some new poems

 La Plata

 

A calcium-white moon

twinkled like a parasite in our blood,

 

like a swallowed needle,

 

infinite rivers leading to one

ravenous and blinking core.

 

I wanted so many things.

More than a mouth of broken teeth

 

could possibly ask for.

One merchant after the other

 

sold colored pencils and plastic

combs to tired women with

 

swollen bones. A landscape made

entirely of wrong notes.

 

You offered the thief a swig of whiskey

instead of pulling me away

 

when he reached for my pocket.

We let our legs dangle off

 

the train, penetrate

the glistening dark,

 

stars flickering like cello

tongues. The night smelled crisp.

 

Happy. We were happy

pulled up against the spicy

 

cunt of the world, offered

in one brief, delicious flash.

Prayer in Lingerie

I want nothing from you but your voice, now,

inhabiting the corners of my room, filling

my sheets with sweat and lilac-spume.

 

I stay awake listening to bullet-hard

insects and their flimsy night-gown wings

suiciding on my window.

 

Make sweet of their rot-flavored buzzing.

Make my nipples alcoholic and swivel

to the bottom of this martini glass-shaped

 

ache, dirty and lit from within.

 

 

Prayer in Red

 

Today I hovered around a single baby

seal's corpse, split-stomached on the beach.

I witnessed the infinite chewing

 

of the earth taking it back, leaving

only a dark slick behind. Most days

I don't need you to tell me who I am.

 

Let me stay where I belong, somewhere between

the glass jar in the back of the refridgerator,

one marachino cherry left,

 

and your mouth, gleaming and sugared

with thirst.

snapshots

It has been almost a month since I last wrote, and now with only a month left in Buenos Aires I find myself desperate to record everything that happens to me. So to catch you all up on things, over the past few weeks I have:

- finally settled on an MFA program (Vanderbilt, baby!)

- been attacked by a taxi driver after flipping him off. Luckily I was rescued by three huge Italian-Argentines (since Haywood wasn't there to defend my stupid ass).

- started taking classes at the world's prettiest yoga studio http://www.valletierra.com/

- spent a ton of time with Santi; cooking, running, doing yoga, drinking wine, writing poems and being a happy bum.

- eaten my weight in chorizo.

- learned my favorite Argentine phrase: "me chupa un huevo." The literal translation is something like "I suck an egg," but it really means "I don't give a ____."

- seen a ghost.

- spent an hour with Santi trying to save a starving street cat at five in the morning.

- fulfilled my life-long dream of watching"The Omen" projected on the wall of a ballroom while drinking wine.


Those are the highlights. I realized recently that my favorite moments here have been the ones which at the time seemed unbearable. For instance, walking around La Plata-- an ugly town outside of the city (Santi loves ugly places, like the abandoned industrial zone where we went running one day and it felt like we had survived an apocalypse). We ended up eating choripan and drinking flat coke at this ramshackle asado run by a bunch of bums who cooked meat out of old gas tanks filled with charcoal. I love this memory.

That's all for now. I can barely concentrate, struggling to hear my thoughts above the deafeningly loud tango record my housemate is playing. So much feeling, so much passion. I'm no longer surprised by people's tempers here, or startled when someone threatens to kill someone else, such as a family member. These things pass as quickly as they arise. Bueno, me chupa un huevo.

metacine

Half-way through Slumdog Millionaire, or Quien Quiere Ser Millonario, Santi leans over and whispers, as if saying something really meaningful, "This must be so strange for you...you're in Aregntina watching a movie about India. Are you okay?" He is being sarcastic, and is talking during the movie that I chose to see because he is both bored and annoyed by the extreme aesthetic and sensationalized portrayal of poverty. We drink a large box of chocolate milk and eat alfajorcitos. When the movie is over we both feel slightly nauseous....

I am on the Internet a lot these days, in the midst of trying to decide where I will be spending the next 2-3 years of my life, what type of environment I want to shape my new world of poetry, creation, and lots of introspection. This is a big deal for me, a decision I do not take lightly. So I am gathering as much information and input as I can, knowing that in the end none of it will matter and that it will not even be a choice but an impulse, a response to my gut.

