Flesh and Blood

I read with Sara Wintz at Small Press Traffic on Sunday, the day after my return from Chicago.  Even though I slept for like forever, I was still groggy, a grogginess that no amount of rest or stimulants could touch.  On the plane home, I was writing a response to student work, and I fell asleep with my fingers still typing.  But the reading went well.  Sara read new work that was inspired by Occupy protests, which Oakland-based poets have been particularly active in.  This new writing was amazing, and the longer Sara read, the better it got.  As in Walking Across a Field We Are Focused on This Time Now, her forthcoming book from Ugly Duckling Presse, Sara danced between straightforward and oblique, while exploring how the individual is enmeshed in larger cultural vectors, and all the pangs of pain and bliss and inadequacy that entails.  I loved reading with her.

Since Claudia Rankine cancelled and we had all this extra time and I didn't have anything new that's ready to share with the masses, I decided to read "Lapdance," the very raw ending to the buddhist.  As dedicated Belladodie readers will remember, I read it in New York, at Segue, less than two weeks after it was written, and since I was still in the heat of the emotion I generated to produce such rawness, I lost it, right up there on the stage of the Bowery Poetry Club.  I've been too nervous to touch it again.  But I was curious what it would be like, now that almost a year has passed since its writing, how it would be for me.  In a nutshell, on Sunday here in San Francisco, I pretty much was in control of the material; I'd be up there thinking, What drives you to write such embarrassing stuff, Dodie, and I could feel the emotion radiating from the words, but I was pretty much outside that emotion.

Then, when I got up Monday morning, it hit me.  Wham!  Like I was broadsided by a speeding train of loss.  And a deeper ineffable, an unspecified trauma that was all the more powerful because of my inability to define it.  It was both visceral and mental, as if those two weren't separated, are never separated, and the gist of it was that I was reminded that this person wasn't a fantasy or a dream, that it/he really happened.  I felt very much a being of flesh and blood and that this other energetic mound of flesh and blood was still existing somewhere in the world.  I keep waiting for the next sentence, but it's not arising . . . his lyings and coverups remind me of a 50s sex comedy, except I didn't find them very funny.  A negligeed broad in two different hotel rooms and Tony Randall frantically running back and forth.