throbbing light machine

mm, eljay, how I have neglected thee! I'll be better, I promise. I've just been feeling wildly inarticulate about most things.

This weekend marks the second annual Love Your Body conference at school, something that I dearly needed. One of the projects, "Images of real College Women," involved a collection of black and white photographic nudes of sixty of us. The conversations that I've been hearing about this...! It was fun to do--I was one of the models, but then again, I work on campus as a painter's model, so it wasn't terribly different for me. My photographer was actually a member of one of the drawing classes that I work for, so she has a history of hanging around me when I'm starkers.

I love it when things get better.

Aaand, while I'm on the toppic of art students, poetryspam:


Culinary Retrospective in Tangerine

My mother’s kitchen was always filled
with small pots of juiced color,

ball jars brimming with
chemicals and strong-smelling powders.

Three or four gourds, maybe some
pears, the dark ones that she liked,

might have lolled about on
the old red and yellow tablecloth,

the one with the hole
in one corner.

She would ladle up
a spoonful of saffron

and spread it out on the board,
already laden with oranges

a pinch of sage and the
remnants of strange fruit,

where it clung in clumps as
thick as the butter

on my sister’s mashed potatoes.
She would spread it thin,

like the frosting on the birthday cakes
that never turned out right,

shaping it in scalloped whorls
or rolling it out like pastry

while the fumes of her turpentine
spiraled through her hair.