A Poem from Bennet Bergman

a poem that Bennet wrote. my name is in it so i am proud.

(click to enlarge)

Self Portrait

This is a project I did for my Performance, Collaboration and Poetry Class taught by Kazim Ali.

A few notes:

. it is in Oberlin, OH

. the fabric was dyed by black walnut die

. the other is corn silk

. those pods were found earlier in the semester in the arb

. the last two notes/poems were from Self-Portrait at 21 Years (the first of those two is lifted from James Wright)

. the photos were taken by Sam Bass (a gem)

Also, around 2:30am on December 20 I realized a couple of mistakes in the slideshow. They are now fixed.

Freaky weird

poem 21: Revisiting the Coyote

Revisiting the Coyote (Three Years Later)

Dear animal,
dear sweet thing,
I loved once. The last nap
I took in the state of Ohio

was an elegy to you.
Remember California?
The morning I found you there
I couldn’t tell to call you:
coyote,
animal, no,
dead and gone.

I’ve spent this life trying to call each thing
by its right name and you’ve been no different.

Coyote, let me tell you our portrait
from the spring of that year:

I walked along the tracks
following a path worn by pilgrims
and stumbled upon your body with a weight
at my heart. Near that grotto you were

wildlifelessness.
I’ve asked you once:
did you go in your sleep?
Were you hunting

for some family? Are you missed?
Those bare teeth were a reference
to a fighting life but I couldn’t help
imagining something more solemn,

just as romantic. You were some hidden
lighthouse on that burnt up mountain
and that spring you consumed
me with your going. Dear animal,

dear decomposition
of us all, I’ve got the bared teeth too.

--mgb 11.2010

*some lines from this are taken from Dr. Zhivago.

This is the third poem I wrote about this coyote. The first was written four years ago and the second was written two years ago.

This will be read at Mark Welborn's junior recital next week along with "On the Last Ferry Home..." and another poem that I haven't written yet.

6:30 on Tuesday, November 30 in Fairchild Chapel in Oberlin, OH.

Keep Marlo at Oberlin Fund

WANT TO HELP ME STAY IN SCHOOL?

I realize I have few to none marketable skills but...

now I am selling poems to you.
There is a sliding scale but $10 bucks a poem starting would be great.
Also, I can write love letters/break up letters etc. etc.

I can make you collage postcards or little poetry books. Everything will be made one of a kind just for you and I can send it through the post to arrive at you as some sweet gift.

(Or if you're not into one of a kind, I can send you any poem you've seen of mine handwritten or something.)

email mgbarrera@gmail.com and tell me what you want!

make this happen!
all goes toward the Keeping Marlo At Oberlin Fund.

Some Mail Art

In high school sometimes it felt like all I did with my time was make mail art and send it to strangers around the world and I would get things too so now I have a few big boxes of beautiful things sent through the post. I sent things sometimes under my real name, sometimes under this name of Bosco Marx. Coming to Oberlin, I haven't really had the time to do it as much as I had once. Last night was a mail art exhibit here and it got me excited again. The first thing I walked in and saw was the Brain Cell Project which I didn't know much about but in 2006 had gotten a part of the project in the mail. This was exciting. The Recycled Products Coop (I think it was) had a space there with everyone's name and OCMR number on a card so you could anonymously send something to someone. I made three and liked them and decided to put them here before dropping them off. Then I went home and made one for a friend in Chicago that I miss greatly. (I don't think he reads this or knows it exists so I'm not afraid to put it up before I send it). The big one will be folded up and sewn together around the edges. I hope you like them!

(click to enlarge)

Some Audubon for You

I have this small book of a few plates of Audubon's birds.

It's very sweet so I scanned some of my favorites for you.

My favorite is the passenger pigeon.

Aren't they beautiful?

(click to enlarge)

This is garbage.

i decided to try and turn that self portrait from the two posts ago into a book. this is my first try at anything like this and i think it is garbahshe but important to document i suppose. maybe you will like it. i hope you can tell me what i can do better.

(click to enlarge. annoying for this sort of thing but okay.)

Poem 20: Found Poem and My Own Words

A stray deer, a bulb, a briar,
a blunder, the unemployed
my ancestor occupied;

now we're talking.
When walking home just now
I saw an old woman cutting
carnations, a simple weight
attached at the bonfire
of her irregular rattle,
and thought of you.

I said once, if I love you,
we'll fight, and I meant it.

This morning began with a flood.
While my body was heavy with the weight
of the unwanted gift, you
were in the garden, said,
a weed is anything
in the wrong place.
I'm worried but I'll wait it out.

mgb 11042010

Here I took 3 sources (not sure what they were) and took some words, some lines and rearranged them to make my own poem. There are a few of my own things here too but it feels like mine anyway.

poem 19: Self Portrait at 21 Years

Self Portrait at 21 Years

I.
I have tumbled upon that ridge
so many times I learned
the language of that single mountain.
Lately I’ve been yearning
for that western state
where I could have drank myself
into a coma after this world started trying
to burn me up (or drown me).
I’m just putting my cheek to the wind.

