Jha'Meia has posted the 3rd edition of the Asian Women Blog Carnival! Check it out. :)

ETA: For Us, by sheafrotherdon. &hearts &hearts &hearts! That is all I have to say.

I have far too many writing projects to offer you a birthday prompt right now, but there shall be a snippet of Sekrit Project!Gwen for you later tonight, and also an epic plotting session when I have finished (or possibly while I'm procrastinating) my first springkink fic. For now, though, have some e.e. cummings:

( Introduction )

&hearts &hearts &hearts!

1. Khimjahng

It held you once. Chora of hands splashing water,
to scour and peel mugwort piled in bamboo creels.
Chora of knives hacking sowthistle or lotus-root,
steel beating against wood boards, blades glinting.

It was. Now November sun slants into your eye
( from a foreign sky. You scrub, rinse, chop, wring. )

-- Suji Kwock Kim

***

Dreamwidth open beta starts very very soon, which means that I will be getting invite codes very very soon! :) I don't know how many they're sending out per person, but if you'd like one, comment here with your email and I'll go by first-come first-serve until I run out. (Unless you've already mentioned it to me, in which case remind me, because I am forgetful like that!) ETA: I now have 5 3 2 invite codes, for those of you who want one./ETA -- and they're all spoken for! Sorry, folks.

Also, I'll be closing my drabble free-for-all tonight, so drop a prompt if you want one!

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

-- Pablo Neruda


Drabble free-for-all is STILL OPEN! My brain hasn't up and died on me yet, so I'm taking unmerciful advantage. *g*

she congregates with nomads
attentive & occasionally settling
reconjugates self with each meeting:
i am self
I is personae
i & stolen grammar
hoarded carefully in bare hands & forgotten pockets
aiya! hai been dou ah!
good fortune, she's a tough cookie
will bend & trace those words to follow black, black hair
the sound between her bare thighs as she walks & sidesteps
mimics & repels the roles imposed upon her

remember: timidity begets timidity
speak up, girl!

lip: to be used as a verb whenever possible--she lips backbone, a daily necessity this slow road through thickets

tongue: caught between the command performance of communication & her tongue's own slippery dance. thrust into the chasm of speak or be spoken for.

breast: in conjunction with chicken evokes fear. in conjunction with lover, a welling, a swelling, of touch & of shyness

knuckle: layers of work ethic, prone to cracks & dryness, punishment in a harsh climate

back: her neural arch supports the clan's full frontal reunion, genealogies writing themselves before her wary eyes

liver: proteins of endearment, this interrogative organ delivers feast into fuel, water into blood

guilt: a way of life, can be slowly unset by the beating heart's optimism. atriums of responsibility a syntax of action.

sisterhood: this anatomy includes mother if possible

-- Rita Wong


*PS: drabble free-for-all is still open! leave a prompt if you want one. ;)

1. Color of Home

I met you by Battery Park where the bridge once was.
Invisible it ran between the towers.
( What made you follow me, O ghost in black cutaways? )

-- Meena Alexander

***

Some of you guys will be pleased to know that I've just ordered Swordspoint from Barnes & Noble! SO EXCITED, I CANNOT WAIT TO READ IT. :D :D

ETA: HOMG MERLIN CAST DIARIES. &hearts &hearts &hearts all over i_claudia! I KNEW I WOULD BE EVEN MORE HOPELESSLY IN LOVE WITH BRADLIN, BUT I HAD NO IDEA I WOULD GLEEFACE TO SUCH AN INCOHERENT EXTENT OVER ANGEL COULBY. OMG. OMG. *PINK SPARKLY HEARTS EVERYWHERE*

Leaving Chinatown

Slicing a mango to share between us, your mother
smiles at the grinning fool I've become, pours me
more and more wine. You’re working late uptown.
Green platanos searing in oil, saffron rice boiling,

black beans simmer with sofrito, chili, red onion
until steam clouds the room, tasting of salt,
wetting my eyes. What lies between us feels thin
as this mist, as strange. How real is it? When she takes

my face in her hands as she would open a fruit,
her ravaged voice cutting through me, I see her
as she must have been once, afraid of nothing—long before

she fell in love with your father, a man who shattered
what he touched, who left her eyes galled by all the other
faces, like yours, she might have looked into with love.

-- Suji Kwock Kim

***

thanks to the lovely avendya, i am now fairly set up over at dreamwidth: glass_icarus! the intro post is made, as well as a bit of personal fandom history, if you guys are interested. :D

i haven't decided what i'm doing yet, journal-wise, but i don't plan to leave LJ for the foreseeable future (unless the majority of my fandoms decide to migrate, which is extremely unlikely as i have many of them), so do not panic! i'm definitely not about to jump ship. &hearts

For you, because I felt it was appropriate to your post of bibliophilia the other day:

An Afternoon in the Stacks

Closing the book, I find I have left my head
inside. It is dark in here, but the chapters open
their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound,
words adjusting themselves to their meaning.
Long passages open at successive pages. An echo,
continuous from the title onward, hums
behind me. From in here, the world looms,
a jungle redeemed by these linked sentences
carved out when an author traveled and a reader
kept the way open. When this book ends
I will pull it inside-out like a sock
and throw it back in the library. But the rumor
of it will haunt all that follows in my life.
A candleflame in Tibet leans when I move.

