I'm a WINNER!

I won a prize!

"What for? Your wit and winning smile? The fact that you finally cleaned the kitchen today? Your stellar dance moves?"

None of the above, my good people, although those are all true facts about myself. I won for some of my poetry!

You can find the blog from my school about how I won here (so you know I'm not making it up!). (What excited me most about the prize was that apparently Sylvia Plath won the same prize when she was in college. This could mean many things for my future, but I'm gonna go with the famous poet route.)

So here's two of the more pop culture pieces included in my winning portfolio.

Fiend Hunter from Ninja Gaiden (Xbox)

I would prefer to fight in cotton – it breathes

and it would be nice to not worry 

about shaving every bit or having a boob pop out

after I’ve killed some fiend using my viper clutch

and it’s still  really hard to get dates

most guys are too busy seeking life-giving orbs

to revive dead lovers

or caught up in the monotony of demon killing

some of them, you never see their face

behind their armor

my battle axe is taller than me

and incredibly hard to get storage for

and insurance? Insane.

but at least  I’m not those other women

non-player characters

who live to be accosted and killed

at least my iron bikini stops bullets 

I don't know much about video games (though there is a super cool Art of Games exhibit in the American Art Museum here in DC right now!) but I've always hated how scantily clad the female warriors are. I mean, seriously? You can't even see the man's eyes, but the lady leaves nothing to the imagination but her actual reproductive organs. Which is exactly how I would dress to fight my battles. All the pubescent gamer boys are being fed yet another sexist lie of entitlement...

A Burgundy Van Alone on the Highway

We had lived in the zombie-filled land so long

that we grew nostalgic for the early days,

when there would be only a zombie or two in the yard,

and crossing it was fine, a jaunt.

Now zombies crawled over everything,

they knew we were there, we had to move on.

But we were stalwart, wearing our combat boots

and laughing through their moans.

Even my mother, so high strung,

was cheery as we packed.

Those humans who didn’t become zombies

 turned gray and stiff and died

but never decayed.

We adopted ancient practices

of talking to the gray dead ones,

keeping them in corners

and bringing them scraps of food.

We wrapped them in blue cloths

and added to our liturgy that the color was sacred.

My gray-skinned stiff sister was put

 in the back of our minivan

 for our journey to find a quieter farmhouse.

My father threw his fishing rod on the top of the van,

relieved to be going:

“We just need to get away for awhile, really, crowds are not for us.” 

This was from a poetry assignment to write our dreams. This was an exact dream I had, a strange conglomeration of my anthropology assignments about religious rituals and my intense plans about how to survive a zombie apocalypse. (Have you made your emergency plan yet? Better get on that.) It started as a prose poem, a form I love, but which general audiences don't know what to do with, so I modified it for the contest. Yup, never even published and already a sell out. 

So there you go! Some culture for your day. If you want to read much better poets, I'm currently all about Max Jacob and Sylvia Plath, as mentioned. 

Moments and My New Life Goal

I have not been very good about living in the moment.

I have not been stopping, for any number of seconds, to drink in that very second.

Or am I only being paranoid? Is it really even possible to ever so proverbially "live in the moment"?

It's like one of my very favorite quotes from Our Town by Thornton Wilder:

EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?"

STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some."

We are surrounded by too much everyday, same-old, same-old mindblowing glory to ever be able to drink it in.

This is a bit of good ol' fashioned family lovin' and birthday glory.

This is a moment I try to catch about once a week - sunset from the cliffs over the ocean

And here I sit, in my pj's with some coffee, after a normal Monday, mired in the beginning stages of an essay that's due tomorrow. And I know, I know, I am unable to capture and remember everything that has and will happen to me during these months in Peru.

Normal Sunday night - English class planning. (And yes, I am reading Harry Potter in Spanish.)

In these past weeks I have been spectacularly sick, taken mid-terms, taught children, swam with sea lions, held babies, met a million aunts and uncles and cousins and finally bought my flight home.

Mixed feelings is an understatement.

I read a poem tonight called "Instantes", author unknown (attributed to Jorge Luis Borges but it's NOT him - I wrote my poetry final on that guy and I am backed up by a Google search). Here's a verse that struck me:

Por si no lo saben, de eso está hecha la vida,

sólo de momentos; no te pierdas el ahora.

The last line says "Don't lose the now."

It would be hard to lose this now - the water was so cold I was shocked into embracing the moment.

I also don't want to lose the "later". I want to live every moment and remember everything for ever and ever and ever. I want to learn Spanish and salsa dancing and change the world and wake up early and stay up late and eat at every single hole-in-the-wall cafe in Lima. So how should I establish a daily routine based on these wants and the desire to "not lose the now"?

Well, I'll likely drop out of school and join a Spanish-speaking, salsa-dancing troupe that performs in cafes and donates all merchandise sales to orphanages. Like a good ol' USA social justice artsy hipster, but in Spanish and with rhythm. Come catch a show.

I'll be like this guy who performed on the micro - except in cafes. Dancing.