A Romantic Dog

Moved

2011-10-12T11:11:00.000-07:00

Hello

I've moved to tumblr because blogspot was being a pain.

Go here instead to find my newest things: http://marlobarrera.tumblr.com/

Ohio

2011-08-17T11:47:00.000-07:00

Here is a poem. It has been a while. It is the billionth revision of a poem that I may or may not have posted on here long ago that has never be satisfying and it also gives a place to the last short poem I posted here.

Ohio

From New Orleans, in August

I lived as a Russian toy

in the small town north

of here. My body rolled

in her body. Her ribcage,

rounded as a loving arm,

made those months a hot,

sad surrender. I could get used

to the blatant cold, spring’s wild

dogs, the miles of unholy farmland,

but not the early dark

brought on by winter’s months.

Here, the days have me landlocked.

Out the apartment’s two small windows

I can only see where the trash is taken out to.

I understand this hot south as a dogfight.

I assume a landscape still exists

after nightfall but I could never really be sure.

-marlo barrera

august 17,2011

Poem

2011-06-21T11:20:00.000-07:00

Self Portrait
(During Transition, Moving South)

In our apartment,
out our two
small windows
we can
only see
where the trash
is taken out to.

June2011

hiatus

2011-06-11T10:08:00.000-07:00

Well, there has been quite a hiatus on this blog. The poems aren't coming easily anymore. It's all a bit discouraging, but I guess understandable. There are big transitions going on. I recently left Oberlin to return to New Orleans to work for the next eight months so that I can finish school in London in the Spring. Oberlin is a really special place and so is New Orleans but the incongruity is a bit hard to bear; but it's getting easier. Hopefully I will have something that I am proud of on here soon.
Stay tuned, I suppose.

There's a poem here:

2011-05-15T17:50:00.000-07:00

Russian prison tattoos are pretty incredible. Each of the images means something, is some sort of badge of status or fearlessness. I watched a special on t.v. once that went into this prison where, when prisoners died, they would cut off the skin where the most interesting tattoos were, and basically turn them into human leather and made a whole museum out of human Russian prisoner skin.

A lot of prisoners had tattoos on their faces. (In the third picture, the man has barbed wire on his forehead which means he is in prison for life without chance of parole.) But I remember something on that show about how there was a point when Russia decided prisoners could not be kept for life, so there were all of these men released who thought they would never get out, and their faces and bodies were just covered, making them this almost untouchable and surely unemployable group of people.

(click the photos to enlarge)

A poem from Cecily Parks

2011-05-05T13:22:00.000-07:00

The Wish for a Field

Were I loved, I would be braver.

2011-04-28T11:28:00.000-07:00

2011-04-24T12:06:00.000-07:00

On the Coast near Sausalito

1.
I won’t say much for the sea,
except that it was, almost,
the color of sour milk.
The sin on that clear
unmenacing sky was low,
angled off the gray fissure of the cliffs,
hills dark green with manzanita.

Low tide: slimed rocks
mottled brown and thick with kelp
merged with the gray stone
of the breakwater, sliding off
to antediluvian depths.
The old story: here filthy life begins.

2.
Fish-
ing, as Melville said,
“to purge the spleen,”
to put to task my clumsy hands
my hands that bruise by
not touching
pluck the legs from a prawn,
peel the shell off,
and curl the body twice about a hook.

3.
The cabezone is not highly regarded
by fishermen, except Italians
who have the grace
to fry the pale, almost bluish flesh
in olive oil with a sprig
of fresh rosemary.

The cabezone, an ugly atavistic fish,
as old as the coastal shelf
it feeds upon
has fins of duck’s-web thickness,
resembles a prehistoric toad,
and is delicately sweet.

Catching one, the fierce quiver of surprise
and the line’s tension
are a recognition.

4.
But it’s strange to kill
for the sudden feel of life.
The danger is
to moralize
that strangeness.
Holding the spiny monster in my hands
his bulging purple eyes
were eyes and the sun was
almost tangent to the planet
on our uneasy coast.
Creature and creature,
we stared down centuries.

