The Tattooed Poets Project: Laura Goode

Today's tattooed poet is Laura Goode.

I had the distinct pleasure of recommending a shop to Laura back in January when she was planning on getting a new tattoo in Los Angeles. Knowing she was going to be near Pasadena, a lovely city I once called home, I suggested Resurrection Tattoo and she was very happy with the experience. This is what she got: 

"My newest tattoo, a peacock feather, is an homage of sorts to my friend Jon, who died of cancer on January 20, 2011. Jon’s middle name was Skanda; Skanda is a Hindu god associated with the sword, symbolizing his protection, and the peacock, symbolizing his destruction of the ego. Skanda is often depicted riding around on a magic peacock, and I like to picture Jon doing that now.

The particularity of Jon, and the shape and singularity of the hole his absence leaves in my life, was that he was not just friend to me, but more than that, sometimes transcendently, he was collaborator. Our relationship was marked by fervent bursts of art. He starred in, and photographed, the first play I ever wrote. He art-directed my second. He took the author photo for the jacket of my first novel. He was my colleague, my interlocutor, in innumerable conversations about queer theory and Chinese propaganda art and writing and Aphex Twin and, eventually, cancer. He called the Facebook album of my author photos 'Portrait of An Author As A Young Author’s Portrait.' He told me that if there were ever a Lifetime movie made about my life, it would be titled 'Laura Goode: Heart of Gold, Womb of Steel.' During a period of time in our lives marked by wild, leaping growth, Jon wove so many fibers into the fabric of my initiation as an artist. I hope I did the same in his, but I don’t have the luxury of asking him.

For all these reasons, it felt appropriate to mark Jon’s impact on my life, as well as the impact of his departure from it, with a work of art. I got the feather at Resurrection in Pasadena with one of my and Jon’s best friends, Meera Menon, who got her own feather for Jon. Afterwards, Meera and I talked about how we experienced the pain of paying homage to him in a skin-abrading way: it doesn’t hurt as much as losing him, I told her I had been thinking. We confided that we both thought the pain brought us somehow closer to Jon, closer to how much pain he had experienced himself.

I look at Jon’s feather now, knowing it will walk with me always, and its splashes of wild color, its heady plumage, bring me some of the joy that Jon himself once brought me. As Skanda’s paradoxical peacock illuminates, death destroys the ego, and both the pain of losing Jon and the more literal pain of memorializing him physically have humbled me. In life Jon raised me up to the rafters of the imagination, and in death he brought me back down to earth. The below poem, I think, celebrates both contributions."

What The Body Becomes 

Look up in wonder: the recluse
& the moors have come in.

The garden’s elegant logic, a mystic
event, greening. A return, if one

is willing, to the fine dark clay
earth. A channel somehow

open; another closed irrevocably.
I have so much still to say.

The rite of production
is one, too, of consumption—

the coal, wood, even peat
of day. Of life. Renewable

resources. The fact
of heat. We, miners

exhorting the earth
to give us back the dead.

This is what the body becomes:
the sustenance of another.

~ ~ ~

Laura Goode's interracial gay hip-hop love story for teens, Sister Mischief, was released by Candlewick Press in 2011. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Feministing, The Faster Times, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Dossier, Slope, Fawlt, and other publications. She is currently producing her first feature film, FARAH GOES BANG, co-written with the filmmaker Meera Menon. Laura was raised outside Minneapolis, received her BA and MFA from Columbia University, and now lives in San Francisco; you can follow her on Twitter @lauragoode.


Thanks to Laura 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: Fred Schmalz

Today's tattooed poet, Fred Schmalz, resides in Germany, a first for the Tattooed Poets Project.

As you can see, he is also heavily-tattooed and, lucky for us, he sent us a lot of photos, so let's not waste any more time and take a look at his ink.

I'll let Fred explain:

"...a right arm upper half-sleeve related to a poem of mine ('I am here to tell you where I slept last night') which originally appeared in 6x6 - containing a lily with a naked lady petal, a sleeping figure, and a text excerpt from the poem.

This is intersected by half of a two-arm text strip (down the backs of both upper arms) with the first line of Charles Olson's The Kingfishers - What does not change / is the will to change. (the / which appears in the poem sits on the back of my neck).   