-- Mary Oliver

You are free to prompt away, as always! &hearts

***

In other news, I've just written several hundred words for a Morgana/Gwen merlin_ficathon prompt! (It's turning out to be more Morgana-centric, though.) This is new and exciting territory; would anyone like to beta-read when it's finished?

Two poems for today!

Concerning Starling's Law of The Heart

"...the critical factor controlling stroke volume is the pre-load or degree of stretch of the cardiac muscle cells just before they contract."
--Marieb's Human Anatomy and Physiology

House a pump in four chambers,
arteries and veins for pipes, valves
for valves, pacemaker a tap

( that won't quit running. Let it. )

***

Nocturne in C

Because these are not the nights of empty hands,
because these are not the nights of dreams galloping
like gasoline fire over blue tar,
I wish you could see what I see
( when I look at you, )

Oh, Texas. Sometimes I don't even know what to say about you. I am having some trouble with this link today, so here are the relevant pieces of information (the topic of discussion was voter identification legislation) in case it doesn't work for you guys.

O RLY:

"Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?"
-- Texas Representative Betty Brown (R), on Tuesday.

YA RLY:

“Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”
-- Brown, to Organization of Chinese Americans representative Ramey Ko.

NO WAI:

Her spokesman said that Democrats “want this to just be about race.”

I've spent the last couple of days trying to decide if this is funnier or more insulting. Republican Party, when are you going to realize that minorities do, in fact, exist?

... Anyway! I'm tired of ending things on a depressing note, so have an old favorite of mine for Poetry Month:

( as freedom is a breakfastfood, by e.e. cummings )

Hippopotomonstro-sesquippedaliophobia
the fear of long words

On the first day of classes, I secretly beg
my students Don't be afraid of me. I know
my last name on your semester schedule

is chopped off or probably misspelled—
or both. I can't help it. I know the panic
of too many consonants rubbed up
against each other, no room for vowels

to fan some air into the room of a box
marked Instructor. You want something
to startle you? Try tapping the ball of roots

of a potted tomato plant into your cupped hand
one spring, only to find a small black toad
who kicks and blinks his cold eye at you,
the sun, a gnat. Be afraid of the X-rays

for your teeth or lung. Pray for no dark spots.
You may have pneumonoultromononucleosis—
coal lung. Be afraid of money spiders

tiptoeing across your face while you sleep
on a sweet, fat couch. But don't be afraid
of me, my last name, what language I speak
or what accent dulls itself on my molars.

I will tell jokes, help you see the gleam
of the beak of a mohawked cockatiel. I will
lecture on luminescent sweeps of ocean, full

of tiny dinoflagellates oozing green light
when disturbed. I promise dark gatherings
of toadfish and comical shrimp just when you think
you are alone, hoping to stay somehow afloat.

-- Aimee Nezhukumatathil

PSA: The Asian Women Blog Carnival is now open for public consumption! So many exciting things to read; so many voices worthy of love and respect! \o/

Today's dose of poetry is actually a spoken word piece: Black, White, Whatever (2008), by the ridiculously talented Kelly Tsai. I had the great pleasure of seeing her perform this piece in person, and it is amazing.

before I leave for Boston today! (Last-minute day-trips FTW! :D)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, search_soleil! &hearts Also, have a poem:

ImageNation

“Britain is interesting from a dental standpoint.
They won the war, but they lost their teeth.”
— Mike Myers in April 1999 Vanity Fair: Hollywood Issue

When the empire disintegrated, the world
shattered like a glass Pepsi bottle, a fiasco
where the shards of former colonies flow

into a syrupy run, crashing and jostling
the other. The grand corporeal
vessel dissolves though corporations

rush to suture the lacerations, to coalesce
the bodies under a fortune flag. Perhaps

middle-aged women and beer-bellied
men ponder such concerns at yoga
class, stretching their souls alongside the throbbing
machines of physical enhancement. The pulleys burn
to and fro like a bad episode of the Industrial

Revolution while the surplus holy conduct
the journey from Home to Om. In our States,

the Spirit arrives imported, waits
for the cell phones to stop ringing, acts
the patient profit for global souls.

In the spill of national borders, the mystic
resides on the other edge of the waters,
or in Rumi’s case, the other side

of the grave. His flushed readers ruminate
through visions which translate death
into transitory celebration, poetry

into carnal knowledge. Amidst this carnival, posed
like a bharatanatyam beauty, Mike Myers palms
a personal organizer, Om legible like the cross

of lifelines on rough hand. Unlike the syrup turned

to sores, the dental to decay, infection
of cross-cultural contaminants
inciting the boundaries to fester,

we know Mike is healthy and wise
because he still possesses a proper set
of sparkling North American teeth.