-Robert Hass

2011-04-10T15:45:00.000-07:00

Poem 24

2011-04-02T11:28:00.000-07:00

For the Mississippi River

I.
Let’s call you thief. When I think of you rustling
through and packing up what you can, you make me
think of my easy surrenders. Terror gets in my bones
easy. I’m the bulb to the frost.

II.
Darling, you tell me south like a well-written love
letter so I think of what holding you would be like:
light as a screen door, violent as the slamming of one.

III.
I try to be more than your landscape of industry,
of barges. Life is hard for all living things and I guess
you’re just the end for some so I go with an open heart

to your broken cities, have built new chambers
in my chest, am cultivating gardens there.

IV.
Since your most recent escape, my decision-making comes
in the form of a blackout stampede like your loose heart.
I take and abandon easily, have learned to regret
nothing, have taken you as my wild mother.

V.
In my poorly constructed letters
I sign under love, yours, always.

-marlo barrera, completed march 2010

*With 2 lines that I think I stole from Bennet Bergman

A poem by Bennet Bergman

2011-03-20T17:03:00.000-07:00

This poem is from Bennet's newest chapbook Minor Canyons. All of it is wonderful. I've been carrying it in my bag for the past few weeks.

7. the Men from Town

On Good Friday in San Miguel

we watch the men from town

lynch and burn a paper-mache

effigy of Judas, spangled in

dishrags and bottle rockets.

The Scoundrel, they say,

The Coward, though

on Sunday, dressed in repentance

and new clothes, they lower him

tenderly down.

2011-03-16T08:10:00.000-07:00

Here is a picture I took at a Ring of Honor wrestling show in Philadelphia a few summers ago. I just remembered and I like it and want to remember it forever so I'm putting it here.

It is Necro Butcher who was also in that movie The Wrestler who puts staples in Mickey Rourke's head and gives him a heart attack.

2011-03-15T21:37:00.001-07:00

2011-03-02T19:17:00.000-08:00

Fermentation

2011-02-24T21:54:00.000-08:00

This blog was originally intended to be a log of the things that I make (you know, incase the originals are lost in some bogus flood or something) and, in the past, that just so happened to translate to mostly poems. Since then I have explored other mediums that involve using other parts of my brain (like making paintings and collages and building things with my hands-- which reminds me that I need to finish that series of nests).

This semester I have been looking into even more things that get me excited about living (make me feel more human, less lonely etc etc). This is why I've been taking a lot of exco (experimental college) courses: tango, Murray Ridge story telling, bellydancing, (step aerobics) and... fermentation!

All of these things have me excited but fermentation has been so exciting now that we are taking care of our own little bubbling babies! (what is all this hippie nonsense anyway?).

Tonight we made sauerkraut and kimchi.

Here are some photos of our kimchi that we have called Larry King:

I was really surprised at how easy the process was: cabbage, veggies, spices, salt and smashing all down with our fists/beer bottles (which is what that thing is inside of the jar).

It feels really nice to make something and then have to care for it for a period of time (before devouring it, of course).

It's ephemeral, and more communal in ways that my words have not been.

If this comes out well (and it smells fantastic) I will be making it all of the time!

Exploring new things soon...

Our Bodies Our Selves III: More Diagrams

2011-02-06T09:50:00.000-08:00

(click to enlarge)

Our Bodies Our Selves II

2011-02-05T12:43:00.000-08:00

Some more collages from Our Bodies Our Selves.

(click to enlarge)

Our Bodies Our Selves

2011-02-04T18:34:00.001-08:00

Some really awesome scans from Our Bodies Our Selves and some poetry collages I made out of the book too:

(Click to enlarge)

A Poem by Robert Hass

2011-01-31T15:49:00.000-08:00

Counterpane:

Grandfather's Death

On the pillow

the embroidered flowers

are fading

fading that patient spider

my grandmother

who made the best

of losses

bright quilts from rags

that are every bird

Audubon ever killed

in America.

