Maria T. Allocco, Threa Almontaser + Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Babes, bots, & tater tots, 

Funny story: my boss accidentally avoided an email for a hot while and the person who sent the email is epic. Let me introduce you to Maria T. Alloco. This is from "You Work With Death"...

You worked on call the entire week, reusing the same mask. We sent you three N95s. You led a surgery; the patient tested positive. Now they’re filling the hospital. Your scrubbed and gloved hands—when free—sewed elaborate embroidery for every member of our family. You made me an angel, once. I cross-stitched you one in return, of Snoopy at a typewriter: Chocolate chip cookies are red. Chocolate chip cookies are blue. Chocolate chip cookies are sweet. So are you. You display it over your desk in every office. On the phone today, you said stitching skin is different. Something else heals it. You do your best, you said. God does the rest. Growing up, I remember you hiding in the closet. Once, I opened it. Curled up next to you. Made my body into a soft shell, too. What are you afraid of? I whispered. Death, you said. Please don’t tell mom and dad.

And if you're interested, here's her bio on The Rumpus!

Maria T. Allocco is a mixed race, mixed-genre writer recently featured in the New Yorker drinking a kombucha—fermented, like kimchee juice—except sweet, full of tea and fruity. Maria is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University where she is always ‘that person’ in the room. She’s social media free. Reach her at: readingyourwords@gmail.com.

Allocco's work totally inspired a sister-loving poem of my own which I immediately submitted to the Longleaf Review in the interest of not "killing" it. This is a new tactic I'm taking up. I figure I'll try it out until I get totally defeated again and then do something else unreasonable. If you have any advice I'm all ears. 

Things seem to be falling out of the sky recently. In addition to this random amazing person my boss could have found sooner, my dad (who is dead, by the way) received Threa Almontaser's debut poetry collection, The Wild Fox of Yemen, in the mail. I'm in love in the way I love all poetry the first time I read it. 

.it follow I 

I can't tell you what I love about this line except that it feels explosive & daunting & real in the same way last week's quote from Natalie Diaz did (re: "all the griefs I've had I still have"). Reading Almontaser's poems is like eating a ripe peach. Exceptional is the only word that comes to mind, and it comes to mind not because of the sweet/tart flavor of a peach, but because of the privilege; it is a privilege to consume. So when she puts this on a page I can't help but pause, almost as if eyeing a gorgeous person in the corner of a room while life is busy happening...

We are still here, we will always be here, we, the durt under the nails of your country, crusted red/from digging. 

God rests in the distant fields, waiting. 

or, un-simply, this...

O unclaimed prayer, when will you cease sinking? I wonder if my mother made an
alien of herself for my father. She said she did it selfishly, countless nights of English

lessons in the kitchen so he'd no longer be a lack of shade in her life. In my veins, an infinite
alien. It runs think. It runs naked, greased garnet, my darksparked future. I want to paddle 

to remedy island, ask the panthers lapping my stranded blood, Which part of me tastes most alien? I was a jellyfish before this body, slipping away when my mother spoke

I consider now the distance between the body that forms the word and the word the body forms ("O unclaimed prayer, when will you cease sinking...In my veins, an infinite alien"), more simply stated: word and mouth, if I could even simplify such a connection. For Almontaser, this distance is language, or the ability to understand something precisely in the way only words written or said in their native tongue can accomplish. I do my best to imagine this pain, incomplete and decontextualized as it may be. 

My own therapist is always telling me to name my feelings, though I come up empty-handed. Some sessions are a bit like asking an indecisive child what they want at a breakfast buffet. "Did you feel happy, isolated, afraid? Was it excruciating?" After a typically long pause, she reassures me of my humanity quite simply: "where does it hurt?" I always point to the same place. I know the respite of finally having an answer to a question about yourself. I think of it as a line you can draw when the distance between selves is more tangible. Almontaser writes, instead, "I want to paddle..." 

I haven't journaled in a while. I go through lulls inside my own head...sometimes I am a visitor, sometimes I am a dweller, sometimes I live there dangerously & entirely. And while I'd argue that too much time in one's own head is never good, it's hardly a dull experience. In an attempt to solve this problem, I turned to Reddit and was reminded, once again, that I am the source of my own demise. 

One thing I did to help in these kinds of situations when you're alone is to document your thoughts in a journal. 

FanTASTIC advice. Fuck off.  

To those of you journaling out there on a regular basis, know that I envy you in a bad way.

in other news

This song by CMAT is hitting a lot of spots. 

I wrote a poem that I won't like for very long...should really think on that. Relatable? 

Watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire and considered how even when female directors admonish The Male Gaze™, it's still there. Pesky fuckers. Felt abandoned by cinema & also like I could be a professional movie critic. Remembered scraping by in my first-year intro to film class and rethought my ego once more.

I guess all of this is to say that the brain is in the body, but I'm not convinced everything's attached...

Hopefully you eat breakfast tomorrow. 

xoxo BLT