Vera Wilde

Oils on 40 x 60 cm stretched canvas.

“Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.
Red sky at night, sailor’s delight.”
Where are you, Arjen?
Be night.

Oils on 40 x 60 cm stretched canvas.

This poem isn’t going in the book, but goes with this painting that is apparently going on the blog.

Both were inspired by that time I developed sphenoid sinusitis after pitching paintings that not a single gallerist in sub-zero Cologne would even look at this February, and subsequently: lost my wallet and stuff in the station right out of my hands cos I probably had blind spots I didn’t know about, cried all the way home on the train from the pain, went partially deaf, and generally had a medical emergency without it occurring to me I was having a medical emergency. (I thought it was a migraine, and then a cold, and then…) Then socialized medicine saved my life with a surgery that didn’t bankrupt me because I have subsidized health insurance as a freelance artist. (It was about ten euros. Germany is cool. Charité is awesome.)

Silly poem, silly story. Still, I liked the metaphor enough to write and paint it. I think we all have snakes inside us capable of striking when we don’t see them coming. And experiences or times when we need help but don’t actually have the expertise to convey what’s going on, to get it. It’s just a particular instance of one of those universal experiences that art is supposed to convey, in order to drum up empathy among humans for humans. (Humans are ok.) Not bad work, if you can get it. Better, perhaps, if you can’t… And do it as an outsider for its own sake.

“Sphenoid Sonnet”

The gravel road behind my face
leads to my red third eye.
The bucking snake there rises up
to strike and kill the sky.
What fire kindles behind my eye?

Days from dead
inside my head
sparks alive
with pain and dread.

Raising scales that throb and pound,
the rattle makes its warning sound.
Help—at last I cry and moan.
That was its poison, and my koan.

It was my voice it feared the most.
I killed the snake. I am its ghost.

Oils on 100 cm x 120 cm. Inspired by walking around Lake Constance last fall.

40 cm x 60 cm gallery canvas with oils, gold leaf, mixed media.

This is (quite possibly a draft portrait of) my missing friend Arjen Kamphuis with his heart of gold. This is me back in the studio after months of illness and recovery; vacation and hunger to paint again; and a big box of medical-grade Lindt chocolate thanks to Arjen. Arjen who brought me home to the Continent, CCC, and Berlin. Arjen who took me to the grocery store when I couldn’t afford a protein bar. Arjen who read me right as a healthy artist and an injured transparency activist when I had left the U.S. due to massive retaliation and turned up at CIJ after couchsurfing London alone for a hard spell. Arjen who gets it. #FindArjen

Here are a few more poems for Arjen, who may or may not see online things at the moment, being missing.

• Lockpicking—a poem about how communication can be hard. Maybe it’s easy for some people, but it can be hard for me, especially when I’m overwhelmed. Some people just work that way, and Arjen has always been super tolerant and understanding of that. 
• Walking along the Amstel—a poem about how none of us really knows what to do next in this crazy world. But when we go looking for answers to that question in a serious way, we find others who are looking, too.
• Waiting for Wind and Trains—a poem about waiting and trusting your instincts.

Among other poems I haven’t blogged yet that he inspired, I’m digging in my manuscript… And often what I find that seems like his, is in edits to other poems that I’ve already blogged—and that it doesn’t make sense to repost a new version of when the book itself is almost ready.

Like in “Yearning for the Birth of Athena”—the new version’s bit about the gods watching cat videos online… That’s all Arjen, he would make that joke or observation about attention resource capture, while himself also watching cats. Cats are ok. But wait, I already blogged a rewrite with that bit, too. Guess I’ve been rewriting for a while.

Today I learned a relevant, untranslatable German word for this: Verschlimmbesserung—to keep editing until you’re making the thing worse instead of better. Hmmm. Probably best to write a new one quickly, then.

***

“Arjen???!!!!?!?!??!?!??!?!??!!?!?”

Where did you go?
What did they do?
Didn’t you know
we’d be worried about you?

You would have known, and cared, being you.
So something happened, so… So…
Tomorrow:
stew?

Show up at my door.
We’ll talk some more.
Or not, if talking won’t do.
I’ll still make (poems and paintings and papers and) stew.

I’m so worried about you.

Poetry keeps happening. Poetry that would not be possible without Arjen, my dear friend who found a stray transparency activist wandering the streets of London and brought me home.

Of Arjen-inspired poems, I previously blogged a few from our adventures in Lisbon:

• Compreensão
• Wandering Cemitério dos Prazeres
• Finding Praça do Comércio
• Outside the Closed Church Door

As well as this one about what a great listener and friend he is: “Safe Space.” (That painting, too, was inspired by Arjen in—and needs to go home to—Amsterdam, one of these days…)

It also happens that Arjen was the one who helped me pour my first poetry book manuscript into Amazon CreateSpace for publication. As well as making multiple formats of e-book versions for me to put on my website for free. And getting me set up to put the illustrated version on my website, too. It was important to me—that the book be a book, that the art be CreativeCommons and free, that the finished thing be finished and out in all these forms. So it was important to him, and he helped me get it done.

Now my second poetry book is almost done. And it happens that Arjen seems to have gone missing.

This is concerning. I am concerned.

I would like to fix this. But I don’t know what happened, so I’m not sure what to do… More… Tonight. Maybe tomorrow it will become clearer.

In the meantime, I just want to give Arjen some of his other poems. And I’m not sure how, other than to try putting them here… Maybe he is vagabonding and offline, because the world is crazy. Maybe something else is going on or has happened… Because the world is crazy.

Poetry does not help. Except when poetry helps. Here are some more of Arjen’s poems, which I hope actually get to Arjen one of these days, soon.

***

“Searching in Bodø”

Norway

Gray mountaintops like fins slice the Arctic sky.
We retrace your outs and ins,
since you left without saying goodbye.
Did you, too, want to wander further?
To lie down alone forever under a blanket of clouds?

Away, the world’s noise recedes
as you gaze the seas,
as if to tether and untether
boats of breath and mind.

Stay. You own your time,
and so are rich. But could you lend
me a cup of tea and company
sometime and some place calm and free?
Tell me and I’ll meet you there.
The best minds of my generation leach despair.
You do that for me.

When I look again, the mountains are gone in the grip of sky.
Full of more questions than when we came searching—what happened, why?
What sharks rammed your ship?
What do you need? Are you finding it?

Hey! I’m talking to you.
Back in the wild Berlin blue.

***

“This Is Just To Proclaim”

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.—Robert Frost

That something
is a part
of us all

But something
there was
that loved
a wall
after all.
That something
survived its fall

Something else still
will be
persisting
when we think
we’re done resisting
for as long
as we’re existing.
Good too
can be banal.

***

“Travelers at Rest”

Split, Croatia

The bright orange finches
have followed us out
into the city
and are homesick
for the falls;
try to kill themselves
repeatedly
on the terrace.

The cats, kindly,
are here to assist
in all their mortal coil-shuffling needs.
Also to eat bread,
chase each other, brutally,
and regard dogs with suspicion,
people with apathy.

Geography does not change nature,
human or otherwise.
They, too, are homesick,
but for Egypt, and the days
when people better knew their place.

We are all longing
for somewhere else,
except while in motion.
Here on the road,
we are home.

***

“Picnic in Vondelpark”

Blurry leaves sway over birch tribes, and they are
how there is no time—only lighter and darker moments,
and the wind that moves their weaving orbits,
and the owl’s anthem announcing that they’re mine.

My throat is growling again at the world.
Although I trust in your goodness in my head
and in my heart, something in my animal softness
needs to be apart, bows its head, kicks at the dust.

Half a forest away from the blanket and your question,
a husky field with chirping frogs infringes. I must walk further.
Nothing is wrong. But I would like to wander now, deep into the dry grasses,
and lie down alone forever under a blanket of clouds.

Vegan chocolate mousse, retired hand model’s feet. 

“Humanity seriously needs your salads…” my dear friend Hanka said this morning as I thought about blogging some of the recipes some of my favorite people keep asking for.

My daily perusal of the headlines suggests humanity seriously needs:

• Concerted global action on climate weirding to keep fossil fuels in the ground and transition more or less immediately to clean energy use and infrastructure-building.
• Actual functioning international law on refugees supporting Good Samaritans and those silly little human rights the post-war international order was at least ostensibly built on, and without which the liberal democratic order loses the moral high-ground of first principles.
• More drastic redistribution of wealth from corporations and very rich people than has ever happened before.
• Novel solutions to classic collective action problems that successfully institutionalize checks on corrupt corporate interests in realms from infrastructure and arms to drugs and education.
• For that whistleblower movement that was brutally killed off by short-sighted prigs to begin to get the public support it deserves, starting with ending the mass surveillance that enables states to increasingly predict and restrict resistance to unjust government policies.

The usual: World on fire. Don’t see how to put it out at the moment. Sorry. Shall we tell our grandchildren that I went to the kitchen to think about it? Will future generations invent an A-scale to measure the supreme assholery of people acting (or not acting) like this (like me) in this time, the closing window in which at least significantly mitigating the collapse of global ecosystems and the civilization they support might still be possible? Much as the Frankfurt School of German philosophers responded to Nazism by creating the F-scale to measure Fuckheads (or maybe it was Fascism). But the F-scale, which evolved later into the Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation measures that explained a lot of rising xenophobia in pre-Trump America, didn’t address the A-problem. What about all the assholes who just do nothing while the world burns? I’m no fascist. Just can’t figure out what to do. Fucker’s really going down, huh? Sorry.