It is amazing to me that I can be physically in Buenos Aires and mentally feel like I am nowhere, floating in a thought-congested mind, completely consumed by the trinkets of my life, sorting them out, polishing them like an isolated lunatic with a hoarding syndrome. I am in Buenos Aires, but at the moment I could be anywhere, in front of my computer, rummaging through infinite landfills of information, searching for something I know I will never find.

I like to travel because it is another way of losing yourself to the moment, forgetting who you are, dispersing bits of yourself along the way, at the end lighter-- less you-- but really, closer to the truth of who you are. The last (first) time I was in Buenos Aires, I spent two magical weeks wandering around the different neighborhoods, in love and in a trance, merging with the energy of the city, a sparkly darkness that felt both close to death and more alive than any place I'd known. Now I am back and here, kind of making a life. I have an apartment, I go to the market each day to buy meat and vegetables. The cheese shop owner knows me and what kind of goat cheese I prefer. I can tell you how to get somewhere on the subway, or the best place to go running, or which movie theaters are showing what North American films. I feel comfortable here...not home, but something that could become home if I stayed long enough.

I love this, and at the same time I am trying to hold on to that feeling of wonder, how it is when you experience anything for the first time. There is a part of you that remains aware and is processing all of the newness. And then there is the part of you that has lost its compass, existing without any point of reference, dissolving into the landscape until you become part of everything-- the cement facades and bus-sighs and streets full of people that look like you but have a hardness in their eyes, smells of roasting meat, and the promise of another evening to swell your lips and close the night around you like a shiny wound until everything disappears but your heartbeats, a bird shuddering in a paper bag, a handful of seeds, last sip of wine, a giant net on the dark water, what you have lived your whole life trying to name that now palpitates between the two of you as if it's always been there, as if it's about to be born, making a home inside you.

Milk bags and other favorites

Today I started making a mental list of all of the things that first annoyed/aggravated me when I arrived in Buenos Aires and that now I don't want to ever live without. Here are a few:

1. Milk bags (and yogurt too)- people here by plastic bags of milk, snip a little hole in the corner and then place the bag into a colorful plastic pitcher that takes up tons of room in the fridge and tends to get knocked over, or fall out of the broken refrigerator door that is always packed with at least three half-empty squeeze-bags of mayonnaise, an old lemon, and a damp cardboard container of orange juice, all of which are held in place by a rickety bar, fastened with a rubber band. It's messy, but milk bags simulate an udder-type experience. I like them. The milk is so processed it never goes bad.

2. Light your own stove (I don't know the actual name for it)- every time I make tea I have to turn on the gas and snap a lighter towards the jet. At first my thumb would catch on fire. Now I can do it without looking.

3. Nescafe- sooooo much easier than brewing coffee!

4. Bidets- obvious. It still blows my mind that we don't really have these in the states.

5. Waiting for 20 minutes after you order a coffee- I get to strike up conversations with other patrons and ogle the pastries oozing behind the glass cases.

And of course there are things that I loved instantly, that are perhaps the reasons why I came here intuitively and then came BACK on a love-crazy, passion-induced whim, which has turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made.

1. Heladerias- like getting a pint to share with your boyfriend-- bitter chocolate, dulce de leche and marscapone-- and sitting in the park while the sun goes down.

2. Asados- meat, tender, salty meat that is so delicious you want to cry. All day long.

3. Malbecs- wine that is sweet, full-bodied and fierce a woman you love but could never live with.

4. Dulce de leche in plastic tubs- three in the morning, "just one spoonful never hurt anybody"

5.Terrace parties- perfect for feeling like your out of the city, drinking white wine...

6. Words like "A full," "Che," "Boludo," and just the conjugations of you, "Vos sos..."

7. Botanical Gardens- a magical place full of fountains, marble sculptures, and best of all, hundreds of cats....I still don't understand how this happened, but the garden is basically a cat shelter. They are beautiful and well cared for. People treat them like gods.