-- Purvi Shah

So! April, in addition to being National Poetry Month, is also traditionally Asian American Awareness Month, and having been smacked in the face with Fail of a racial nature all over the damn place, I've decided that it's important to me personally to highlight both. My goal for the next four weeks is to promote awareness in this space of racial issues, identity issues, and stereotypes specific to me, as an Asian-American woman. Following this theme, have some reading to kick off April:

For A New Citizen Of These United States

Forgive me for thinking I saw
the irregular postage stamp of death;
a black moth the size of my left
thumbnail is all I've trapped in the damask.
There is no need for alarm. And

there is no need for sadness, if
the rain at the window now reminds you
of nothing; not even of that
parlor, long like a nave, where cloud-shadow,
wing-shadow, where father-shadow
continually confused the light. In flight,
leaf-throng and, later, soldiers and
flags deepened those windows to submarine.

But you don't remember, I know,
so I won't mention that house where Chung hid,
Lin wizened, you languished, and Ming-
Ming hush-hushed us with small song. And since you
don't recall the missionary
bells chiming the hour, or those words whose sounds
alone exhaust the heart--garden,
heaven, amen--I'll mention none of it.

After all, it was just our life,
merely years in a book of years. It was
1960, and we stood with
the other families on a crowded
railroad platform. The trains came, then
the rains, and then we got separated.

And in the interval between
familiar faces, events occurred, which
one of us faithfully pencilled
in a day-book bound by a rubber band.

But birds, as you say, fly forward.
So I won't show you letters and the shawl
I've so meaninglessly preserved.
And I won't hum along, if you don't, when
our mothers sing Nights in Shanghai.
I won't, each Spring, each time I smell lilac,
recall my mother, patiently
stitching money inside my coat lining,
if you don't remember your mother
preparing for your own escape.

After all, it was only our
life, our life and its forgetting.

-- Li-Young Lee

daily dose of pretty, from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself:

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab
and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yaws over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd
wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

~e.e. cummings

(end-of-term paper/presentation madness; actual content to come soonish? ;0)

Now i lay(with everywhere around)
me(the great dim deep sound
of rain;and of always and of nowhere)and
what a gently welcoming darkestness--

now i lay me down(in a most steep
more than music)feeling that sunlight is
(life and day are)only loaned:whereas
night is given(night and death and the rain

are given;and given is how beautifully snow)

now i lay me down to dream of(nothing
i or any somebody or you
can begin to begin to imagine)

something which nobody may keep.
now i lay me down to dream of Spring

--

i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
--i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
--i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

J'ai tant rêvé de toi que tu perds ta réalité.
Est-il encore temps d'atteindre ce corps vivant
Et de baiser sur cette bouche la naissance
De la voix qui m'est chère?

J'ai tant rêvé de toi que mes bras habitués
En étreignant ton ombre
A se croiser sur ma poitrine ne se plieraient pas
Au contour de ton corps, peut-être.
Et que, devant l'apparence réelle de ce qui me hante
Et me gouverne depuis des jours et des années,
Je deviendrais une ombre sans doute.
O balances sentimentales.

J'ai tant rêvé de toi qu'il n'est plus temps
Sans doute que je m'éveille.
Je dors debout, le corps exposé
A toutes les apparences de la vie
Et de l'amour et toi, la seule
qui compte aujourd'hui pour moi,
Je pourrais moins toucher ton front
Et tes lèvres que les premières lèvres
et le premier front venu.

J'ai tant rêvé de toi, tant marché, parlé,
Couché avec ton fantôme
Qu'il ne me reste plus peut-être,
Et pourtant, qu'a être fantôme
Parmi les fantômes et plus ombre
Cent fois que l'ombre qui se promène
Et se promènera allègrement
Sur le cadran solaire de ta vie.

~Robert Desnos

( translation: )

of no sleep. literally. have a poem! *keels over*

Desire

Say I chew desire and water is an explosion
of sugar wings in my mouth.

Say it tastes of you.

Say I could drown because you left
for the time it takes a blackbird to understand
a pine tree.

Say we enter the pine woods at dawn.

We never slept and the only opium we smoked
was what became of our mingled breath.

Say the stars have never learned
to say good-bye. (One is a jewel
of blue magic in your perfect ear.)

Say all of this is true and more

then there are blackbirds
in a heaven of blackbirds.

~Joy Harjo

Elle est debout sur mes paupières
Et ses cheveux sont dans les miens,
Elle a la forme de mes mains,
Elle a la couleur de mes yeux,
Elle s'engloutit dans mon ombre
Comme une pierre sur le ciel.

Elle a toujours les yeux ouverts
Et ne me laisse pas dormir.
Ses rêves en pleine lumière
Font s'évaporer les soleils,
Me font rire, pleurer et rire,
Parler sans avoir rien à dire.

~Paul Éluard

( not the best translation )