My right arm has the Harry Smith foot-of-the-Buddah three fish image which adorns all the later Allen Ginsberg collections,

and several staghorn sumac branches with fruit.

All except the three fish were inked by Stephanie Tamez at Saved Tattoo in Brooklyn."

Stephanie Tamez is an amazing artist, and she is especially renown for her "type" tattoos. I know that I, if I was getting a tattoo with a lot of words, would put Stephanie at the top of my wish list.By way of bio:

The following poem from Fred appeared originally in 6x6 issue 14 from Ugly Duckling Presse.

WHERE I SLEPT LAST NIGHT

A woman who shared
half my last name
gave me the bed below our bed.
Ask me to explain.
Etude. A green field.
Mat inflated with lung air.
Smoke screen for privacy. Privy.
A thin door and three thin walls.

The bed hidden below our bed is our last bed.
Count back and beds become impossible
retrievals:
I may have slept
one summer in an Ohio hotel, my Saturdays
a fuck-fit carnage, dried palms
woven into the holy cross
you Polish Catholic

you denial of love.
Bed deemed worthy of our backs.
Bed along with the rest of our loneliness.
Bed born of necessary grammar.
Bed requested by a shirtless man.
Robbed in this bed.

My struggle is the struggle of men
and their otherness,
men without shame, men who are only
their small rooms.
Touch a hole in me and I seep water,
palms saffron and swollen–
my arms are ashen
and tremble like ivy.

I told myself
this would only marginally be
about fucking, that so many
beds are entered and left alone,
that my love is a maker and I am a man
who leaves and returns to a bed
as he finds it, who sleeps as continuance,
who clothes in pillowcases
an ongoing occasion: our bodies’
natural destination.

Patient once. Stained. I shove
lover. Shovel over. It all ruptures,

the groan where we come to rest,
one leg’s shudder before passing out.
Trap door clap.
Conception’s sudden pinch.
Meet mother.
Meet father.
It wasn’t supposed to
happen this way, but ten years earlier,
when the notion held a romance,

you flew and I shattered a little
Blue vial in the sink.
What will my body do?
My replaceable body…
Tornado, be quick and pass.
We have spoken of the surfaces of things
but not their natural environment.
Morning’s minor reflections pass
without elucidation. We maze

the new route home, resting as relatives.
Red hair, red socks, for miles
you draft the come-back of good news,
clean living, moon creeping into a skylight.
Who washes over me?
Your hip joints

loosen like rain clouds over mountains.
That pair of lost slippers–the furry pink ones
I see under the door or peeking
through laundry at me.
I guessed the light, which was
our old apartment two in the morning
after a heavy snow.
I suffer no physical realignment
and thus lack chemicals to warn me of fatherhood.
No hemorrhaging in the spoils of joints.
But I find that I am unusually hungry.

I could have gone on loving
without my shirt, could have
asked that your hand warm
my skin, heat radiation, radiance.
You stood in the kitchen and told me you love me
more today, that it grows in you–


pause of a woman
lost between synapses–
idea derailed on the stretch to dinner.
The coarse fabric you knit drops stitches.

The bed borrowed from the landlord
is almost too small for one,
or too narrow, the length
sufficing since neither of us is long.
Beds turn on us.
We sicken of comfort.
Homebound, practicing loneliness,
six hands surround me. They pin me
in my fever. They hold the sheet.
Modesty, honestly.

The room we’re offered is a fuckless marble hull.
The fireplace only works
if I break up the furniture.
The television works.
The refrigerator does not work.
The stove works.
The blankets work.
The rug underfoot doubles as a bed–

already it has been rolled up.
We are alive with our calcium deposits.
Our chipped plates
returned to the top cupboard
breathe out a scent
I associate with you, the meal
fed me from that part-life
where we camped in the front room
of a condemned house,
lauding our insomnia, how morning
never seemed so remote. But here

rules loosen: run in snow and melt our feet.
Wake in a semi-truck state
full of chocolate milk and headlamp,
full of typhus. Mingle
among loves and recall a swallow
asleep on what I took to be a bed,
the broken hour set like a table
tracing the road’s curve.
Ground beneath us heaves east,

incandescent, the motions my hands make
grotesque, sanctimonious. Your
desire to feed me.
I eat a pear,
take a drink of water.

The sun outweighs us. It has no recollection,
blue in a tall shank of light.
This greets me
upon entering the house.
And the vinegar waft of the staircase.
Carpet pile flattened by feet
headed to bed ten thousand times. Or twenty thousand
feet knocking off at once:

here are my feet, ashen relics.
Tied to each arch is a bent branch,
the wood still warm. I walk with them
to the back door.
Then a dial turns and tiny notches align
with the moon. Resistance
attaches to every object in the house.
Our curtains haven’t kept the ocean out.
We are the peninsula’s only hum.

~ ~ ~

Fred Schmalz's first collection, Some Animals, is forthcoming in 2014 from Jackleg Press. His work has appeared in A Public Space, 1111, Zoland Poetry, LUNGFULL!, Spinning Jenny, Conduit, jubilat, Handsome, The Blue Letter, We are so happy to know something and The Bedazzler from Wave Books. His poems were included in La Familia Americana, a bilingual anthology of new American poets published in Spain by Cosmopoetica in 2010. An exhibition of contemporary German illustrators responding to his poems will be staged at Rotopol Press in 2012. He is founding editor of swerve magazine. He lives in Kassel, Germany.

Thanks to Fred for sharing his awesome tattoos and poetry with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

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 them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Amy Rafferty

Today's tattooed poet is Amy Rafferty.

Amy narrates her history of getting tattooed:

 "I've never been that sure why I got my tattoos and to be honest I'd probably put it down to poor impulse control.

I got my first when I was seventeen. Me and my friend Suzy were wondering around bored one day and we found ourselves looking in the window at Terry's Tattoo Studio. We could see all the big, hard men in there, grimacing and posing, with their arms covered in thistles and doves and black panthers.

To us it looked dead exciting and grown up and 'cool' and so we snuck in for a closer look.
An hour later we came out, all red-faced and tearfuI, me with a butterfly on my stomach and Suzy with a flaming heart on her shoulder.

We thought we were pure rock 'n' roll but we were too scared to tell our parents what we'd done. We both left it at that but then, ten years later, I got a Chinese good luck symbol on my back, ostensibly to bring me good luck but mostly it was to impress a sailor I was keen on.

My dragon was next and that was to show I was brave (or getting braver) and the flowers on my leg started off as a single bud from when my friend Polly and I went to get tattoos together and over the years the bud has grown. I think there's some meaning in that.

In 2007 my Dad died suddenly and I had this strange instinct to let him know that I was okay, that I was coping, and so I think that's why my flower grew as it did. 

And if somehow my Dad was aware of all this? Well he'd probably be shaking his head and saying ruefully "daft lassie, what are ye up to now?"

I love the idea of that. He thought when it came to making big, life-changing decisions that I was an idiot and yes, he was probably right but he also showed a grudging and loving admiration for my impulsive side. 

For now, I think I'm done with tattoos, but you never can tell when I'll take a wee notion for another."

It's cool seeing the evolution of this, Amy's floral tattoo, that has grown along with her.

She sent us this lovely poem:


Directions.

What you remember of them most is

that they could not stop talking,
and that the road from Inverardran veered left,
and took you from the kirk by the Toll
of Atholl to the Shoulder’s Choke
where you heard them both,
heralding their own as the worst.

Then by Stob Binnien,
shrouded in cloud and the eldest,
who sucked black mints,
black-tongued, bright-eyed and spry.
She picked at stitches and thought aloud
if it had been made in ‘Ehberdeen’
then it would have been made fitter
for its own purposes.

And the younger, the witcher,
the one you loved,
all hook-eyed and pleasure driven,
passing the pretty lace between them.
She pulled it through but worse
this time, tighter, the threads biting.
She winked at you, slowly, dropping a lid
and said “it just depends who you know”

And then Ben More and the great pools,
the flooded lights of Saint Fillan,
patron saint of the mad and the over-bound

and between them, a circle of pretty white lace,
holding them both together.

~ ~ ~

Amy Rafferty is a Glaswegian living in the West Midlands. Her poetry and prose can be found in several anthologies and publications, both on-line and off.

