Moved

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

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

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

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:

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

The Wish for a Field

Were I loved, I would be braver.

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

Poem 24

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

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.

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.

Fermentation

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

(click to enlarge)

Our Bodies Our Selves II

Some more collages from Our Bodies Our Selves.

(click to enlarge)

Our Bodies Our Selves

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

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

marlo barrera

1.30.11

Poem 23

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

poem 22

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.