From Field Guide (1973)

hands and tits

2011-01-30T18:26:00.000-08:00

marlo barrera

1.30.11

Poem 23

2011-01-29T18:15:00.000-08:00

Letter to The Butcher

Even after all the times I’ve registered your face
I can’t say I’m familiar. It must be that you wear
your life of dismantling on your torso so I’m busy

wrestling with your invitation to struggle.
Like a distant relative I try to stay

distant and like a distant relative I try
little to understand but I do understand
that I’m the birch and you’re the freeze

so I’m accepting with fighting resignation
that I wear my own dismantling on my torso too.

Like you, I’ve ruined most of what I’ve loved
and it all comes back in the form
of road, failed crops, or waking

like a sad hunger. I’ve been an amateur
in learning the structure of things, the scaffolding

to hearts but when it comes to gutting I’ve got it together
in spades. Master of anatomies, I want to imagine
a life of long harvests, fruitful scavenging

and building new, of putting the life back
into the bodies; there’s no room for apologies now.

marlo barrera

january 2011

2011-01-26T13:47:00.001-08:00

2011-01-23T16:20:00.000-08:00

2011-01-16T21:59:00.000-08:00

poem 22

2011-01-12T12:41:00.000-08:00

New Years Day in the Crescent City
(Self Portrait 2)

At six-thirty a.m. the nine of us are splendid
beasts toward home in the fog. I’ve never seen
such a tired migration be executed
with such beauty, but something in the steps
derived from crude estimations

is a freedom. In a moment
our avian selves are land held
and that’s okay. See: I’m learning to stave off
the somber drunkenness and this walk is a light.
Everyone is a little more tender

this time of night. Like experienced mourners
we brush each other as we pass, hold
each others faces near our own faces,
fold our hands into each others weary hands.
I think that nothing has ever moved as we do.

This is a relief; I see now we are easy
targets for even the smallest assaults: day, light,
the wild. I’m hearing it, the pulsing echo.
After tonight I’m giving up the body.

marlo barrera

january 2011

i think i will work on this more. i guess we'll see.

A Poem from Bennet Bergman

2010-12-22T14:54:00.000-08:00

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

(click to enlarge)

Self Portrait

2010-12-19T18:05:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-16T18:20:00.000-08:00

poem 21: Revisiting the Coyote

2010-11-24T16:53:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-15T06:16:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-13T13:54:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-09T08:04:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-11-07T11:10:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-04T19:08:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-09T18:52:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-28T11:06:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-13T08:16:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-04T17:17:00.001-07:00

Fishman 8/21/2010

2010-08-23T07:46:00.000-07:00

The elderly

2010-08-17T11:15:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-08-13T11:17:00.000-07:00

I'm the little one.

Poem Paintings

2010-08-05T10:09:00.001-07:00

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

2010-08-02T23:39:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-23T15:46:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-22T09:16:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-19T08:23:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-14T09:35:00.000-07:00

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.

A couple of monsters I made

2010-07-13T09:29:00.001-07:00

Poem 14: Natural History

2010-07-11T20:40:00.000-07:00

Natural History

The whale in this city
building keeps these bodies
crawfished—heads forward,
pinched, eyes glazed over
by the size of the thing.

In this city I am wanting
to be the ghost:
ignore this place
like it doesn’t mean a thing.
In this building though
we would live to be in the orbit
of the lifeless creature,
forever see the ridges on its body
like the last grains of rice,
our smaller selves waving
wildly in its presence.

I once mistook its living counterparts
for ships. Now I cannot shake the way
every whale reminds me of you,
their bones: elastic and brittle.

--marlo barrera

july 2010

the first draft of this poem was written my senior year of high school.