Even here, in Ohio, with her slow
transition into winter this year,
I’ve been a harvest ready
apple with no predator.
I have never been afraid
but I admit that the end of autumn

terrifies me. It would be easy
to love this place less.

II.
And of all the men I’ve slept with
and all the women I’ve wanted badly,
I know that like two different species
we could never need the same things.

But somehow I loved them all.
It’s taken me all this time to learn to live,
but lovers, I understand now
your lives are your own lives.

III.
All the ways they called me animal:
-feline
-avian
-wretched
-some sad, wild beast
-already extinct and gone
-I’ve missed you so

IV.
I am the negative of a photo
of someone you loved once.

Tape me to the windowpane
next to your bed; at night
hold me up just once
to the artificial light
of your reading lamp.

V.
In the bedroom, the bar,
the hull of a ship, in the attic,
his studio, the post-harvest garden,
in the dry basement of a friend’s house,
I heard it. You either hear it
or you don’t—that pulsing echo,
its way of saying: none of us will make it
out of here alive. Its way of saying:
you wolf, do something with yourself.



-m.g.b. october 9, 2010



Notes:
This is a first and last draft of this poem. It seems appropriate this way.
A sentiment from a couple of lines from this poem has been lifted from James Wright’s “Voices Between Waking and Sleeping in the Mountains.”

poem 18: On the Last Ferry Home: Moving Over the Mississippi

On the Last Ferry Home: Moving Over the Mississippi

I hear my city at war,
or maybe I’m hearing
my own heart like a war

with its million ammunitions,
million missing limbs, its slow
roaring movement through loss.
I was the barrel of a shotgun.

I was the wrong way out of town.
I was a lone moving animal,
trying to find the door to your house.

In times like this I try to ignore
the numbers, the body counts,
the orphaned young. But this war
makes me a listener so I understand

the crashing, my body moving:
a mistake. Let me warn you:
I bring the hurricanes, the forest

fires, the non-God fearing baptisms of the earth
and they take me in their arms like a familiar stranger.
As a moving funeral in this drunken city,

I leave bright trinkets in my wake.
As a moving funeral in all the other cities,
I leave the already worn land, the dry brush, the barely lit

match. I leave the ghost towns behind,
later drive past the washed out houses,
the burnt branches of that mountain.

I wish I could say those skeleton lands
have never moved me.

-marlo barrera

june-september 2010

poem 17

After Losing You

I declined the mangrove
life, the half-hearted-lover
life, the sadness-sitting-heavy-
in-my-heart life. I declined
the Tuesday sun, the neighbor's son,
a hive. I declined the asphalt road,
extended hand, the body
laying heavy in the sun.


*

I woke up imagining you
moving through your empty
house like a cocooned ghost.


---m.g.b. september 2010

People from Lisette Model photos

Fishman 8/21/2010

The elderly

Here are some watercolors I did over the past two days. I think they get better as I go especially since I'm so new at it.
Here they are in the order in which I made them:

1994?

I'm the little one.

Poem Paintings

These poems are all from the last chapbook I made. I still have some of those chapbooks, by the way, if you want one, let me know.

(click to enlarge)

poem 16

I.
The first thing I saw in Virginia,
in the woods there, on that farm
where my body was free,
were the sunflowers.

Their faces: human, wide,
and blushing, were a mockery of life.

As in: sit your ass down.

As in: put the shell to your ear,
convince yourself of its voice.

As in: I have always been an embarrassment
to the rest of the living things.

II.
This must be how the barnacles
on the body of the salmon feel.

III.
On the way to the cemetery
(where we planned to bury
the day, last night’s sickness,
the sadness dusk washed over us)

the glow of the mushroom caught us.
Its orange body: a saint
and we were predators.

We forgot about the burial,
carried the mushroom
between us, its meat clinging easily
to the sliver of dead tree. Our shoulders
slumped by the weight. The mile walk
back was a prize. Later, in the kitchen,

we broke the body and tried to preserve
the shape of the puckered heart.
I couldn’t understand ‘til I tasted the thing.

IV.
I went out and wrestled
away the sorry thunder
from the overworked land.

---marlo barrera; august 2010

poem 15: For a Future Son

For a Future Son

In the dead of winter
north of here I lived
in the ribcage of a dead
cow. My body rolling
in its body was a Russian toy.
It’s ribs, rounded
as a loving arm,
made those months
a hot, sad surrender.
Those months
were an empty tin.

In that wet trap I learned what this body means—
its dry, dusty mouth, stiff limbs, curved
spine as a shell—I learned what this body is worth,

and that isn’t much.
The old cow though
could have had a future
in its death, something other
than a holding structure
for this animal.

I could have passed
easily without much
notice but the cow made me
accustomed to this city’s humidity.


*

So I brought you here in the months
before your birth. In the dead
of winter, you rolled around
in the ribcage of a dead cow.