There’s really not a lot of thinking out there (as far as I can see) about the possible positive or mixed role of acceptance in global crises. There are ways in which structural failures have positive effects by forcing change, as in the drop of global CO2 emissions during the financial crisis—the only time we’ve seen such a drop in recent history. And there are ways in which perceived personal failures, victimizations, or other tragedies have positive effects by forcing change as well, in people who are resilient to trauma. Maybe we do not need to save the world, to stave off various forms of collapse and systemic failure. May we need to accept that we cannot. Just as we accept that we cannot undo our worst mistakes, or change other people’s behavior, or prevent life from happening in all its random (beautiful, horrible) glory.

We are a cosmic miracle. We were not built to last. Although we may yet. Probably more through chaotic chance than planning, if we make it as a species another ten thousand years. If you want more certainty than that, go gamble against the house. Anything worth winning is uncertain. Yet, it’s good strategy to wait til you can win, to fight again.

Despite its rationality as a piece of sanity personal and political, acceptance is gendered female (marginalized, weak, receptive). It runs throughout Virginia Woolf’s work on what the fuck to do as a woman existing outside most systems of power, but rich in love and expression—and so both privileged and marginalized, as is so often more the case than one or the other. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf presses for women to make their own space for intellectual life in a world that denies them equal educational opportunities, allotting zero-sum resources to boys’ instead of girls’ education. It is an acceptance of being outside, and a petition for making space within that. This resonates today with discrimination against girls who are good at math and science, with all sorts of pressures to self-sort into what seem to be safer spaces but are also much less well-paid and thus ultimately less safe.

Anecdata: I was convinced to leave the high school computer lab in Alabama in 1999 when it was suggested I could have sex for money, and excluded from my robotics team build because it turned into an all-male sleepover. Worse harassment followed me into STEM in college, and I changed paths. My postdoc appointments in Psychology/Government 15 years later paid roughly half that of an average Computer Science postdoc, although they were at two of the top four universities in my fields worldwide. I didn’t have health insurance at Harvard, couldn’t get my moving expenses effectively covered for two required cross-country moves in six months, and certainly didn’t have the time or resources to rebuild social networks in new places again and again to begin to give myself the strength to carry on when I was harassed and retaliated against, leaving America and academia in 2015, as I’ve written about elsewhere.

Informal social exclusion shapes girls’ and women’s choices in logical ways that reproduce structural inequalities, whether you think the data suggest women in the aggregate can be as good and happy in STEM as men in the aggregate, or not. Woolf’s problem of female exclusion from education is thus obviously germane in many societies globally today, but also remains relevant in the more so-called advanced ones (not that I include the U.S. in that subset—it’s a global outlier among OECD nations for backward outcomes from infant mortality and birth control access to police violence and infrastructure). Patriarchies killed off other societal models around the time of the industrial revolution. And patriarchies suck for females…

And a lot of other people. The boot on the neck of one is always, sooner or later, the boot on the neck of many. Social exclusion of girls and women often tracks with or mirrors exclusion of others (e.g., racial/religious minorities under authoritarian leadership, men who aren’t party members under communism). Exclusion doesn’t have to be a law to be a practice, and resistance doesn’t have to make you dysfunctionally unhappy since you can’t solve the problem (of society taking a less healthy but more currently evolutionary successful form) anyway.

Virginia Woolf accidentally explaining why COINTELPRO is a totally fucking awesome idea. 

So in her later Three Guineas, Woolf suggests a more radical answer to this problem—more a society than a room of one’s own. But she accepts building that takes time, and small efforts from many people acting chaotically rather than in concert. Eventually she goes on to take her own life because, arguably, she cannot either bring a more humane society into existence for herself, or survive in the one she criticizes. She loses her acceptance, and so gives up in a worse way. (I would like to have read more of her writing than she got done before giving up; but refusing to attempt to live through something you know you cannot survive is also a perfectly respectable choice.)

What would our grandchildren’s A-scale have to say about Virginia Woolf? How will this A-scale work? What does it buy us? No idea, really. I wonder, though, how people are faring now mentally and emotionally in juxtaposition with how much of the world burning they know about, tune into, and accept. I wager there is a three-by-two matrix wherein

• well-informed and tuned-in people who accept chaos and powerlessness in a psychologically resilient way are happier and better socially (and thus politically) functioning than,
• misinformed or simply tuned-out people, who have on average probably higher acceptance but not of actual reality, and who are probably happier than,
• well-informed and tuned-in people who do not have this acceptance.

There are lots of problems with testing this. You are not supposed to say some of your prospective research subjects are objectively wrong in their understandings of the world in interesting and important ways, for instance. You are also supposed to make more open-ended hypotheses about stuff we really don’t know, cos then you can say “I was right!” and be more likely to have your results published (sigh). Basically, you are not supposed to have any balls.

But I don’t have any intention of testing any of this stuff anyway. I’m just wondering how to keep being happy and healthy, making good people good food, and square that with watching the world burn. Because it doesn’t actually feel wrong to me to be doing zero world-saving right now. Although I’ve always lived in a guilt-rich internal ecosystem and so this choice of mine puzzles me, striking me as something I understand intuitively better than I do cognitively, at the very least. It just feels right to make cold food on hot days and love the dear ones whom I love. Maybe humanity does need my salads. I certainly do.

 

All the recipes here are gluten- and-dairy free. None require heat; one requires meat. Enjoy.

 

Green Salad

As a cool, refreshing side to breakfast, lunch, and/or dinner, mix:

• rinsed handfuls of fresh greens (feldsalat—what is this in English or do all greens really translate “salad” and all cuts of meat “steak”?!, romaine, rucola, whatever’s pretty)
• throw in a bowl with a quarter lime, freshly squeezed
• drizzle with balsamic crema (high in sugar—don’t look—but some sugar turns out to be not so poisonous after all)
• drizzle with olive oil (which is more religious rite than cooking, if you have the right olive oil)

Done. Somehow over the summer it’s a very easy habit to be in, to make a basic salad 2-3 times a day with another bit of food. It helps you feel full to get the extra fiber and water, when it’s really too hot to eat. Plus you get dietary karma points for greens.

Big chunks of different-colored bell pepper or cucumber, pieces of endive or olives, dried tomatoes or artichoke hearts on top add easy variety.

If you want to be fancy or need more variation, you can add some coconut aminos or cajun spice mix (see my Roast Chicken recipe at McSweeney’s for directions) to the dressing. If you want something more filling and don’t feel like making another dish, flash-fry a steak to cut up, or some seafood (scallops, shrimp, dear God sous vide fish) to throw on top. Good meat on good salad needs only a little salt and pepper after cooking in good oil. (What is good meat? Idk: Ask people in your area, forage, and find it. What is good oil? People have different opinions about this because of omega 3:6 ratios, smoke points, and such. I like what tastes good, which is mostly not smoke point winner coconut oil or heart-healthy olive oil, but a blend of sunflower, rapeseed, and linseed oils, even though you’re not supposed to cook with linseed oil cos heat degrades it. Tastes lighter than the others, works for me.)

This is so simple I’m not sure why I’m even writing it up, other than people suggest they want these things, and I am suggestible.

 

Fruit Salad

Like the green salad recipe above… This is not even a recipe. It is more of a protocol. Go to a good food market, grocery or biostore. See what fruit is pretty. Rinse it and cut it up in a bowl. Again with the fiber and water, and the being too hot to eat. Now you have two salad bowls on the table: green salad and fruit salad. People are starting to look happier as more bowls appear. Making people happy is fun.

When fresh berries are pretty and affordable, use fresh berries. When melon is, use melon. Passionfruit—don’t be afraid of the wrinkly brown and purple ones. The ugliest ones are the best. Kiwis. Pears.

 

Juices

In the summer, I tend to save apples and citrus for fresh juices. At least, the fresh juices I make lots of since I accepted the ketogenic diet has super cool research behind it but does not work for me… And then a cool nutritionist convinced me that fruit is not evil just because it has sugar and is thus not ketogenic.

My body agrees with the nutritionist. My body says fresh fruit is magic. It also says fresh juice is magic. And it feels really good to make (“make”) and feed (feed) these things to good people. It’s not ketogenic and it might somehow contribute to climate weirding, I know, I know. But I can’t game it out, man. I’m not even gonna try. I’m gonna make fresh salads and juices and be with the people I love. Turns out I’m really good at loving people. And then it turns out there are a lot of really good people to love—or at least, more than I thought. Yes yes yes, world burning. But—salads, juices, sit.

My favorite juices currently are a green one involving fresh greens like spinach (three rinsed handfuls) plus a tin of fresh herbs like basil, a few celery stalks and carrots, a peeled lemon and lime, orange and apple—in a slow (green) juicer… Or a simpler citrus one with orange (for most people), orange and lemon (for me because I like it tart), or clementine (when I lazily arrange for grocery delivery and bags of random things show up but I can’t complain because this food came directly to me). If you don’t have a slow juicer and a citrus juicer, buy a citrus juicer. They’re cheaper and easier to clean, and there are lots of other ways to eat greens (in eggs, salads, wilted, soup, etc.).