2010-06-16T09:03:00.000-07:00

"[...]preparation for a life of giving myself away, preparation for a process of schooling in which I was to give myself away to teachers, in preparation for a life of wage slavery, when I was to give myself away to the highest (monetary) bidder. I was similarly prepared to give myself away in personal relationships. The idea was that I should give myself away to those who held power over me until I had nothing left to give[...]
This is what is expected of all of us. This is what is expected of the world, that it give to those in power til it has nothing else to give[...]
But do we need to live like this? Do we need these masters? Do we need to give ourselves away to those who do not hold our best interest at heart, and do we need to allow them to hollow us out and hollow out the places we love?"

--endgame volume 1: the problem with civilization by derrick jensen (p191)

Poem 13

2010-06-15T20:59:00.000-07:00

In your absence it was my job
to keep the dog from digging

in the yard. But I was rabid too.
I was in a fever and lock jawed
and so insatiably thirsty
I drank
and drank
and drank
‘til I could feel it move inside me
like my very own tide;

you were a strong moon.
In that horrifying dream
I am the one destroying.
I have a tide in my belly then too
which moves my whole body.

In this waking life
the rabid me follows my mouth,
my nose which can’t understand either,
but night after night brings me to this same bed.

*
Our dog is learning: digs,
avoiding the flowering weeds
you couldn’t help but to love.

--marlo barrera

june 2010

Isn't She a Beauty? or Poems for People I Love(d) Once; Big Pelican Puppet

2010-06-03T13:49:00.000-07:00

These images of our coast are horrifying. A friend and I are looking to build a giant pelican puppet covered in oil to brign through the streets and organize some actions. Let me know if you want to help with the thing. No impunity for big oil!

Also, I finished a chapbook this semester. It is called Isn't She a Beauty? or Poems for People I Love(d) Once. There are about 14 poems in there. I sewed them all and drew the covers and everything. Soon I will scan one and put it on here so you can see what it looks like. I made only 28 copies. If you want one, please email me (mgbarrera@gmail.com) and I can get one to you. Giving me some mailing money would be really nice if you have it and if you donate a little money that would be great because it will go toward the big puppet and hopefully some other projects like that for the spill.

Starlings Fall Dead From the Sky

2010-05-12T21:13:00.001-07:00

here.

They both came at once

2010-05-02T16:29:00.000-07:00

Here is a video that my friend Rafe Scobey-Thal made out of my haiku that I posted a while back.
I think it's pretty great.

Untitled from Rafe Scobey on Vimeo.

Romantic Dogs in Best Undergraduate Writing of 2009!

2010-04-26T18:32:00.001-07:00

It got in there!

Here is the link.

poem 12: The Nest

2010-03-30T23:10:00.000-07:00

The Nest

The home was a threat before the hornets froze out in this year’s short winter. Since December I watched the nest deaden. In March I cut the branches from the tree.
It was the weight from the shell that made my body
ache and the caved wall in the side of the beast
that exposed its thousand eyes, the jealous lover.

With its eyes, its shell, its wanting,
the old hive made me a woman.
So now I can eulogize
half the population with:
she was a woman too.
Meaning: we are organs
and all the keys are down.

I learn yearly how to love.
This usually happens at the start
of fall. Now I am half way through
the year and I am hungry.

*

Reading about hornets, I learn the queen
can survive through the harshest months
in a slumber. I learn she is home and bodied.

-marlo barrera, march 2010

How to Make a Bird Sound

2010-03-13T13:23:00.000-08:00

Hornet's Nest

2010-03-07T13:31:00.000-08:00

Over the winter I had watched a hornet's nest in Oberlin. When I was pretty positive everything in it had frozen dead, I left a note in the mailbox of the house it was in front of. He gave me permission to cut it down. The neighbors were afraid of it anyway.

Here are photos of the incredible treasure (click to enlarge the photos):

poem 11

2010-03-04T14:17:00.000-08:00

Telling you this now is like holding
a flattened penny between my palms,
is like watching you out of the corner
of my eye in the morning, your eyes
getting used to the light. I’m telling you

I want to believe in god and here I am
pushing myself toward love with such velocity
that I think maybe a South American
poet could fall in love with me
now. We will break each other’s hearts.