---marlo barrera; july 2010

Feature Article I

Urban Gardening in New Orleans, 5 Years After the Storm
By Marlo Barrera, July 2010

Muscadine grapes have the slip skin, the kind you can’t eat. They have the seeds. Some of them taste so much like a grape and some have a very distinctive taste that I can’t explain to you but I’ll put your name in my log book and when you come back next season, I’ll give you a few pounds so you can try.
Ronald, one of the mentor gardeners at Hollygrove farm, knows the plants in his plot so intimately he could tell you exactly how many pounds of fruit each plant will yield as the garden matures. Next season the Muscadines will produce 50 pounds of fruit and the seasons after: 80 to 120, which is hard to believe when looking at the weak and tenuous vines parallel to the ground with their fresh, new leaves baking in the sun.

The Hollygrove farm and market began in 2008 in order to provide accessible and healthy food to the area off of South Carrollton in New Orleans. Since Hurricane Katrina the Hollygrove area is part of the 87% of the city that is considered a food desert—an area defined by its lack of access to healthy, fresh food when considering poverty level and access to transportation. Before the hurricane there were 30 supermarkets in New Orleans and nearly five years later there are 20, each serving 16,000 people—nearly twice the national average. To fill this gap urban gardening and farming has become part of the rebuilding efforts in the city with leaders like Parkway Partners helping to start and re-establish more than thirty gardens just on their own. Urban gardening is becoming a part of the culture of the city, not just an underworked side note.

Paul Barricos, the general manager of Hollygrove market, watches over the small, air-conditioned space full of the scent of fresh basil. He collects money from the customers who, every Saturday, pick up their bag of seasonal produce that is grown at Hollygrove farm itself as well as other local farms. This week, blueberries and small black tomatoes are part of the package and recipe cards detail how to use the week’s produce. Barricos explains that the Carrollton-Hollygrove Community Development Corporation, a board of all Hollygrove residents, started the farm as a functional community center—a place to not only have access to fresh food, but also to learn the skill of gardening and become more involved in the community through the gardening itself and the meetings that are held in the space. And it’s easy see how both the communities of Hollygrove and broader New Orleans are invested in the market, a welcome green area in the midst of car exhaust and sighing homes.

It looks good from the street, says Ronald, but to the trained eye, you can see the disease in the plants, the bugs eating up the leaves. Outside, Ronald moves his hands over the land, saying the whole area was swamp when he got to it eight months ago, before they put down $2,000 worth of topsoil and he began to plant his crops of antioxidant berries.

Imagining the changes that this space has undergone and is moving through now, it is not hard to imagine the other 700,000 vacant lots left four years after the storm bringing the city even closer to its food. This is a civic-driven effort with different groups around the city trying to turn many of these vacant lots into gardens and farms. The effort is effectively creating a map for other cities in the country with food justice groups creating networks to explore new ways of gardening in different cityscapes. Other cities are currently exploring gardens on the sides of tall buildings and skyscrapers in order to take advantage of the plane of light that is wasted daily, which could potentially be an option in downtown New Orleans. All cities though that are inclined to incorporate urban gardens into their cultures are striving to create a more sustainable land base, to create equal access to healthy food, and to create communities where you not only know your neighbor’s name but also their favorite thing to harvest.

*

From the entrance of the garden you smell the green of the plants. You can see residents walking down the street toward the market, the children with their gangly bodies barreling down the road, all limbs and flailing like a windstorm. You see the long rows of cars leaning in the heat lining both sides of Olive Street, their license plates from Louisiana and Mississippi and from the north too. Walking down the rows of the smaller plots reserved for community growers you see the small signs labeling peanut, tabasco, lemon verbena, okra. Most of the visitors are in the small building that houses the market, but outside in the garden, three gardeners work on their plots. You see the man with his wide-brimmed hat clipping the long stemmed zinnias and handing them to a woman with dusty hands who puts them in plastic cups full of water. On the other side of a walk way are two larger pieces of land where the two mentor gardeners have their plots. And there is Ronald pulling weeds among the blackberries. He says they get a lot of Yankees here. He says he comes out here every day to see what needs to be done. He lists the names of the blackberries that are high in antioxidants like they could be his ancestors: Apache, Navaho, Arapaho, and Ouachita, which is pronounced witch-it-auh he says, but it does not start with a ‘w’ like you would think.

Nests I've Made

I've been working on a series of nests for a project I am doing for myself. Each is for a person that has felt like home at one time or another. Each nest has their hair in it and mine too. There will be about eight of them total, I think. The final part will be a nest big enough to fit two people inside. And I'm attaching the names to them because that is horrifying and scary.

Bowerbirds and some drawings

These are Bowerbirds and their structures. The photos are from this July's National Geographic. Bowerbirds are the only animals, besides humans, known to kill other animals for decorative purposes. The male builds a bower structure to attract a female. He does not live in the structure but decorates it with bright objects like bugs, berries and trash. If the female decides to mate, this is the only responsibility of the male to that family.
Click to enlarge the photos.












Here are two drawings I did. One is of Uncle Jr of the Sopranos and one is of an old lady at an old folks home I visited in Covington.