Narrative
Death Card
Confronting the self
Sculpture
A Brush With Death
Featured in the NYC Culture Club @ The World Trade Center
Summer 2024
Prose
Diagnostic Tools
Before me there is yellow. As my brain joins my eyes in wakefulness I understand it is oil paint upon the wooden canvas that rests against the legs of my glass table. Inherited from the woman who previously dwelled here, the table’s main identity is as a purgatory for things to be dealt with later / never. I am on the floor. Arms laid out at either side with limp palms looking to the sky, beginning to doubt heaven’s existence. Suddenly the level coldness of hardwood comes into focus against my right cheek. I cock my head to check the time on the microwave. I believe only a few minutes have passed since I rose from bed in pain, convinced all I needed was a good emptying of my colon. Then the pushing made the circumference of my vision close in as I made a mad dash for the bed. My place on the floor evidence I did not make it, the puddle of blood where my nose had made contact with the ground proof of impact. Had I fallen from standing? Or did I crumble to my knees with my hands softening the blow of my skull colliding with the floorboards?
Sculpture
The Problem We Don’t All Live With
Poetry
Love Should Teach the Children to Dance
love should scrape the batter from the sides of the bowl
skip the cracks in the sidewalk
believe in impossibilities
and bust her knees running in the driveway
love should feel a charley horse where the sun don’t shine
see red in her panties
Conceptual
Death of New York
After Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris
Performance
Tea Party
Immersive reading on the encroachments of womanhood.
Prose
Mama
Today I traverse the stairs to the world below and I cry for you. Today the men who find their thrones beside the station will not sponge sop soak absorb my expression. The sun hits me like a towel’s embrace upon departing the tub. You always rinsed me beneath the shower head, leaving my feet the last appendages to go up against the water before landing sequentially on terry-clothed tile. In the seconds of wet body interacting with air I let my eyes bounce around your cubbies of accoutrements.
Prose
Urban Dirge
Now the city is oversaturated in shame, drowning in it, and everyone looks the same and talks the same and only cares about money and no one is making good art. If I had no shame today I would have told my friend who invited me and twenty-four other people to her apartment for dinner that I think most of her friends are uninteresting, and I don’t want to go. And instead of sneakily asking my mutual friend if he was going, I would have asserted that he would be going and that we would be talking about Blue Velvet over the meal. I also, having just left the theatre, would have laughed as loud and as frequently as I wanted while watching David Lynch’s culturally prescribed magnum opus regardless of whether he meant for his small-town-love-story-film-noir-porno to ellicit such a chuckle.
Photography
Photography
Photography
Woman Too
I never thought I was beautiful growing up. Not in the way the starlets in the movies do, tears running down hollowed cheeks staining the satin piece of fabric they are passing off as a gown. No, I did not think I was beautiful because it was true. From its conception there were no black faces in Hollywood unless they were men or servant girls. We were not allowed to partake in the glamour. Not where anyone could see anyway. Though isn’t exhibition the point? I am an actor. I am an American. I am a woman. What am I if not desirable, if not an object for consumption?
Prose
On That of Which the Patient Complains
In August there is a forehead hematoma. My long-term house guest and I anxiously await the start of the fall season and the coolest days of the summer have forgotten to drop themselves in temperature. We reminisce on July days when we would disobey the signs that said otherwise and seat ourselves on the rocks just where the Hudson breaks. He would regularly request a Genevieve on the rocks, a nod to my being next in line to train as a bartender in the restaurant where I worked and where he too would end up working later in the summer. Then we did not know anything other than that it was beautiful to be at the center of someone’s world…
Poetry
Things you must know if ever you are to love me
I am an unusual creature
I find ease in complication
I will not set the clocks back
I live in warm weather time
And in the spring I will write a note above the oven that reads “this is the hour”
I will eat the platanitos on the way home from the market
or the grapes if I want something sweet
or the chocolate (dark) if I‘m in need of indulgence
I love the resounding silence of the morning…
Poetry
An Antithetical Ode to 20
And so I keep singing the same song over and
over
Hoping that at some point it will cause
my mother’s eyes to light up the way they did upon my initiation into the ivy league
Or the talented tenth
For the way my underdeveloped mind could dance circles around the grown-ups in gowns at galas
For my string playing, phonetically obeying, strategic displaying of everything that can fit inside a box
For every time I managed to outperform myself or be more of a
doll…
Photography
Forms
The body as storyteller
Prose
Bordered Love
March 1949
My dearest Nelke,
I do hope that this letter finds you well and that I have not been forgotten in Berlin. I write to you now from Heidelberg where I have returned to finish my schooling. I apologize for the inconsistency of my correspondence. The last few months I found myself a captive of war in Soviet Russia. I hope you understand the difficulty in communicating with the outside world under these circumstances…
Photography