 

Teas

Chilled herbal teas are the best thing to drink on a cold day. At least, if you’re allergic to the milk and cream that should go in a proper iced coffee (of which you would otherwise drink approximately five a day)—can’t stomach straight black tea or bubbly things either—and don’t of your own volition drink enough tap water to hydrate although you know that you should. (Did I say alcohol was a tasty cooking ingredient and side dish? Alcohol is poison.)

Rose, chamomile, and black with lemon and honey are my favorites. But it pays off to experiment, since things tend to taste different cold than hot. You might like chilled green tea even though hot, it’s not your thing.

The big problem with chilling herbal teas is that the best way to drink a lot is to vary the flavors. But then you end up with five cups of tea in the fridge, and no space left for salads and mousses (important). One solution to this problem is to brew fewer flavors in bigger pots, half-filling them with boiling water and double tea bags for as long as they need to steep, then topping up with lukewarm water and refrigerating so you add fewer containers and less heat to the fridge. You still couldn’t do this as a commercial kitchen—it’s too space-inefficient and the heat might degrade other, industrial-sized containers of stuff. So I understand why I can’t get this at a restaurant. But I’m not running a restaurant, so I don’t care.

 

Chicken Salad

Although it is so hot you need many salads, juices, and herbal teas to survive, you may or may not still sometimes roast a chicken anyway because we are men and not beasts, or women and also beasts, but you know what I mean. If you do, great. If you don’t, no problem.

Pull any leftover chicken off the refrigerated bones of the roast if it exists. Break it up into bite-size pieces. Boil the bones for stock by night, when the heat won’t add to the heat of the day. Set chicken and stock aside.

Dice one raw chicken breast per person (say, 2-4). Heat oil in a pan, add the diced raw chicken, and pour over some mirin rice wine vinegar and tamari (gluten-free soy sauce). Turn down heat from high to medium-high, breaking up meat with a spatula as it cooks together in clumps. Sprinkle spices over meat as it cooks—salt and pepper, plus garlic powder, cayenne, and paprika if you like, and fresh or dried oregano, thyme, and sage if they’re ready to hand and you like them. Flip and cook until both sides are done. Remove from heat and set aside.

In a small bowl, break up a bunch of walnuts and pecans by the handful (say, 3 handfuls each). Pull out any shell pieces. Dump into a larger bowl.

On a clean cutting board, slice rinsed grapes (say, 4 handfuls or 2 bunches). For some reason, I like white grapes better with the other green stuff in this salad. But you could also use purple grapes, frozen pomegranate pips, blueberries, dried cranberries—anything small and sweet. Add to large bowl with nuts.

Rinse and dice celery stalks (3-4), fresh dill (2-5 fronds), and chives (2-5 handfuls). Add to nut and grapes.

Add cooled chicken (both freshly cooked and leftover if you had it) to large bowl. Top with mayonnaise (about 8 squeezes or spoonfuls, but I always eye it) and mustard (1 spoonful). Add salt and pepper to taste.

If you don’t have something (e.g., fresh dill), improvise (e.g., add more dried spices or don’t worry about it). In this way, none of my recipes are recipes. They constantly change because my cooking is not that precise. It’s more meditation than anything else.

Now it is possible that you have three salads on the table along with cold juices and teas. People are happy. People are getting fed. Healthy food is going in good people and this is form of serving justice in the world, except love is not justice and my kitchen is not the world. I’m ok with that.

It’s easier to impress friends with this if you make everything but the juice ahead of time, and just pull it out of the fridge like a rockstar at the last minute. But people’s sense of time is also distorted by heat and stress, and you don’t really need to impress your friends. Although it can be fun.

 

Gazpacho

This is the first recipe that is really a recipe, although it is not the first recipe people have been asking for. Most gazpacho recipes have bread. This one, like all my recipes, is gluten- and dairy-free. So it does not have bread. You could add bread. But I’m not sure why you’d bother, cos this is so good.

2 cloves of fresh garlic, peeled and sliced
1 spring onion
6 medium, ripe tomatoes
2 red bell peppers (efficiently de-seeded by chopping off top and bottom, and then striking out the white parts from the sides—h/t Milo)
1 large cucumber, peeled but not deseeded (for some reason the seeds are essential to the flavor—do not believe the recipes that tell you to de-seed)
1 handful fresh parsley
1 handfuls fresh cilantro (if you have the gene mutation wherein cilantro tastes like soap to you, I am sorry; you are cursed; some people will make you gazpacho with basil instead, but I am not one of those people because cold basil tomato soup is just wrong; but I can make you a caprese instead)
4 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
a sprinkling of garlic powder, paprika, and cayenne pepper
a more generous sprinkling freshly ground salt and pepper

This looks like a recipe. But actually it is also not really a recipe. It is a list of ingredients you gather and throw in a blender. Then you press a button. Presto. Gazpacho. This is not cooking so much as disassembling fresh food into pureed form. I’m not knocking it. I’m just not sure what to call it.

You can add a variety of things on top to dress up gazpacho—chopped chives and crumbled feta cheese, drizzled balsamic crema and sliced bell pepper, a chorizo smiley-face. But good gazpacho doesn’t need any dressing-up. It’s crisp and refreshing, not too acidic but very bright and fresh.

Like the chicken salad above and sorbet below, this recipe feeds: two people if it’s all you’re making, three people if you have some more dishes to go around, and four if you’re making a bunch of other stuff. (To feed 5-6, it’s better to make two batches ahead of time. Like a lot of chilled, spiced dishes, it gets even better after a day in the fridge.)

 

Cherry Sorbet

a package of frozen sour cherries (what I find here is usually about 300 grams)
3 spoonfuls xylitol (a sugar substitute a bit sweeter than sugar with fewer calories that seems to be better for your teeth)
a few sprinkles of salt
a glug of almond extract

Again, this is not a recipe so much as a list of things you can put in your blender to subsequently eat and feed people when it is too hot to actually cook. It reminds me of the red shaved ice desserts I used to get special from shady vans over the summer as a kid. It reminds my dear friend Gerben of a childhood cherry-flavored candy. I think the cherry flavor probably reminds a lot of people of a lot of childhood things, because cherry was a common junk food flavoring back when junk foods had real food flavors. But this is not junk food. It is mostly cherries. Who knew? Nostalgia can be high in antioxidants.

You can try other variations of the same idea—frozen raspberries with fresh mint and lime juice (plus xylitol and salt), frozen strawberries with fresh basil and balsamic crema(plus xylitol and salt), frozen blueberries with vanilla extract and cinnamon ((plus xylitol and salt), the more sour frozen berry mix you can buy here in Germany (plus a tad more xylitol and melted chocolate drizzled on top). The simple cherry sorbet is my favorite, but playing with new things is fun.

 

Vegan Chocolate Mousse

Lindt motherlode.

1 block tofu (I think the one I got was 400 g and said something about silk on the package)
100g 90% dark chocolate (Lindt, from the enormous box my dear friend Arjen sent to aid in my recovery from illness because I have the best friends in the world)
3 tbsp + a splash maple syrup
splash (1 tsp or so) vanilla extract (I might try vanilla sugar in place of xylitol plus vanilla extract next time. It’s hard to find alcohol-based, American-style extracts here in Berlin—they’re available over-priced at boutique and bio stores, so I usually buy them online… And my love R doesn’t like the flavor so much. I like it more than freshly scraped vanilla bean in desserts though, since it’s what I’m used to—the flavor is stronger.)
pinch of salt

Melt chocolate in microwave, stirring every 30 seconds until smooth. Blend it all. Top with cocoa nibs and chocolate hearts.

Chill in the fridge overnight for best results (or a few hours if you’re desperate). The added bonus of chilling overnight is that then you have a healthy (ish), chocolatey, cool summer breakfast. Also, if your dinner company has left by then, you have more for yourself… Not that I would ever think of anything but the greater good.

A recipe qua love letter.

When I first moved to Berlin—or rather, came on a one-way, first-class train ticket to visit my new love some two-and-a-half years ago, and never left—I vaguely recognized “Danke” from multi-lingual thank-you notes. You know the ones, decorated with the word “Thanks” in seven languages, different sizes and fonts scattered across the page like hands waving in a group—all saying the same thing, all the better for their blithe redundancy. I had learned French in high school, which was of no use to me now—except in fostering the hope that I could learn German, too. This in spite of having lived in Holland for three months, interrupted in the middle by one glorious month in Lisbon, without picking up even the ability to recognize Dutch or Portuguese. (Now I know: Dutch sounds like German without being German, and there are no other common European languages like that. Portuguese sounds Slavic without being Slavic, and there are seven other common European languages like that.)

Mark Twain once wrote of “The Awful German Language” that “Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp.” Twain’s beef aside, learning German isn’t all that different from learning French. You have to soak in it for a while, getting soggy in the batter of your stupidity before the lattices of the brain loosen. Then you can jump in the frying pan of real conversation, browning and firming up what seeped in there somehow. If you can learn French, you can learn German. Except perhaps in Berlin.