I will learn exactly how
Borges feared the sea.

I will take that fear and bend it
into a tunnel that only this poet
and I could live in, huddled up
without waiting. Once I fell in love

with every stranger I ever met.
I would tell them how our days began
destined to meet each other,
fall in love and make each other
feel worth a damn.

It’s not until I give myself over
that even the sea will see
fit to take me.

Know: I want to run into something
hard with my body. Like spit
first hitting the oil, I want to fry.

I will go driving in the countryside,
die at the sound of a barn swallow,
myself and the machine
intimate with a strong tree.

-summer2009
marlo barrera

Glass Flowers: the Ware Collection and Poem 10

2010-02-27T15:42:00.000-08:00

Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka were glass artists from Dresden, Germany commissioned by Harvard University from 1887 to 1936 to create realistic replicas of plants. At the time there was no way to preserve and showcase plants to the public in their original, live state so glass was used instead. The two men made thousands of these models with no apprentices or help.

I got a book called Glass Flowers in Nashville, TN at Bookman, Bookwoman Books. It was printed in 1940 and has drawings by Fritz Kredel of 16 of the pieces from the Ware Collection, all with a focus on pollination. Each plate has a substantial description of the pollination of each flower.

It is the most beautiful book that I own.

Here are three of my favorite plates illustrated in the book. Click on them for a better look.

The collection is at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

-----

Here is a poem of mine from 2008. I have been posting older things because currently I am working on writing a bird field guide and a collection of nests. They have me preoccupied.

Recently, the two of us love with both
our hands, fondle sad things like hems,
corners, the edges of cherry orchards.

This is said to have made us both a little less
lonely seeming—we have suddenly become

landlocked. I speak brokenly in clock-tongue,
now. I only crane my neck. I know
only what it means to pray.
This is the North,

we discovered.
The definitive.
The North. So looking at you now
is like watching the compass settle,

finally. Today on the steps of a church was a woman
mourning someone her head thrown back,
hands pressed tightly to her chest without delicacy.

Help me identify these feathers, please!

2010-02-26T11:28:00.000-08:00

Here are some feathers I have found and been given in the last year. I am sure what a couple of them are but I guess not so confident. For the life of me I could not figure out how to put text on the images so here is some information.

These two feathers are both pretty large. The first one (a) is about 7.5 inches while the other one (b) is just slightly bigger. (a) was found in Oberlin, OH and (b) what found in Pittsburgh, PA. I suspect (b) is some sea bird.

This next group is great. They will be named (c) through (g) from left to right. They are all much smaller than (a) and (b). All five were found in Oberlin, OH.

**UPDATE: (c) is from a Northern Flicker Woodpecker (there are 7 species of woodpecker in Ohio) and (f) is a confirmed blue jay feather. Hooray!

Here are their sizes:

(d) two inches (I LOVE this one)

(e) almost three inches

(f) This one is my favorite. It is about four inches long. The other side does not have the pretty blue markings, only the black and white. I suspect this is from a blue jay.

(g) I think this one is from a cardinal. It is about 4 inches.

Please post any inklings of suspicions or pass this blog around to people who might know. Also, if you have a feather you loved once or haven't had the chance to love and want to get rid of it, send it my way. Just ask for my mailing address. In return I will send you something nice. We could trade things.

Here are some other things I collect:

-field guides and nature guides (especially those that are hand drawn or a strange sort of topic--- I have one only for eggs-- and those that are full page drawings too.)

-navigation guides and guides on what things I can eat (i.e. edible wild plants, mushrooms)

-particularly beautiful compasses (I only have one right now. It's always in my pocket.)

-stuff with birds on it

-old found egg shells

-abandoned nests from birds that won't return to them for the next mating season

-snake skins

-any other sort of beautiful and nice things (I have many buckeyes because I love them and old broken black walnuts, a mermaid's purse)

-dead bugs (i.e. intact bees, moths and butterflies, shells of scary big things)

Also, please let me know if you have any ideas of how to store or display these feathers!