8. Book stores- they are eeeeeverywhere. A dream come true.

9. Cafes- so many beautiful places to have a cafe con leche and people watch.

10. Men with babies...Argentine men in general- I hate to generalize, but Argentina really does have the highest concentration of beautiful men in the world. And it is common to see them holding babies, or taking walks with their families and looking genuinely happy.

Team Junky versus Team Sana

Yesterday I went running with my friend, a chain-smoker and self-proclaimed junky (although his definition of junky is questionable) who happens to have the endurance of a marathon runner, putting me to shame as I panted behind him, face the color of jamon crudo, while he floated effortlessly ahead. I don't smoke, I try to eat well and exercise just about everyday. True, since coming to Buenos Aires I've indulged a bit more than I normally would in the States. My block alone literally has three bakeries, all of which have windows displaying baskets of glazed medialunas, facturas, cheesecakes, everything that I can't say no to. This, along with the fact that meat is cheap and I've been eating steaks the size of my head for lunch everyday, has perhaps slowed me down a bit. However, it still came as a surprise that someone who has smoked for more than half their life can out-run me. After two hours of puffing along Libertador, stopping only to hose down, or to walk cautiously through the field of unleashed Rott Weilers and German Shepherds, I decided that my whole concept of what it means to be healthy is bull-shit, informed by a North American dichotomy of gluttony and self-denial. We label things as unhealthy, when it is really not about the things themselves but our unhealthy way of using/misusing them...

Baby Steps

Today I have not broken another person's belonging, injured myself or said anything resulting in uncomfortable silence. A good day. Or maybe I'm getting accustomed to my new lifestyle.

It is evening in Buenos Aires. I'm writing on the terrace, drinking tea and enjoying how the light falls across the worn faces of buildings, looming like white sails around me. I love this time of day. I could drink this light, inhale its honeyed cells.

I am still healing from a bad cold. Took a walk, had lunch with friends . Baby steps. Maybe tomorrow I will venture outside of Recoleta/Once. Maybe I will feel inspired to write...

What Being Gringa Means to Me

...I never saw myself as a blogger, up until this moment. I am an extremely private person. For instance, at times I would rather lie than tell a stranger a simple fact about myself, like what I studied in college. Words-- how I choose to express myself-- feel weighted, as if they carried some special power that could be lost in transmission to another. I realize that this is a paranoid and narcissistic way of relating to others. Maybe this Blog will be an exercise is sharing myself with the world, honestly and sin miedo.

Tonight I am in bed with a cold that seems to be on its way out. This is my second night staying in what will potentially be home for the next few months. My bedroom is on the terrace of a two-story apartment complex. The room is small and simple with whitewashed, crumbling brick walls, green trim and a dim yellow light bulb under which I write. It is bohemian, romantic and good for escaping the craziness that lies a few feet away. The house is shared by two argentinos, two italianas, un inles, un español, y yo, the token norteamericana. English is forbidden and the freezer is stocked with a thousand different cuts of meat. I am in heaven.

Tonight we had an indoor asado and I realized, in the company of three other north american girls from Chicago, that we gringas share a certain no lo se que, algo, difficult to describe, that perhaps no other female possesses. Ever since arriving in Buenos Aires, I have felt more clumsy and foolish than I ever have in my life. I thought that this was me, Kendra, just being my usual suave, awkward self, heightened by the experience of adjusting to a new city and culture. But tonight my heart leaped as I watched three other girls spill wine on the table cloth, spoon heaps of mashed potatoes and meat into their chattering mouths with vulgar and joyful abandon. I heaved a sigh of relief each time I heard one fuck up a spanish phrase and follow up with something self-deprecating. I was, for once, out of the spotlight. So what is it then? It's not just about being clumsy or crass...maybe a lack of sophistication that most porteños y europeos seem to be blessed with? Will think more on this.