Berlin to me is a city of love and sweetness. Probably in the first case because I came here for love. But also because it has this vibe of kindness, silliness, celebration, and having time for life. It’s not unusual to see musicians busking in Mauerpark on Sunday, just far enough away so you can make out the different tunes. Or someone wearing gold lamé pants on the subway—or a man wearing lipstick, or a gorgeous young woman in (weather permitting) a summery dress and no bra. I threw away the only bra I came to Europe with years ago; no one has ever catcalled me here, regardless.

The culture of safe self-expression extends even to the corporate world. Local ads for public transit announce that the buses and trains are good here, “Weil wir lieben dich“—because we love you. To be sure, the love doesn’t extend to every grumpy, middle-aged grocery store clerk glaring and double-checking your cart for attempted shoplifting because you seem foreign. But it spreads pretty far and wide in Berlin. So much so that this is the first place that feels like home.

Forgive me for I have been born American: Home is English-speaking. It’s bad, but it’s a good problem to have. My German is coming along slowly, because in Berlin, I can usually get away with feeble attempts and switching to English.

And home is love and sweetness. So not everyday—not even every week in the era of keto-paleo-low-FODMAP-low-carb goody-goodness—but every once in a while, home requires the decadent sweetness of French toast. Not real, American French toast—the kind made with gluten, stale imitation-French bread, and childhood disappointment. But German French toast, modifying the classic recipe of love and sweetness to suit the times and our tastes.

If you can make French toast, you can make German French toast. Start with gluten-free sandwich bread, freshly freed from its airtight seal. Toast the bread slices two by two while mixing five eggs, two extra egg yolks, half a cup of milk or rice milk, one dash of salt per egg, and a similar sprinkling of cinnamon and nutmeg. Soak the toasted slices two by two while readying the toppings on the table: maple syrup, cinnamon sugar, cherry preserves, 100% dark chocolate broken into bits for toast-top melting, white miso paste, and rainbow sprinkles. Then cook the soaked toast with extra egg batter spooned over the top and sides to spilling, letting the pairs of pieces brown on medium-high heat in a non-stick pan with a small bit of light cooking oil.

It helps to have at least two and preferably three extra lovely people on hand for good company and quality control. That way, it doesn’t matter that you have to keep toasting, soaking, cooking, and flipping the rest of the batches while the first one, two, three pairs of French toast are done, and need to be eaten while they’re hot. I actually enjoy keeping on cooking while people are eating. I have to explain every time, but I’m happy to keep saying it and feeling that it’s true: There are very few things in life that I enjoy more than cooking good food for good people.

What is the opposite of YOLO (you only live once)? This is not a rhetorical question. I am still actively looking for a better way to say: You only eat too much sugar on rare occasions, so it’s less poisonous than if you did it all the time. Carpe the occasional glucose dump? Eat, drink, and be merry today, for tomorrow we may diet? I don’t know and, by the time I sit down with the last two pieces and cooked leftover egg batter, to show how to melt unsweetened chocolate on top, smother it with miso paste, pour maple syrup over, and enjoy being myself in front of my dear ones, no matter how weird I am—I don’t care.

German French toast tastes like sustainable indulgence. Aber ich muss noch Deutsch lernen.

Oils on 16″ x 20″ stretched canvas, 2014-5, Boston. From a series of five in which the best one was in the stolen batch, and another I just gave away. I guess I should have a go at the “road like fire” concept anew one of these days.

What is it about the road that is so like fire?
Staring into it, watching the landscapes flicker,
I fall into the trance of night
like a cat’s liquid pounce into a lap.
Like a hunter caught in a larger cat’s trap—
happy, hot, swaying lap.

“These are your privacy settings. Blink to accept,” oils on 100 x 80 cm stretched canvas, 2017-18. 

As I mentioned in my newsletter last week… Due to changes in European data law (GDPR, taking effect this week)—and my impression that social media is crap—I’m leaving MailChimp.

I’ll just email people who want to continue receiving infrequent updates about my art, writing, and other goings-on. What that means for my website is that now the newsletter sign-up on the side-bar is gone. So, like it says on my About page, just email me (if you haven’t already) if you would like to receive infrequent updates on my art, writing, research, etc.

Either way, I’m deleting my MailChimp account and all the data it holds this week. I’m so much happier off Facebook and Twitter.  And I don’t want / use / even know all the data MailChimp collects on email marketing… So I know it’s going to feel better to not have that lying around, either.

“Stones”

“some sorrows are like stones, and they never melt, though our tears rain and groove them… “—Derek Walcott

Yes, I have carried many heavy stones.
Sometimes the weight has made me stronger.
Sometimes I could not walk any longer.
What is it to you if I cannot put them down?

Meanwhile the man who loves me sleeps.
I cannot injure what he owns.
I would like to lie like water in his ridges,
grooving so softly the canyon of his chest.

What I love best
is the bridges
that over water and stones
stretch solid, straight, and kind.
They are beautiful without rains and troubled water.
They are also beautiful when spring storms blind.

When the storms have passed,
sometimes the high waters have swept away
stones that seemed they couldn’t be moved,
and the bridges themselves may be grooved
like stones
that last
and last.

A rewrite of and new riff on an older draft of a poem about being happy at home with my love. These are the sorts of things I’m not sure are original enough to leave in the book; but I’m so glad I could write them, I’ll probably let them stay nonetheless…

“Home”

Sweet, soft, clean, and hot—
too tired to remember what I’ve washed,
too happy to care. This is how we get there.
Home, into each other, every night.
Home, still inside you, you still inside me,
every sweet morning in the early light.

I want to live where this peace flows
over you from inside me
and over me from within,
over and around us like rushing water,
the impossible stream gushing from the stone.

Sleeping and waking in the rhythms of your breath,
in the rhythms of my breath,
in the flow of our dreams,
never bursting the seams of time with rush and such.
Free to be at home together
free to follow the sun, making our own weather.
You feed my gentleness, and my fire
with a love so listening, my savage squire.

***

“Home Again”

Your chest holds my face
like a glass of wine—sweet, calming, and craved
like a hot shower—warming my wearied wake
and like a favorite poem,
the cadence of your breath saying again and again
how beautiful the world is and how it is my home.

“Weiter” is “further”or “continue” in German. Our camper van’s name is a play on this…

“Weiter”

From the undulating Elba
to the port-pocked Rhine,
we ferry our camper
down to the sea
in no time.

We find the dunes
just as we left them,
swirling softly under the moon.
And lie down in summer grasses,
and float on soon.

Where we’ll be next time we wake,
neither of us knows.
Free in love and place and time,
to go where the wind blows.

So soft the curling dunes at night,
so sweet your pillow-chest.
I’ve never played so long and hard,
or gotten so much rest.

“Fox and Friends,” 2017, oils on 40 x 50 cm stretched canvas (sold).

After saying that I might a few months back, I have indeed been blogging some poems. To paraphrase the Stones, it’s only poetry but I like it. And it’s going well.

I’m working on my second poetry book manuscript, Vagabonding. (My first poetry book is illustrated here.) I might restructure it completely in a next editing phase, hopefully before finishing it in August. But so far I have just rejiggered it slightly in two main rounds this year of editing, cutting around 50 pages and rewriting a bunch. So now it looks like this—

New Arriving, Europe (9—done, e.g., here). Was 10, now is 9 poems from London to Lisbon and Amsterdam, where I lived when I first immigrated to Europe in 2015. I’ve edited and blogged all of them, although there are a few that I haven’t re-blogged since substantial editing and a few that I know still need good writing or to be cut.

Finding Berlin, Germany (7—done, e.g., here). Was 12, now is 7 poems, about making my home in Berlin. Again all are edited and blogged; again I still know a few that want more attention or to be cut. 

High Art (2 remaining, 6 done, e.g., here). Was 10, now is 8 poems on art. A few remaining to be edited into a form that I want to blog them, or cut if it can’t be done. 

Back in the Colonies (7 done, e.g., here). Was 11, now is 7 poems on goings-on back in the colonies, mostly America. All edited and blogged; still a few needing another good edit or to be cut.

Back for Forwards (9 done, e.g., here). Was 19, and then I broke this section into two parts—this section and the next. Now this section is on looking back…

One Step Forward (10 done, e.g., here)… And this section is on going forward… And all are edited and blogged. 

Relations (5 done, e.g., here). Was 10, now is 5 poems on family. Kill your darlings…

Nuremberg, 2027 (13 done, e.g., here). Was 10, now is 13 (mostly from re-ordering the manuscript). Envisioning future war crimes trials. All edited and blogged (in fact many more blogged than made the cut; so it goes. Forgive me for being drafty on the Internet…)

Vagabonding Anew (7 done, 2 remaining; e.g., here). Was 10, now is 9 poems on seeing my new Continent, mostly with my love in a camper van. I had blogged none back in January when I posted my draft Table of Contents, and now have edited and blogged seven; there are two remaining. 

Newly Arriving Every Time (7; to be done). Was 10, now is 7 poems on happiness and home with my love in Berlin. I’ve still only blogged just this one early version.

Others (4; to be done). Was 15, now is 4 poems on sexuality, still all needing to be edited into a form that I want to blog them, or cut. 

