Open Diary - Nel Cielo

Open Diary - Nel Cielo http://www.opendiary.com/entrylist.asp?authorcode=A385389 Open Hands praise the body that hates you. http://www.opendiary.com/entryview.asp?authorcode=A385389&entry=10222 http://www.opendiary.com/entryview.asp?authorcode=A385389&entry=10222 it's been a good year for challenging my body. i've never been big on working out, and i'm still not; it's just boring. but i've found that i can commit to my handy dandy pull up bar twice a day. i got it a few months ago and started with ten reps. moved up to 12, 15, 18, and now 20. perhaps in a month i'll hit 24. i like progress. but this is less challenging than stretching my groin and leg muscles. fuck. i just did my first REAL groin stretch, and it was close to ten minutes, letting my body know in no uncertain terms: "we are doing something new now." i gave myself a reasonable goal of doing full splits by next summer, and stretching every day or so (with breaks when necessary) could do the trick. flexibility is my glaring weakness when it comes to dance, and it's getting old. i never believed that i could do splits, and felt that as an adult it was too late. but my body and i are gonna see how true that is. i'll keep you updated on my progress. in this moment, it burns, baby. that must be good. Sun, 15 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT for brenda moossy http://www.opendiary.com/entryview.asp?authorcode=A385389&entry=10221 http://www.opendiary.com/entryview.asp?authorcode=A385389&entry=10221 1 she told me she'd distinguished the soul of a gator by the taste of its spine, by how many taste buds tore off upon it, ravenous. then she laughed until a nymph spat out. i married the swamp for nothin' but its mania. she said it's the closest we can come to your mouth. she begged me to one day bury her in the ozarks. somewhere there's a licked-open cow gut, brandishing a voice and face and hands, poeming: naw sugar, i just want to be loved. somewhere a farmer is touching himself sober in the stalks. somewhere a buzz of feathers and flies ensures nothing goes to waste. somewhere, there you are, biting into barbecue sauce draped on a rib. you tell me you know he loved you. listened. gave everything he's got. 2 sometimes you rattle into my mind and I want to pull the car over and mold myself an ax. they say we're dust, right? we can cry ourselves into mud, reshape our bodies, harden at noon. i was born a missing jewel, natural as the swamp. 3 she was my favorite nurse. 1984. she wasn't scared by my body. she didn't twist her mouth, proclaim my beauty through one eye. when she spoke, her voice buzzing, i sunk into the bayou. my blood cooled. my lips molten leather. 4 a beaten girl curls up under him, croons of a sweet jesus. exhaled smoke unveils the exit lights. the field misses her hands. the scarecrows tell me they hang themselves. 5 i found a letter in the bayou, in the remains of a molded ax. it was all in Arabic, the same as my name. at the end, a voice: find me. Sun, 2 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT to James von Brunn, gunman at the Holocaust Museum http://www.opendiary.com/entryview.asp?authorcode=A385389&entry=10220 http://www.opendiary.com/entryview.asp?authorcode=A385389&entry=10220 You took a rifle to the Holocaust Museum, hoping to punctuate your denial. At 89 years old you proved age mellows nothing. In that sense, I respect you; if I live that long I hope I still have something to die for. Your last breath was in a hospital last year, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that your last dreams raged regret that you couldn't kill a single Jew. All you got was a security guard. But at least he was black. Stephen Johns had the audacity to open the door for you as you entered the museum. I have no idea if he ever reached for his gun, if he'd even had time. We call him a hero, regardless. And I am proud. With all we've endured in this country, there is a beauty in knowing we can still die for someone else. You were angry that there was a national museum commemorating a “lie”, but by that logic, we also have Cooperstown. The hip hop exhibit in the Smithsonian. Tuskegee, Alabama. Black folk are used to it. We stopped asking for our own holocaust museum; we realized we're living in it. We're paying taxes for it, going to war for it, and while our holocaust happened hundreds of years before Hitler, no one dares a denial. In that sense, we are privileged. Our grandparents don't have to reveal concentration brandings in their skin. We don't need to take skeptics on a pilgrimage to everywhere. I don't smoke, nor have I ever, but last year I saw a film about the Holocaust. And when I got home, I could literally smell ashes. Perhaps you wanted an apology for their apparent lack of proof, for having Steven Spielberg instead of Alex Haley. The gift of a holocaust is in the survival, the pride of its children. I wonder if you never grasped the power of a bowed head and raised fist, a bar mitzvah, a pow wow on a sinking reservation, a rainbow flag. I read that you were an artist. I wonder if, while walking to that museum door, you had the scene perfectly composed: field trip bodies curled and still, fork-tongued curators dead on their knees. But imagine the aftermath of your gun-stroke symmetry. Now that this deceitful museum, this emerald city, was finally silent, how many shots had you reserved for us? Imagine how you'd undo the myth of all the world's weeping. Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT untitled (his broken bread) http://www.opendiary.com/entryview.asp?authorcode=A385389&entry=10219 http://www.opendiary.com/entryview.asp?authorcode=A385389&entry=10219 The day he was shot, I heard his stomach crawl. I wondered if his last words to me were true: “Woman, cut your voice the wrong way and I will swallow you.” The day he was shot, forty-seven miles separated his grip from my walls, from night after stolen night, when he shared his body with me instead of his wife. He loved the fool in me, loved telling me my surrender gave him the power to lead every march, bellow every speech, to beseech the Lord's will to hold every bullet at bay. He told me it was holy to be the other woman, to be his favorite of all the Other Women. He told me the Lord gave me too much power, and I believed him, the night he begged me not to run home, hanging his head out of the open window. He asked, “is leaving me tonight worth the movement? Will you dare what the Lord allows no gunman to do?” He knew. My people needed my silence, needed my body to willingly bend before the mountaintop. The moment I heard him die, I was home, slicing bread. His gasp hurtled out of me, and the blade opened my finger where he once said a ring could be. That night, I listened to the riots, thanking the Lord that at last my secrets could surround me. Every building burnt, every chomping dog, every stroke and kiss from my overburdened, weakened man. And the silence after...all of it was mine. For the love of my people, it was always mine. Dear Lord: may his wife forgive me. I never asked to be holy. Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT From Antonio http://www.opendiary.com/entryview.asp?authorcode=A385389&entry=10218 http://www.opendiary.com/entryview.asp?authorcode=A385389&entry=10218 When they speak of me, and my violins, I rarely listen. They've yet to understand, to learn the language of these hands. Francesca. I knew you best in the woods, where the spruce and maple waited, dense and humming. God did not grant me a voice to bend the heart, but rather offered the tools to build my own: maple and spruce, a carpenter's hands and lute player's ear, strings. Time. 30 years of marriage taught my hands to mold the wood into outlines of you. My ears learned to hear underwater. My violins were deliberately light, hardly a presence in the hand; I spent my life creating a hundred ways to render you weightless. Every instrument I carved, shaped and varnished, inlaid and measured, every hour of the 200 I spent on every violin and viola and violoncello, each held a four count measure of what I did not know to say; I hoped my callouses would translate, satisfy. Did you notice the glint in my gaze when we attended a concert featuring my violins? Could you hear me crackling from the bow, stirring in the belly, craning at the neck, shimmering in the forest's voice? When they speak of me now, their throats gurgle awe at the work of my apparent “golden period”, beginning in 1698. Francesca, did they know that this is when you died? The following year I married another, but I prayed she would understand: a violin must be played, continuously, for fifty years before its full potential is revealed, and Francesca, dear wife, I only had you for thirty. She was too kind to object, too forgiving not to smile when I named our daughter Francesca. I'll always love her for raising your children along with hers, for not withholding affection even when she caught your scent in my carpenter's dust. If the Lord Christ had lived longer, his woodworking skill could have been molded into music. He could have devised a blueprint for a violin whose sound could resurrect, unearth your voice from the belly. But to be honest, Francesca, I am still but molded dust; to physically feel your risen voice could cause me to dissolve, disintegrate into the workshop floor. You should have lived to be my widow. When my words failed me, when my joy could only sing through a voice I never had, you would have smelt it, in the varnish, felt it tighten in tune. While the concert hall's acoustic unveiled every measure and secret, with every chord, I'd have unfolded, dissolved into you. Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT