind. It’s the flat skyline of new lives and vintage advertisements, it’s a shallow American kind of history, the kind that isn’t built on layers of stone but in stories - in mobilization and redlining, of limited layers and everything upfront.
This city smells like everything, like gasoline and green and piss in the elevator. It’s fried chicken and strawberry scones that only ever intersect on the margins, on the edges of English where it gets hard to buy avocados with a credit card.
Get up and out, to archived treasures and acres of grassland, wander people-pastures with ten-dollar cheese and mineral water, dawdle under the geometric decor of storefronts that call to you in Broadway, search concrete, churches and cherry trees for a place you might belong.
I am dead tired, infatuated, crash landing on tables to drink wine, nibble on scapes and rub my skin on the eyes of the displaced.
Take small sips let it sit on your tongue, pull the air through your teeth while the server sells decadence to the table next door, earnest and awkward next to the woman wearing mismatched & oversized clothes. She visits table after table asking for, you’re not even sure what, but at least a cup of coffee while you and all your pink fingers clench purses, pearls, whatever.
Shake your head slowly and console yourself with over-educated cynicism - who knows, maybe she’ll want booze next; coffee is a diuretic and she rejected the offer of water; it’s just a small business owner trying to get by, and all they did was scatter tables on the sidewalk across from the store boasting gluten-free bagels and craft beers, in this community of brick townhouses that lose their families and whisper change through grates that guard tree-lined blocks from the shit of unspecified dogs. Hear them next to you and they’re someone else’s rationalization but you know it’s all the same - you’re one of them, you’ll always be one of them, pink fingers and all.
Your rosé tastes less like relief every second, a new mix of rusty water and manifest destiny, a clear sparkling pink of revolutionary blood and white guilt rising in your throat to form some perverse nostalgia for the moral ennui of expatriotism.
Get up and out, out of the borough into the free air of manicured parks and helicopter parents steering their children away from strangers, to the wide world of bitter disenchantment and user-designed misanthropy. Dawdle in the sun until you burn slightly, take advantage of depleting ozone while it’s possible, longing for a forest that you know will be clear-cut when you arrive home.
I’m eagle-esque; bareheaded and proud, predatory even. I’m coated in feathers when here, arranged to mimic some Abenaki custom, that was crushed, unrecognized, moved to trapper country to leave nothing but the trappings, which we gleefully grab to hoard in suitcases until Halloween.
It’s not that we talk about these things, these that end up underlined and spell-checked, lost in wingspan, in the translation from right to profitable, lost in revision that suits the winners even as they lose their foothold. Gloss over these the downsides of bipedalism, how we stand upright, lose our feathers, and paint scales on dinosaurs, even, so they can sparkle and speak.