Sweet Home (4 remaining, 2 done; e.g., here). Was 12, now is 6 poems on being happy at home with my love again. Might combine well with the section before last. Yes, yes, that happens now. Now we’re back down to 12 sections. Good. And I can combine them so it’s 10 instead of 13, and then that might help me rewrite as well, the regrouping… Thank you, Internet, this helps.

Sweet Roam (2 remaining). Was 5, now is 2 long trip sequence poems. With many parts. That I’m still not sure what to do with, in whole or in part. 

I guess I’ll wrap up the obvious—editing and blogging what stays from the last five sections—before re-printing the manuscript physically and/or re-structuring the whole. I’m such a Luddite when it comes to editing, especially larger projects. I really have to hold it and see it, to see it. But it’s good. I’m making good headway, and I like my work.

A rewrite of an earlier draft of a much older story. Probably goes at the end of the Nuremberg 2027 section of Vagabonding (my next poetry book). If it makes the cut…

This is a poem about those times you have been crouching under a worktable re-reading The Odyssey (Emily Wilson translation), trying to ignore the bad upon worse news while yearning for some mother-fucking eagles to swoop down and tear out some mother-fucking faces, pre-journey Telemachus-style—but you know much of art and religion is just one, long imagining of unattainable justice in (and beyond) an unjust world, and a blinding one that promotes false faith at that. It’s useful when it gets you out of a bad situation (trust in God and get on a plane). But then you put it away like a security blanket and face facts.

There will be no eagles. Only books and tables, and coming back out from under them to vagabond, relax, see so many gorgeous palaces and cathedrals that you’re all cathedralled out for a while, and accidentally discover Virgo Lactans—paintings of Mother Mary squirting milk on baby Jesus, [your favorite monk or benefactor here], and the flames on the poor souls in purgatory. With the help of baby Jesus, who aims.

So at least not all art is fantasy about over-coming powerlessness. Some art is fantasy about magical breast-milk. Which I guess is a male fantasy about over-coming the powerlessness of not being able to lactate, by getting to direct the lactation. Hmm.

In any case, I guess you could say this is a poem about not waiting for a hero, even one who defies normal gender roles to the extent that she’s born war-ready from the wrong end of the wrong gender. Athena has it all; but we don’t have Athena.

Oils on 40 x 50 cm stretched canvas, 2016 or so, web store.

“Yearning for the Birth of Athena”

You know how it is when
you lay with the goddess
of lulz and wisdom,
and have second thoughts.

So you swallow the bitch—
the available plan B.
But instead of dying,
she’s splitting your skull.

Or it feels that way.
So you have your closest friends
open your head with an axe.
We’ve all been there.

The fully armored, battle-crying
goddess leaping out. The mind of god
becoming woman
with a shout.

***

Now where’s pregnant Zeus,
when we need him most?
Why are the fighting, fucking, meddling gods
waiting to jump in and save the coast?

Did they get distracted
by their social media stats?
Are they working their second jobs?
Are they busy watching cats?

Or did we anger them so much
that they left for good this time?
Never again to grant a foolish wish for golden touch?
Nor to settle injustice itself—instead of crime?

Stop waiting for your hero
to pop out of some pompous dude.
Or the chances will be zero
that we’re anything but screwed.

Oils on 40 x 50 cm stretched canvas (web store).

This is a rewrite of a poem I linked to yesterday in the “empires fall” vein. It’s still not as tight after rewriting as this one that says much the same thing, but that came out whole. That’s ideas for you… Sometimes when you hold out your hands you can catch them. Anyway, literally this is a poem about the shrine that survived the nuclear blast in Hiroshima.

 

“Painting Itsukushima”

Bring me your despair—but only a bit.
Resistance is a marathon, not a sprint.
Pour out what you must and I’ll sweeten it.

Every day I pour myself out—sometimes by pouring in.
Every day the great works of the ages wear a little thin.
Time ravages everything. No one knows what will happen.

Except in the big picture we’re all doomed, and that’s alright.
Everyone dies. Empires fall. Experts imagine they know what’s right.
Our brains tell us stories, day and night.

If you had seen Rome crumbling, what would you have done?
Written a friend, retired to think, sent away your only son?
Toward the end, it must have been clear to everyone.

Maybe fiddling on the roof is all there is to be done.
A fireball—the phallic missiles’ burst—the arms race finally won.
Madmen have ruled the world before.

Yet we’ve avoided nuclear war.
The blasts thus far have been contained. But not the fear—
the blanking mind, making threats; the will to fight, flee, and follow.

It hits us all—soft skins, soft cells, soft atoms, mostly hollow.
Maybe that’s how the shrine in the water not so far out
from Hiroshima survived the bomb.

Too much substance in its spirits for its matter to go wrong.

This is a poem in my happy vagabonding series (e.g., 1, 2, 3…) in my Vagabonding poetry book (in manuscript) about exploring my new Continent in good company. It’s about admiring the Roman ruins in Pula, Istria (Croatia) with my love last summer. It also resonates with some other poetry I’ve written/blogged/illustrated, on how empires fall.

“Pula, Istria”
Croatia

Here is pink!
and there is purple!
Begonia bound
and gate crepe myrtle.
Olive upon olive tree
to cook and lather you and me.
Vineyards for the sweetest wine—
and of the ending, not a sign
but these stone ruins on the hill.
(No reason, either, crossing this
pagan blue sky they touch and kiss.)
This morning, we can build them still.
The Roman bridge, the Gothic arch,
and its devout and sure démarche.

But we had better write it down
in some form other than a town,
before that old collective rot
starts in
and we forget again
how it had been
to build
(and be fulfilled
by) what they built
(with trig, not guilt),
after we lose
the muse
of what
we got.

From the stacks of gouache, pencils, ink, and mixed media on paper I made last spring-summer, largely illustrating poems in my next book, and still haven’t photographed to properly put online. 

For a long time I’ve struggled to situate Robert Frost’s brilliant poem “Mending Wall” in the context of Trump’s America—responding to harsh anger and intentional ugliness with this beautiful, rambling softness of a story. In spite of its limitations there is something powerful and human about arguing this way—as a creative human being rather than a fighter or a machine. Something worth the work.

So I made some poem-paintings riffing on it, recorded the poem, tried setting it in my own lyrics riffing on it on top of my favorite Chopin Nocturne, apologized to Chopin, used the music to edit my poem anyway, and continued to feel there is a song here but I haven’t sung it. Frost’s most haunting line here has innate melody.

But the rest has yet to spin out for me, if it ever does. Often music is like this for me. I feel I have a job to show up to, but I show up and the flow gets stuck. The same thing happens with speaking sometimes, but I manage. Someday I hope to get through a few Berklee music theory and practice books that have been sitting on top of my beloved piano forever, to retrain my 20+ year old rusty classical music mind to compose and play more pop-y stuff, so that I can finally write, learn, and perform proper accompaniment for the poems that have melodies.

Poems have always had melodies in my mind—to the extent that I used to assume they do to everyone. It still seems strange to me when it’s this pronounced, that it’s only me. Can’t you hear it? “The thing with feathers” that doesn’t love a wall…

“Your Daughter’s Voice (U.Va. Serpentine Wall),” oils on 16″ x 20″ stretched canvas, 2014 (sold).

“What Loves a Wall”

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”—Robert Frost

Faith doesn’t love a wall,
but releases its wings
to the winds in a sprawl,
letting go of direction-like things.

Hope doesn’t love a wall,
loves looking up and around in thrall,
wants to see the neighbors and all,
likes to be seen by one and all.

Love can’t not love—yet with walls,
stays to herself, silenced, feeling the cold
creep into her gardens and halls.
Love within walls doesn’t live to grow old at all.

Peace might seem at first to love a wall—
to be left alone, quiet at home, with no visitors.
But people are animals—need contributors,
friends and fellow-travelers, and inquisitors.

Trust doesn’t love a wall at all.
Nor understanding, its cozy nest and catchall.
Trust and understanding don’t love a wall.
And what loves a wall, doesn’t love them at all.

What loves a wall is fear.
What loves a wall is degradation.
What loves a wall is panic and its blindness that makes more blindness.
What loves a wall, loves the shame of a nation.

What loves a wall is wrongdoing.
What loves a wall is wealth that has no mercy on the suffering.
What loves a wall is shame.
What loves a wall, loves pain.

But what loves a wall most of all is the sea,
making modern sea walls crumble
with post-modern holes and speed.
Or maybe it’s the falling-apart of the plates’ shifting rumble.
Or the new life—trees and bushes, animals, mosses, and things—
the new life that follows destruction so quickly,
it can seem like rotting makes a bird sing
when it’s only the rising sun,
only the unwalled wordly one,
only the same, impossible will to keep on
that drives on everyone.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”
That something is a part of us all.

“feeding the well”—pouring inspiration/goodness/newness in without expecting anything out; Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way. 

Recently I was feeding the well in Málaga, where I saw and reviewed a lovely Mediterranean art exhibit. And this is a poem about feeding the well, as an activist as well as an artist, last summer in Croatia with my love and another member of our tribe (h/t GP).

“We were paradise”

We were olive trees
we were stark blue seas
we were nearer to Greece than I’ve ever been
and you tasted the olives and said it’s a sin
how empires have changed so much since then.