Thanks for your help!

9. Another one today.

2010-02-25T16:56:00.000-08:00

While watching your girlfriend
on the shore of Lake Monroe
you tell me how this lake was built
on a place called Paynetown
which I heard as Paintown
and saw it fitting that the corps of engineers drowned
the place out after flattening out
the homes that maybe housed your anscestors
or history once. Here is where I remember
how afraid you are of dogs
and although you don’t like swimming much either,
you go out into the lake further
and I go with you.

Pay(in)etown is still
drowning beneath us
while your girlfriend is up on Flat Rock
drawing us maybe, only our heads
like irrelevant buoys;
our first portrait maybe,
after knowing each other for years.

-october 2009

8: a haiku 2/24/2010

2010-02-25T14:28:00.000-08:00

Here is a strong love-

r. There was a drought this year.

They both came at once.

Here is a postcard I made:

2010-02-13T18:49:00.000-08:00

Poem 7: Untitled Sequence

2010-01-02T22:08:00.000-08:00

There is a reunion
inside me between
my throat and an old
dried up seed.
I am full
of hunger.

I tried to grow
a garden once
but the dirt was no river
mud. Watering
amounted to nothing.
Sunshine amounted
to nothing. Love
amounted to nothing.

A year later you and I
grew pansies together
in a yogurt cup
on your typewriter’s case
near the window.

We’ve been seeing them
sprout but we are waiting
for them to bloom.

My throat,
the old seed,
the pansies
are not enough.
The four of us are
waiting for you
to come home.
The pansies are
waiting to bloom.

*
This is a handsome
mess. I’m settled in dead
or abandoned things I have
seen, in dead or abandoned
things we have seen
together. I am a collector
of old nests, lost feathers,
dead bees. My mid section
is marked by a stale waterline
so New Orleans is left in the depth
of my pockets as an unlucky coin.
My thoughts of you are set in:
two dead
deer,

Here:
I. Route 80
There were no birds of prey.
With the interior of a deer
splayed out next to it on a late
night road, the thing seems mammoth
in size. The animal was lonely there;

is there now as a dead sad thing
and its innards there breaking hearts,
later as an anonymous bloody thing,
is breaking hearts. It could have been human.

II. Route 34
An earlier death
occurred to me first as beautiful
and full. The animal was intact.
The antlers stuck out from the ditch.

The vultures were collecting, then
at once buried their bodies in its body.

I like missing you
through the loss of things,
seeing you through the wait
for our yogurt cup garden.
I am caught between an old nest
and imagining a live deer.

*
You’ve seen this before
but now it looks like I’ve spent long enough
on this coast to see its violence ending
in death like an electrical current
not ending in death.

After the second, we stopped on Route 80
In the bathroom I read (in two handwritings),
you’re the one for me /
and I love you with no reservations.

I told you, wrote it down, am saving it
for a postscript in your next note,
after reminding you about the two dead
deer we saw once in October, after reminding
you to remind me to water the pansies tonight.

------marlo barrera december 2009

Poem 6: Locusts

2009-12-06T18:51:00.000-08:00

Locusts: A Mutually Attracted Species

I am thinking maybe here could be a chance for the Rocky Mountain locust to have some god-fearing return like a hunger, raise hell here. Eighteen seventy-four: twelve point five trillion insects, twenty-seven point five million tons and hungry too, no, starving. Two hundred million dollars in crop damages in the west. Left the place barren like a handful of sand. Left everyone hungry. There was already a drought. Everyone was already hungry. The sugars in the stalks made the locusts want though.

Thirty years later, farmers had a hand in the extinction of them so that plowing now seems dangerous and secure so that North America is the only populated continent without a major locust. We didn’t save a single one. What it must have felt like to shed. What it must have felt like rejecting a body. Here, I have spent too many nights making decisions, my own body wrapped around a toilet.

