Late Spring, I went on a trip to Providence, Rhode Island. It satisfied a long standing curiosity for me about how I came to know America— through pictures and illustrations from the Children’s Britannica, a mish-mash in the imagination from reading story books whose names I don’t recall, and, of course, reading Poe, Lovecraft and King in my teens. I remember we had a tiny figurine of what I think is a Mansard House, which I latched onto because it fed the fantasies I had about home. All brick and, or concrete, the windows fully covered with glass (not just jalousies), multiple labyrinthine rooms and baths, a garden, a body in the yard, a crawling chaos in the attic… and so on.

When I take trips, I don’t consider distance or how popular a destination is. I think what I seek is some kind of completion it will bring me. When I came to Providence, I basked in what I believe is a particular attention to quality of life, beauty and nature. In plain language, the good shit. All this and the multiple road works and an incredibly ugly public art piece at Brown (an iteration of Matisse’s “The Dance” but in a material that glimmers like crumpled aluminum foil under the hot sun)— ah, the spice of life! You can’t have it all but you can have a morsel. With some butter, if you’re lucky.

Because I want to be conventional and keep up with the standards of society, I really sought growth this summer. Summers must be meaningful, at least in the Western World, where you are basically frozen in the winter and still a recovering, crawling worm in spring; a wise old worm in autumn. I did just that by publishing and working like there was no tomorrow (technically, there will be no tomorrow soon because global warming will come for us all).

Some publications, up and forthcoming:

– “(NOT) MY WRITING DESK” at Queen Mobs Teahouse

– A visual poem called “The Tongue is a Shore Where Words Become Stranded” at Berfrois (pictured below)

– Two pieces, one poetry and one prose, at Terse Journal (where I will be working on Interviews soon— yay!)

– And forthcoming, again, at Queen Mobs Teahouse (under MISFIT DOCS) “First Flaneurysm”, a piece I wrote for a class in graduate school and it’s patterned after Georges Bataille’s Critical Dictionary. Will be out on August 27, 2019.

Writing and publishing until you go bald— not at all a bad defense mechanism!

On August, I’ll be flying across the Pacific to visit my home. My soul and sanity will be once again torn to shreds, only to be transformed into… something.

I can’t wait to have a view of a different intensity.