We were rosemary breeze
we were soft pink flowers
we were walking on blisters and talking for hours.
And I bought you apricots like you had at your aunt’s,
and no one on the beach was bothered with pants.

What was the world while we were paradise?
What glaciers melted while we were fresh ice?
What forests burned down while we played nice?
What cities flooded, what droughts drilled what dirt?

Though we missed many train-wrecks—
failed to feel all the hurt—
we were trees and seas and needed breeze.
We were flowers and hours and apricots on the beach.
When we meet again, in peacetime or in breach,
I’ll call up this you if you call up this me.

When my devices didn’t reliably display websites’ actual content, my accounts apparently engaged in activity not of my doing, my phone didn’t reliably complete calls as dialed, a buncha my files disappeared, and other crazy shit happened in Boston in 2015, one of the funniest things was how a website that looked like mine but wasn’t had recipes alongside sex toy reviews. What’s more embarrassing: that, or the fact that at the time, I hadn’t ever touched a sex toy? Unless you count Barbies, which have many uses… (Clearly my embarrassment threshold has grown three sizes since then.)

But I used to love writing recipes, including some that were published years ago as Reviews of New Food for McSweeney’s—Coconut Borscht, Chocolate Love Vegan Cupcakes, Shepherds-Who-Want-You-To-Be-Healthy Pie, Herbal Supplements, and Hot Chai Malk. Which reminds me of how, at one time before the current era of bliss—and before the immediately preceding era, in which I only stopped working to apply calories to body to avoid problems—I also enjoyed cooking. A lot. 

In fact, as a little girl I enjoyed it so much that I tried various cooking-centered businesses, like selling brownies (or giving them away) to the neighbors (age 8?) and Christmas pralines to local businesses (age 20). That was when I wasn’t selling (or giving away) art cards and paintings. It should have told me something that my early cooking and art-centered business ventures generally involved losing money and/or giving the best stuff away. But I like what I like.

And as this new recipe at McSweeney’s today suggests, I like roast chicken. Also Germany. Germany is nice. I would like to become German as soon as possible, but the citizenship road is about 7 years long and I’ve only been here about 2.5 years. So like any good American, I’m brainstorming how to achieve my dreams through careful planning, hard work, and unfair shortcuts.

What if I get a quick online degree in nuclear physics? What if I marry a Dutchman who speaks really good German? What if my great-grandmother was a starving Jewish girl sent by her Romanian parents from Iași to live with relatives in illustrious Stanisławów, Austria-Poland-Ukraine, but luckily she GTFO before they killed all the Jews in all the places and none of my relatives on that side had any citizenship to restore to me now anyway because they were all, as I may have mentioned, Jews? GIVE ME CITIZENSHIP AND I WILL BAKE YOU BROWNIES.

Wait, is quid pro quo for citizenship illegal? Look, all I’m saying is, Make Vera European Again.

Recently a dear friend asked for my chicken recipe. As I only keep secrets that need keeping, I wrote it out for her. But I got a little carried away and wrote it like I used to write Reviews of New Food for McSweeney’s—which is to say, snarkily. Then I submitted it to McSwy’s, even though I hadn’t written for them in years. And they took it!

I was so excited that I wrote another review immediately, which the editor kindly pointed out was lovely but longer than what they normally publish. So I cut it by half, and the editor kindly pointed out it was more of a straight-up recipe than what they normally publish. That was when I realized I had forgotten to review in my reviews. Here’s the longer-still rewrite, which remedies that error.

I do, however, really like writing straight-up recipes and wonder if people might want them, too. After finishing my second poetry book, I’d really like to write something with more of an audience. So I wonder if that sort of a (gluten-free, oddball) cookbook project might be it. 

This is mirepoix. It goes in (almost) everything. 

“Seafood Bisque”

When I was a little girl, before my parents divorced, my abusive alcoholic father abandoned the family, and my mom got sicker and sicker—in short, before everything fell apart—we drove from the white-flight suburbs an hour and a half outside Birmingham, Alabama to the Atlantic coast of Florida, all the way to the paradisiacal beaches of Ponte Vedra near my parents’ hometown of Jacksonville, every summer I can remember. The drive would take a few days, in which my older brother and I would make shaky backseat peaces with Pez and Tchaikovsky’s life story would replay on cassettes so hot the smell of melting plastic still reminds me of Swan Lake.

All happy families, Tolstoy wrote, are happy in the same way. But all unhappy families develop their own reward systems for surviving each other on summer vacation. There in paradise, my dad would get as drunk as possible as often as possible, my mom would walk the pristine white beaches trying not to cry, and I would collect dozens upon dozens of purple shells that looked like painted half-moon fingernails. No one could ever tell me what they were called, so I named them pestañas, the Spanish word for eyelashes, because it’s pretty and sounds purple. (Google says they’re called tellins.) I don’t know what my brother did there, since he didn’t like playing or talking with me, a preference I used to think of as cold but now understand as Aspergiac.

Then we would all reconvene for a special dinner at a special club over a Japanese bridge over a man-made pond with snapping turtles that my dad joked would be in my soup, and eat luscious seafood bisque (cream soup) with diabetical Southern sweet tea. That soup tasted like butter, milk and honey, crab meat, better booze than I got sips of in my dad’s orange juice, and, quite possibly, turtle.

Times have changed. Now we know what to call my brother’s strangeness (high-functioning autism), and possibly my own; as well as our mother’s long and difficult illness (lupus). But of other people one says little, except that they have managed heroically to leave the shared muddle of our past and be whole, although it has required becoming wholly different and wholly apart. My brother and I independently changed our names during one of the stretches of months or years when we were not speaking. (I think I was first, but he wouldn’t give me a date the last time he would speak to me, which was already some time ago.)

For myself, I have managed this appearance of starting anew with no small number of aids—a brilliant and loving partner’s support in a new career on a new Continent under my new name, for example. It is sometimes said that a son grows up and leaves you, while a daughter is forever; so I spent a long time being a good daughter, after which I became a happier son. I am a pre-op trans-Continental. As a hip bastion of radical artsy sciencey LGBTQIAOHNOES, my household intermittently nerds out about ketosis, keeping sugar in the forbidden cabinet originally designated for glutenous fare, cold medication, and God. And as I moved about as far away from the U.S. South, culturally speaking, as you can get without learning Norwegian, I have learned to make my own soup—my way.

This learning did not start with old recipes, or other things I carried. The things I did not leave at first fit in a backpack. I did not miss anything else. But eventually, with the help of a very few and dear friends, I sent for more: the tapes of interviews I had conducted as a curious artist and early grad student, before turning my PhD research focus to their topic—polygraphs, or “lie detectors”; the oil paintings that I hadn’t given up, sold, or had stolen by the man who agreed to take them from the storage unit I could no longer afford to display in his AirBNBs, as a favor to us both; and at last the better flavors of my childhood—cajun spices, blackened meat, and seafood bisque.

I had hoped to turn up but never did, and still don’t know what happened to, my 500+ tellins, although I now suspect they must have been lost a decade earlier, in the emergency one-way ticket to Alabama move of ’04, when my mom’s lease was up and she was too sick to manage, so I brought her up to college with me. She slept on the sofa with mysterious bruises and rages—a different person than the mom I knew. I missed her too much to love her. No one said lupus never presents without neuropsych problems. No one said it was lupus; we figured it out. (She credits me, and I credit Isabel; but it’s patients who have the answers.) My flatmate moved out. The flirtatious older professor saw his opportunity. And there went my 20s.

Leaving everything behind was something I tried to do many times, and finally managed only under that great expatriating duress that turned out to be much more blessing than curse. Also curse. But more blessing.

Similarly, the long-undiagnosed gluten allergy that kept me accidentally skinny into my late 20s seems to have also damaged my esophagus permanently, so that I am physiologically incapable of burping—when I drink too much fizzy stuff, my throat growls all night like a bullfrog in heat—and have had to learn to cook anew several times. This was not fun when back in grad school, I was crying from intense, hyperthyroid hunger at 2:30 a.m., having lost 15 pounds and half my hair in a month, and did not know what to feed myself to keep the hunger pain at bay because everything I used to cook had gluten.

But now that my arsenal of quick snacks and full meals is fleshed out again, I can enjoy the fluidity of cooking favorites on automatic—that Zen of flow in doing something I know how to do and like doing. As well as the challenge of trying something new and complicated—like cobbling together fifteen recipes while improvising to make this soup. And making it gluten-free like I make everything, as well as low-carb like I make most things. The blessing of learning to cook and eat healthier from the curse of medically having to. That is the newness of the food here, although it is an old childhood memory I’m remaking, recipe-constructing, and reviewing at last.

***

All good seafood soups start with a strong fish fumet, or fresh stock (clear bouillon) made from boiling an enormous pot of bones and/or shells. The bones, and the fish flesh you’ll need later, must be from non-oily fish, like cod. And you cannot walk into the grocery store and ask the butcher to sell you his seafood throwaways for thirty cents, like you could when—oh my God, it’s happening—I was a little girl. I’m only 33! I think.

Anyway, grocery stores these days—oh my God, it’s really happening!—don’t sell you fish bones and shrimp or crab shells for soup. At least not anywhere I could find in Berlin, Germany. For that, I discovered after striking out four times and asking a local, you have to go to a Fischladen (fishmonger), like the aptly named Der Fischladen. And you have to call to order your kilo of carcasses a day ahead, since not many people do this. And you shouldn’t do it on a Friday or weekend, because they’re busy.