-marlo barrera, november 2009

Poem 5, Dead Bees

2009-12-06T18:47:00.000-08:00

This has been my first sight of bees
in months after Virginia, in the woods
near the pond where they took to endure
the heat. These two I carried with me
in a paper bag said,
Marlo Barrera
DEAD BEES
I could hear their bodies
against the paper. I could
hear their bodies.

Later, I held the bees
in the palm of my left hand
and walked home to you.

It was the streetlights that made
their bodies glow and my palm endured
the heat as a city block might.

I missed you terribly. The night was cool
but the bees were dead still.
I thought how best we would preserve
them. Last year this time I didn’t know
you and now I’m bringing these bees to you, a gift.

-marlo barrera, november 2009

Poem 4, Sonnet

2009-11-18T17:33:00.000-08:00

Sonnet

After watching the video of your lover
sleeping with a man, first you wondered
why it had taken you so long to realize
it wasn’t you you had been watching,
rather some bastard she brought to your bed,
some son-of-a-bitch who didn’t even have
the dignity to smooth out the sheets afterward
or wash his hands before using your house phone
to call who-knows-who. Sitting there, watching
the video with volume this time, you hear the way she goes
into everything with such enthusiasm; you resign yourself
and second you decide maybe it’s unreasonable

to expect much more. Third, you put on a pot of tea,
get out two mugs and wait for her to come home.

--marlo barrera
september 2009

Poem 3, You, Birch

2009-11-02T08:53:00.000-08:00

You, Birch

If I were
a mushroom,
I would be
the scaber stalk
bolete which does not
keep well and which begins
dying as soon as it leaves
the birch it grew
from. No bolete
is poisonous except
for the red ones
that stain blue.

I would not
stain but would be
the closest to red
without being red.

The mushroom grows from the roots
but I think if I were one, I might grow
close to the bark, some dried up place,
to deceive. I’m not saying I’ve done nothing,
more like my want for you is debilitating.

--September 2009
Marlo Barrera

Poem 2

2009-10-25T20:42:00.000-07:00

I’ve been wanting to nurse something lately
that’s demanding and unforgiving.
This is not a baby.

In fact, I spent months with a sack of fertilizer on my hip
to realize what a burden just holding the thing would be.

Maybe nursing it would be as a friend
described giving blood—the feeling of refilling
yourself and freshening up
down to the bones.

Maybe it would be a dog
filled with the ghosts of my ancestors.

Maybe it would be a hangover
filled with the ghosts of my ancestors.

---September 2009

First Post with a Poem Inside

2009-10-25T20:18:00.001-07:00

I decided to start trying to keep some of my better poems in one place. Here is where the are going to come and wade about in this mucky muck.

Some of my poems are in a chapbook made by Bennet Bergman and I called On the Savagery of Children or Abby Feeding the Fawn by our own press called Baleen Press (www.baleenpress.blogspot.com). There are places where you can buy it (in Chicago, New Orleans, Bloomington, IN, and Seattle for only five buckaroos!) or you can email and I will send you one.

I think I will do only one poem for each post, but I will do a few posts now.

-------

Elegy

I.
The floor was my mother
once. With the motion

of my whole body, she pressed
at my head, held my back,

let myself be a thing that could relax
like an old sack.

II.
Later: It was as if I was the last of something
only vaguely of value
and you were the last person in this city.

It was dark out.
The street was wet.
I was mud
covered.

You had just washed
your hands. Inside was cold
and smelled of plywood.

III.
A warning: I wasn’t built for swimming,
but crashing through things

so everything/one that ever wanted
to touch me could have the chance.

IV.
Be still.
Let’s keep our bodies
to ourselves
this time.

V.
Nevermind.

VI.
Lover, once lover, ex lover, I swear I’m sorry for those things that exhaled on me. It was the bicycle with its hushed whirrings and how it splattered mud on my back, breathed into my body cement. The way new bed sheets touched my legs and the floor again how she—

Oh fuck. Dear god, no
you, neither of us could even begin to understand.

I’m sorry; I took the bus home on Tuesday. It was packed. The woman next to me caressed my hips and I didn’t object.

---April 2009