food is to dogs as poetry is to me

I may or may not be setting myself up for disaster. (The thesaurus lists 'calamity, tragedy and act of God' as possible substitutes. The last one may be not the surest fit, but it sure is funny. Read on.) A natural disaster, as it were. I have taken it upon myself to read more poetry. When I visit one of the many architecturally open and welcoming branches of ye olde Seattle Public Library, I swing past the sometimes small but always mighty poetry section and pick a small handful at random. For a minute it started to feel like a chore. So I found my hands reaching for the colorfully inviting kids poetry books. My stringent adult brain kept intervening, guiding my hand toward the more mature, sensible, generally smaller in size soft backs that are unflinchingly devoid of fun bright collagey water color crayon images. Then I'm like, fuck it, I wanna read the bright color poems with overt rhyme schemes. And guess what, they rule. Also, they tend to not be depressing downer poems. Bonus! But I digress. . . Oh yeah, so I still get the adult poems (er, adult as in 'mature' not as in 'explicit' . . . ) but now I balance the scales with giant thin hard back fun poems. Once home, most of the books end up in my room, with one or two non kid poem books finding their temporary quarters in the bathroom down the hall.

And here is where my dilemma arises. I read poetry in the bano. (how do you put the tilda over the 'n' anyways?) (spell check offers 'banjo' as a possible alternative) (And yes, I'm totally trying to divert you from forming any mental images of that last un-parenthesied sentence.) The thought occurred to me today that I might just in fact be setting up some kind of unfortunate Pavlovian response: when I read poetry, or should this get taken to an extreme level, am even lightly exposed to it, I should pray to the good Lord that there best be restroom, private, public or otherwise, in the very near vicinity. This response, in it's pre-onset stages, strikes me as funny. Ask me again in another few weeks. . . And should you find yourself in a situation where you are perhaps reading poetry and I am perhaps sitting in the audience in plain view listening intently, please take the look on my face to be nothing more than a physiological response to my inner workings and not a direct critique of your art.

i like your dead bird better.

i was just at the BFA art show for Cornish grads. free wine, free snacks, free art. i recommend (tho the wine and snack bit was just for tonight's opening).
one artist's work in particular (kelsey fein)(sp?) (photos/woodcuts of dead birds) reminded me of a story:
my roommate's friend was visiting our portland abode from some exotic far away locale. minnesota or something. she was in town for some conference about what i can't remember. she had long dark hair and something about her made me think, witch? i saw very little of her, due mostly to my work schedule. she left a few days later without saying goodbye. she left behind a brown bag of personal affects.
curiosity, fueled by being home alone, led me to search the bag of it's mysterious contents. (ok, that and i knew that she had called my roommate to say she left behind some boots. i'm not really a snoop.) one pair of black high heeled boots, accounted for. one bag of chex mix, score. one plastic ziplock sammich bag with something black in it, hmmm some thing told me i should not bring the bag regrettably close to my face for further inspection. so what did i do? i brought the bag regrettably close to my face for further inspection. it looked like human hair. wet. and clumpy. and black. and crawling with maggots! i flung the bag back in the bag and left it for my roommate to deal with. . .
a week or so later, i come to find out that the bag of human hair was in fact the delicate remains of a dead bird. she was an artist and collected bird wings.
kelsey fein, i like your dead birds better.