Some recipes call for pouring a half bottle of white wine over the carcasses before boiling away, but this is a waste as adding a smaller amount of wine to the soup later retains more of the flavor (and leaves more wine for drinking). The same goes for the oft-advised addition of “aromatics” (veggies and spices) to the bone broth. It’s more flavorful if you wait and, after the full pot has boiled down to a stock (which takes a few hours in a four-liter pot), separately sauté the veggies and spices. I use a modified mirepoix (French diced and sautéed veggie flavoring) of garlic, onions, fennel, carrots, celery, and parsley (in order of cook time), with 3-5 bay leaves and cajun spices—here, a mixture of vegan bouillon in place of salt, plus freshly ground black pepper, paprika, cayenne, thyme, and oregano, to taste.

When a fork mashes through the carrots easily enough, put the mirepoix in a blender (sans bay leaves). Then strain the fumet into a smaller pot. Add some of it to the veggies in the blender. Blending the veggies thickens the soup without adding flour. You can use this trick in most soup and casserole recipes. It takes half an hour or so, but adds a lot of flavor (and probably some nutrition) along with its thickness. In theory, you can make a huge batch of mirepoix ahead of time to add to different dishes bit by bit. But I’m lucky enough to be able to spend time relaxing in the kitchen; there is something incomparably peaceful for me about making fresh food in smaller batches.

The last time I made (or attempted to make) this bisque, I had forgotten to get shrimp because I was too distracted flirting with the cute, sweet Italian guys at Der Fischladen (hi Angelo, hi Daniele) after a wonderful dinner date with my hot, sweet boyfriend (and a bathtub-sized glass of wine). (Or maybe I’m just getting old and forgetful… Omg, it’s happening.) Made this way, it’s still a lovely soup, but lacks the full flavor of my childhood memory. It really needs both fish bones and shells in the broth, and fish meat and shell meat in the soup. Four out of five friends who have never heard of Ponte Vedra agree, but only after a bathtub-sized glass of wine. The fifth one thinks it needs turtle.

Sauté the meats while the fumet and vegetables blend. Then combine some of the remaining fumet with the blended fumet-vegetable mixture—as much as you need to get the consistency almost right, but still too thick for soup. Then add about a cup of cream, half a cup of white wine, and four or five ounces of cooking sherry. Every other recipe you can find will say to use 1-2.5 ounces, but these recipes are empirically wrong. It is also important to test the sherry while cooking, to be sure it has not turned communist while living in Europe.

When the fish is cooked so that it falls apart, take it off the heat long enough to crumble it into the soup, removing any remaining bones with your fingers. Chop the shrimp or crab meat and add it, too. Squeeze in a few lemon slices at the last minute. Let cool before chilling, reheating for lunch the next day, and taking some in Tupperware to share with the nice fishlads and other friends. Most seafood is best fresh, but this bisque gets better every day for the few days it lasts, the flavors seeping together like a new lover getting comfortable. It tastes like that lasting pleasure of connection not everyone experiences with birth family, but if we’re lucky we find later in good company and in bed, maybe even at the same time.

But first thing after serving the first night’s soup: Take out the trash. Yesterday’s boiled bones and fishheads stink. There is nothing left to do with them. There will always be people who think you still need to catalog them or something, just because you’ve made some soups in your day. They will demand details, or suggest treatments and mantras, all focused on doing more with the used-up bits you’ve already picked clean and then boiled for soup. Forgive them; which is to say, forget them. They didn’t have what you had, and they haven’t made what you made of it. They don’t know that’s just not how cooking works, that’s not how bones work, that’s not what feeding people is all about. Just smile and tell them you’ve already made that soup. And you already gave away the last bowl.

This is Fred. He makes soup. 

 

This is a poem in my Amsterdam series (1, 2) inspired by my time living there in 2015 as a still-fresh expat in a world full of people reorienting in various ways. Sometimes you go looking for the promised land (resistance, a free world, trade routes made of gold) and discover other searchers instead—and that home in other searchers is the best reorientation you could wish for.

“Walking along the Amstel”

Bicycles, babies, and boats bob along the Amstel—
the Rival, the Tramp, and the Res Nova exhaling in gentle troughs.
Amsterdam after L.A. is practical and gray.
Here, bits of blue sky make no Technicolor promise.

Clouds come and go quietly, leading by example.
Mothers laugh and trail behind babies on bicycles,
Dutch stomachs effortlessly tight as they juggle
groceries, phones, and younger babes. (Look, Moms! no hands!)

I am counting butterfly bushes instead of losses,
no longer counting colors to keep from staring at oncoming trains.
Rustling reeds remind me the summers are short,
but my season here is ample—time cool and long.

My new life is like a length of boat sailing across the horizon,
with the slowness of scale but the smoothness of a cat
comfortably at home. I am a stranger here, and illegal.
But there’s no where to return—I will never go home.

All the world’s reset on roam.
This vagabonding is our Res Nova.
Home in the world is the new home.
Banging along for Yucatán, discovering Cordova.

This is a poem in my Lisbon series (1, 2, 3…) about longing for my monogamous Christian husband, and finding damn good company instead.

“Outside the Closed Church Door”
Igreja Paroquial de Nossa Senhora das Mercês (Parish Church of Our Lady of Mercy)—Lisboa

Disused door doves
say sacred sensations
wait willing and wanted.
Fleeing (feminine phantom)
closer cooing, crumbling
in need not unknown,
I look at the locked-out lingerers
and pray for pairing perfect.
What would also work
would be wanted oneness,
so needed necessary and now.

Like some others, this poem was inspired by my time in Lisbon in 2015. Most of us have spent the decade following the last financial crisis observing outcomes worsen for a lot of people in a lot of places as inequality and corruption increased… Without having the power to either stop the forces of history driving that march, or not feel them.

“Finding Praça do Comércio”

The water calls you even if your feet are as stupid as mine,
not knowing direction in your own country,
much less finding your way wandering, except
there is no more way to find, but you know what I mean.
Every time I’d wander out, I’d find myself at the water
and so the city center where the Tejo meets the Atlantic,
or nearly enough that the water tastes of salt
and the cruise ships look embarrassing.

Juan wants to sell me weed.
Nicolás wants my number.
And a tiny, unbent butterfly of an ancient, burnt sienna woman
dressed in a doll-pink dress and backpack, long white pants and orthopedic shoes,
red hair barrette, gold hoop earrings, silver cane,
and imperial frown lets me walk beside her in the protest against the failed bank,
showing me her statement with her money she can never have—
her life savings, stolen by bankers who will get away.
I ask if I can take her picture, and she has me snap
her paper with my cellphone, too, as if believing
in my ability to see, or know who to show.

But I never know who to tell anymore.
So much is going wrong.
Someone give Lucilia Santos Cruz her 106.56 euros back.
Or was that all she had left after the theft?
I am trying to understand the world and failing,
because the world does not make sense.

Still the water pulls me, away from the shouting of protestors
who would like to but will not attack the bankers’ police in their new riot gear,
away from the wider everyday bustle of Baixa,
away from the litter and mosaics of Lisboa,
to the smooth stones and mossy rocks by the gently rocking water.

One circle of stones not too far out looks like a wreath underwater,
or a nest the fish-birds are flying over, skipping stoney kisses
across the bright and cloudy surface of their sky.
A young boy’s melody of question laces a father’s answer
as a migrant’s bench-beat hugs the farther coast,
and there is so much music in all this longing.
The water pulls us—its force without logic, demand without reason,
peace without words.

 

Dug this up from MACAAL. Generally I avoid selfies, but their bathroom was irresistible… 

Lately I’ve been traveling and reviewing art at Delicious Line. Here are my latest:

Eckart Hahn: The Black Dog Dresses Brightly, at Haus am Lützowplatz (Berlin),

James Rosenquist: Painting as Immersion, at Museum Ludwig (Cologne),

Black Power – Flower Power: Photographs by Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch, also at Museum Ludwig (Cologne),

Indigenous Australia: Masterworks from the National Gallery of Australia, at me Collectors Room (Berlin),

Wolfgang Tillmans: Fest (Firmly), at Galerie Buchholz (Cologne),

Africa Is No Island, at Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL/Marrakesh)

“Kokopelli,” oils on 40 x 50 cm stretched canvas (web store).

I must have painted this a year ago, and forgotten to blog it. It’s so nice and thick and bright. I’m down to a partial tube of white and have gorgeous cherry blossom photos to paint from at last—but couldn’t get to the art store all week. Web maintenance is happening now, as my shop appears to be slightly out of order after a software update. So I see this among the accidental uncategorized—the god of fertility conjuring a flower with his lute, the flames coming off his back, the flames coming off the petals, his hair flying like wild birds, and it could almost be a cherry blossom, but look again and it’s a rose, or at least it has a flow about it, I like it, I should give this one away. And get some new paintings up in my web store. And get equipment to flatten and photograph all the paper work from last spring/summer, e.g., in the Nuremberg 2027 series.

But for now I’ll content myself with clearing dozens of paintings out of the entry-way where I inexplicably stacked them after photographing in the beautiful light. Spring cleaning!