In 2009 she received a highly-commended mention for her poetry collection, Pétursdóttir and the Land of Tiny Voices and in 2010, two of her poems were short listed for the international Fish poetry prize. Amy is a postgraduate student of Creative Writing at Glasgow University and sings with the cult, Glasgow band, The Recovery Club. She is also the baby in the graveyard scene of the original Wicker Man movie but she doesn't like to talk about it. 

If you should wish, you can hear Amy singing here.

Thanks to Amy for sharing her words and ink with us here on Tattoosday!

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 them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Iris Cushing

Today's tattooed poet is Iris Cushing. Iris sent us this photo:

Iris explains:

"This is a drawing by the poet Elizabeth Bishop, which I found in her Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, edited by Alice Quinn. It illustrates a dream that Bishop had while she was at Yaddo in 1950, about an owl riding on the back of a rabbit. I love that Bishop was a poet who drew, who rendered her inner and out experiences in diverse ways. I was reading a ton of her work when I got this tattoo in 2009. There were a lot of barn owls and jack rabbits in the country where I grew up in Northern California. Reclusive, mysterious creatures. I wanted to have the image in my life always--it's something I decided to live with, those animals, her simple drawing. I got it done at Inkstop Tattoo in the East Village." 

Iris sent us this poem:

Sequence

Together, we identify
a single tendril of smoke
above the prairie
and follow it to a teepee
disguised as a wedding gown.
Two puffed-sleeve
chimneys and a satin
bodice catch wind.
The white tulle train
is full of spiders.
You circle the teepee
six times before lifting
its hem from the long grass.
When you turn your face
to nod me under, your eyes
reflect a fire.

Inside, we find
a medicine man who can
transform AA batteries
into AAA batteries.
We empty our flashlight
for a demo.
He wears a spangled robe.
Says he sews a single sequin
on his garment every time
something important happens.
He calls it the Sequins of Events.
He can see we were born
under the sign of Michael
Jackson’s hair in flames.
Each hair on your head,
he says, is a little circuit,
a limp lightning rod.
He strums a ukulele
strung with copper wire.
But when asked
if our visit this evening
will merit a new sequin
on his sleeve,
or even on his collar,
he hands us our batteries
and stares into the fire.

 ~ ~ ~

Iris Marble Cushing was born in Tarzana, California in 1983. She is an editor for Argos Books and for Circumference: A Journal of Poetry in Translation, both based in Brooklyn. In 2011, Iris was a writer-in-residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Her work has appeared in the Boston Review and other places.

Thanks to Iris 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: Ira Sukrungruang

Today's tattooed poet is Ira Sukrungruang. Before checking out his tattoo, here’s what Ira had to say about ink:

"I thought if I held off until I was thirty, it meant I really wanted a tattoo. It meant that I’ve been thinking about getting a tattoo since I was fifteen and waited nearly fifteen years to finally have one done. I’m a guy who wants things, and sometimes my wants are fleeting, like a child with a new toy; after an hour of play, I’m bored.

But after that one tattoo—an enormous dragon on my right calf—I’ve been getting a tattoo done every year, and I love every one of them. 

My tattoos are a way to call attention to my body on my own terms. For most of my life, I was fat. When I got my first tattoo, I was close to four-hundred pounds, and I wanted people to look at me because of my tattoo, not because I was enormous. I think long and hard about my tattoos. I have a total of five, and I’m thinking about getting another one done soon. All my tattoos have stories, and because they have stories, I wanted a tattoo artist who I not only trusted, but was a close friend, a person who would do what I wanted, and share in my life. My artist is the poet Ruth Awad, and I can say with certainty, she is the best. 

I don’t give Ruth easy tattoos. On average, my tattoos take about 4-10 hours to complete. Because I am Thai-American, my tattoos reflect my dual life. It is my way of paying homage to my culture, my parents, my life as a Buddhist. There is one tattoo, however, I love most. It was the simplest one. It took only two hours to complete. It is the image of Buddha on my chest. 

I used to wear a Buddha around my neck at all times. I was never without him. When I was nervous, I chewed on him. When I was scared, I’d grasp him tight in my hand. My mother gave me my Buddha. She said to keep him close to my heart. He would protect me. For most of my life, I had. Suddenly, I developed a skin allergy. I broke out in hives and rashes. I was allergic to Buddha! To fix this, to always have him with me, I decided to have Buddha tattooed on my chest. He is the first thing I see every morning and the last thing every night. There is a comfort in that. Seeing him there, in a jungle of chest hair, makes me feel lighter."

Ira shared this poem with us, which first appeared in Mead Magazine, under the title "In the Keeping of Men":

Sleeping Venus

               “To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space,                                              into the keeping of men.” –John Berger, Ways of Seeing

I am learning to see, letting light dance
within my retinas, letting it slosh
around orbed-pupils, like an aerating wine.

There walked a woman today, at the grocery
store, who turned the heads of the meat men behind
refrigerated steaks. How they devoured
her elegant stride. How her presence was body
without mind. They will remember her—only
briefly—as the one with long legs, the one with gracious
hips, and she will be catalogued
away with infinite others, a forever list
of parts.

Giorgione, when you painted Venus, reclined,
her hand seductively positioned above her groin,
what dreams did you give her? Did you fill
her head with the scent of olives and Tuscan
suns? Does painter and subject occupy
the same breath?

My wife sits alone
in her room, the night air
laden with grief,
a guitar on her lap. How do I paint
her voice and the sound of pluck chords? How do I
capture the beating within her chest,
the sad song singing in her heart?

I am learning to see.
First, I close my eyes.

 ~ ~ ~

Ira Sukrungruang is the author of the memoir Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy.  His poems have been published in North American Review, Witness, River Styx, and many other journals. He teaches in the MFA program at University of South Florida and is the editor of Sweet: A Literary Confection. For more information about him, visit: www.sukrungruang.com.

Thanks to Ira for sharing his tattoo and poetry 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.

Best Tattoo Designer

Best tattoo designer Most people who get inked say that they use theiras a means to communicate their inward thoughts, and after they experience fulfillment in having their first body art, they feel required to have more. Most of these body art fanatics are of the viewpoint that one should go for customized body art styles that are designed by expert and knowledgeable body art developers.

However, getting inked is a activity that requires much concern. Selecting your second or third body art is as similarly complicated as was the very first body art. Besides, discovering a body art developer that is right for you is also a trial. So, once you get on your way to your next body art, begin looking for the best developers in the market.

This article provides some sound advice on how you will see one of the best tattoo designer.

Word of lips publicity: Often, the best body art performers are known by buddies who have formerly been inked. If you are going for your next body art and you want a new developer, you could seek advice from your 'tattoo enthusiast' buddies, and take the reviews about developers who designed body art styles for them. Having at least one fantastic referrals from a reliable companion can be comforting.

Recent perform and feedback: Like in any occupation, you need to look into the reputation of a developer. Examine their latest perform, and the feedback/ feedback from their past clients. An outstanding reputation shows their abilities in developing remarkable customized body art styles. Since it is not easy to assess abilities from published or dental reviews, you can look through through your potential artists collection or online collection to take a look at their styles and get a sign of their creativeness and expert contact. This gives you an precise concept of what they can actually generate.

Visit the shop: Almost all body art developers usually have a well-equipped body art store that a possibility can check out. One can look into the state and quality of gadgets that they use, and the needling methods that they use to bring out their techniques. You can even perspective styles created by them on clients seated in the facilities and even discuss to them about the services provided by the performers.

Typically, efficient body art performers use different body art methods, and it's a fantastic option to look at a style being used, if possible. There isn't a better way to confirm the abilities of a tattooist and the health shields they have in place.

Have a conversation with the artist: Asking concerns makes things clear for both the consumer as well as the artisan. Before making your decision of artisan, you may want to ask them about their past body art experiences; how they discovered this art, and how have they enhanced on it. Also, you may need to look at how the end product measures up with the unique style. It should be exactly the same. This will be a evaluate of how efficient the artisan really is.

Browse the internet: Lastly, the world wide web is a great way to discover the best body art performers. There are different ways to discover them. Some body art performers have online body art stores where you can their past perform, and you can also publish is aware about your need for a body art developer. However, the most convenient and most well-known way of discovering the best developer is through an online body art competition. Online body art competitions entice the best body art performers from all across the planet.

Best tattoo designer have created it a lot more readily found the best body art developers. You just have to publish the information of the body art that you want and the guidelines of the competition and developers will begin submitting their styles.

[images by picasa web]

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. 


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