Like a previous poem, this was inspired by my time in Lisbon in 2015. It’s about feeling peaceful in a cemetery after being terrified.

“Wandering Cemitério dos Prazeres”

Something splendid about being surrounded by stone and natural death—
a peace, a slowness, a feeling of family and of rest.
The job that must be done matters less now, again,
than this togetherness with stones, bones, sun, kingfishers, and former men.
There is no job. There is no “I” who must and must. There is not one recorded line
echoing the violence that breaks the eternal mirror, tricking us into time.

“Make Tea Not Lists”

This appears to be a poem whose protagonist has suffered attentional problems, and that will (appropriately) not cooperate in becoming more dense and poem-like. I’m laughing at myself trying to edit it yet again while this week re-trying all sorts of list-making, mindful meditating, journaling, task-reorienting, yoga-procrastinating, mantra refraining-from-mocking, autogenic something things, and enjoying a really good book on organization called The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin. And a really good Guardian interview with physicist Carlo Rovelli on the nature of time. While currently on a poetry book manuscript editing timer. God help me. Is this a poem or not? If I don’t know, then I guess it’s got to go… But I like it enough to blog it before taking it out of the book.

When I went in for shot attention to Mrs. Which and Whose, and Not-It, Frau Doktor asked why I couldn’t Just Do It—whether I kept stopping to have cups of tea. Now when I read Eliot, the tea is all I see.

When I told my office about the very important man’s very important hands and how I couldn’t sit still—they said to do nothing, if you will. Then my files were trashed, and it saved my ass—that needing to move, run, dance. That dashing far enough away at last.

And when I slept in our big red bed under the big blue sky in France, sleeping as much as I needed, eating and loving the same—I knew I needed this animal luxury, being my scatter-brained poet self, living in the wild in my rhythms, listening without acting through effect-minded prisms.

Then I don’t need to be invisible. Breathing is allowed, unmeasured—and dreaming.

Usually I don’t remember my dreams, and wonder whether they are civilized. Not in the sense of denying my most basic needs, for sleep and love more than money or a good life above. But in the sense of making more of my animal—cuisine of her hunger, love and sex from sex and love, delicious rest into some art, or the search for it. This feeds me. Feeding others sets me free.

***

If you could replace your unremembered dreams with prayers, in the Middle Ages, you probably would. If you could replace them with podcasts or books on tape today, you probably would. We always forget Luther, and intend to save ourselves—mostly with other people’s good works and none of our own faith. Faith in the brain, in the self, in the unseen rhythms poets and physicists point to quietly all our lives. Quietly because we are soft animals. We are not priests and presenters, though we may try on the robes and seem sometimes to sing out. Feels better to do without. Remember what happened to Galileo, and who knows why not to Copernicus. They don’t like us.

We know something now about how drinking three cups of tea a day cuts your depression risk. And coffee—diabetes. Miso—breast cancer. Or so we think. We see the substance and not the sigh, sit, drink.

What do we know about listening to birds and looking without seeing out the window? What do we know still about sleep, about our own lives when we let go? About the brain washing itself at night delicately, like a kitten, going over and over what has and has not been done, and what cannot be said or done, but must be imagined in secret and in silence? About the half-gone washings in-between, when we are doing nothing—and everything?

We know without it, our hands are drunken, our minds are dull, we start to hear things in the lull. What we call nothing and waste is sanity. And like sanity, sleep is not what we used to think—is not either-or. You can be part awake, and part on a different shore. Memory systems out. Attention and doubt in a drought. Sleep is a thief that takes what it can get. You don’t know it, because you forget.

***

Last spring, when my love bought me a full-sized electric piano, that feels and sounds like the real thing with its great wooden soul—I asked my first teacher for a few pieces, and learned new Bach and Chopin after twenty years. The headphones helped assuage my fears—that I would suck, or bother people. And my own brain and fingers clicked in ways I had forgotten, but they had not. I could do this, full stop. Then, when I napped, they kept playing Bach.

How lovely, dark, and deep the woods of our minds that when we play again, we play also in our sleep. I’ve never had such delicious rest.

I used to beat the others out for money as a kid. But then I quit and now I’m not on par with all the rest. Would it be better than my play and replay to be like Mozart, dreaming his own symphonies instead? Or Harry Potter waltzing into J.K. Rowling’s empty head? I never feel that I receive my own ideas, but something or someone else’s— the great creative self-deprecating moue. But when you’re in the flow, it’s true. Often I am not. I am in the way. It’s just what I’ve got.

Listen, I don’t know if there’s a force like God or the collective unconscious. I don’t like religion, homeopathy, or other frauds, though they have their uses—and yes, sure, abuses I have seen and known. I have a trippy artist brain wired for ecstasy, and it’s often lead, misled, deuced, and helped me. I just know Bach, being left alone by big fat chiefs, and drinking tea will do for me—and when I interfere, to enforce discipline and plans, it doesn’t work as well. I am not Mozart, and will never be a Potter. I come here into the blank space to see what happens. It is not impressive as a life. It is just what I need. I hope that in time, more work of worth will bleed from the leaves; but I need steeping still. When I can let myself make tea not lists. When I can rub the beads of a meaning that matters like this. Sometimes it boils down on its own. Maybe this one is not full-grown.

And if you let yourself do the same, we might meet here. Or nay. Neither invisible nor strident, unnecessary by necessity. That’s civilization. Playing the same old tune with new feeling. Sipping like old friends, knowing the time and not the leaves are revealing. This is where ideas pour into and not from you, without searching, out of the blue. This is where you are welcome, my dear, to find me. Although I am most me when I am here, which is to say, when I am not here. It’s on the tip of my tongue, so near. Yet entirely unclear.

Two more poems relevant to #MeToo (previous ones here and here). That’s a section in my second poetry book that keeps growing and shrinking, because there’s always a new reason to write more about it. Now I’m fantasizing about writing a short story set in a dystopia where there is so much surveillance that abuse allegations can be more easily verified—and abusive men get branded on the face. So at least you know who has behaved badly toward other women in the past, since that’s probably the most useful heuristic for predicting future abuse… (Not that more surveillance results in better outcomes for crime victims, or that “believe victims” makes sense in the context of due process, or or or…)

“Doubting Tom”

“Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”—John, 20:29, NIV

Bagladykiller, shopping cart caddy, glad he
feels so sure that he can shuffle me out like that—
I am currently mentally homeless.

Shuffling along in my tattered thoughts,
replying to things long said or unsaid but present,
I would abide by conversations more pleasant.

But all the streets
and all the houses
are empty when one turns to enter.

The doors don’t open
and the intersections stop
at ends of the world.

If there were others here,
but there are not even cats,
we could find a way
out of the stranded fray.

Ways do not exist here.
What you want is rest
what you want is chaos
what you want—who knows?

What you want is to have known
before he showed you
that he was one of those.

***

“Men”

There are some tribes of men
who show themselves when
they have a chance to do
what they want to you.
And they do.

It is not all of them.
Their tribe may not be very many.
I have not counted.
This realm is always unaccounted.
Forgive, forget his moment’s whim.

But if there are any
left who are pretending to be a friend,
let’s skip the violation
and make our timely end.
Even rainbows run out of ways to bend.

Never finished, always relevant. I must have started writing this poem last fall on the way to Mauerpark here in Berlin—a now-vibrant park that on warm Sundays bursts with relaxing young people and families, busking musicians (some really amazing), graffiti artists, slackliners and slackers, food vendors and flowers, that was once part of the Berlin Wall and its Death Strip. Spring is almost here…

“Walking to Mauerpark”

Steel supports like blades of grass
stretch up to crane-cut clouds
on the old school’s rooftop. They look
like easel spines between paintings
like giraffes pointing noses at a changing sky
and like the steel supports in the field near Mauerpark
nearby, stretching up and back into history,
marking where the concrete chunks
were carried off, for resale or for memory.

Also along the way and easier to miss,
small bronze tiles break sidewalks
with names, dates taken, dates killed.
This one was the doctor who built the orphanage.
That one, his infant daughter.
His wife, her mother. His son, her brother.

Elsewhere, such steel spokes and small marked stones
silently sit and do not stir in walls and under dirt.
But here they are bare in the biting air
as if the past were present,
as if the Wall and Die Wende had been a dream,
and as if all rewritten stories are not what they seem.

Layers of trauma sift like this,
from the German traüme—to dream
and not know how to remember different times.
The steel spokes in the brain stand up,
lattices of memories we must make fiction to tell
and so cannot clear up with words—
are yet filled in. Marked stones filed and misfiled
scatter, cannot be secured on crumbling walls.
In this deconstruction, landmarks can comfort or alarm.

For some the spokes and stones are solace.
Remembered deaths were not in vain.
Remembering helps us rise again
toward something better—
the idea of freedom,
the possibility of better dreams,
the melting of old into new.
Not leaving the past to be true.

For others, sadness:
touching the cold plaques
caressing the bent shoulder of the past
with nothing whole there to retrieve
yet impossible to leave
as its distance closes in
as the empire cries sin
and as we wonder how long their warning will last.

For its part, all this steel and stone
wishes us neither solace nor sadness.
Our mementos will be another’s clues
as to our fatal madness.