"Inanna"

Hello, my lovely duckies. If you are here, I thank you for taking the time to read this. It is with great pleasure, much fear, and thrill, I put into your hands for your reading pleasure the chapbook Inanna. You can set your own price, which means it is absolutely free as well. You just type in "0.00" when you go to check out. My body is not feeling up to too much chest puffing over this, as it's the cumulation of three months worth of writing and editing. I'm tired, and I will just let the synopsis and the book itself do the talking.

And yes, if you know what the cover art features, I salute you, you naughty kids. ;)

The mythos of Innana has enchanted readers for decades. After dreaming of the elusive sky goddess one evening, I found myself writing of her polarities, her anger, her grief, and wondering at what sort of voice is hiding in texts that are undoubtedly, like all religious scriptures, ensconced in a certain gendered ideology. "Inanna" is a chapbook filled with explorations of identity among sexual, spiritual, cosmic, and social axes. When the radiant goddess of the sky goes down to meet her cthonic bound sister, her body breaks as it is hung on a hook, and her whole life - from the establishment of her own godhood to the marriage of Demuzi - spins out before her. On Ereshkigal's meat hook she is doomed to rot, and in rotting, the Queen of Heaven fully blooms.

Click here to download it at smashwords.

P.S. If you want to know what covers I worked on didn't make the cut, check this out:

I ended up going with the unlayered image since I enjoyed it's simplicity and I felt like the one above is too busy and the effects take away from its meaning.

Juggle of the collections

Whelp. I've done it again. I still have "Inanna" and "Trifecta" to finish up, but in the post Caldera Fest wonder and madness it seems that another is rising with the summer grass. "Trance Lost" so far has proven to be a collection wherein my spirituality, grief over the state of the world, and personal claims of identity intersect to create a poetic baby that might not quite know who she is because she keeps falling asleep and waking up in dreams of astral wandering. Maybe she's angry, but it's hard to be angry when you stare up at the night sky and see Saturn and Jupiter winking back at you. Maybe she's overjoyed to be dancing but the dance moves to the beat of distant war drums she spits on but realizes they shape the world she lives in. She drinks soy milk thinking shes doing good but has to cry in the corner when she realizes its a homogeneous culture ruining the rain forests and the diversity of life. She loves her grandma while feeling confused about what the love demands of her when she confronts the mindset of a post Appalachian baptist who can only see the world in shades of biblical red and black.

All in all, "Trance Lost" is a poetic mess. But its one I have to get out on paper, or it's probably going to go septic and all you will get out of me is stuttering sentences full of hippie self righteous anger that don't do anyone a lick of good. So let me have this, just for a minute.

I am waiting to get the artwork for "Inanna" sorted out, but all in all the editing on that collection is complete. So it should be coming first as soon as the cover comes to fruition. "Trifecta" still has a lot of work and I think I want to reach out to a friend to work on that cover so that one might not even be a possibility until the end of the year. But "Trance Lost," as improvisational in feel as it has been since its inception in meditative journeying and mundane rants, will undoubtedly not be so demanding. The cover is another GIMP project playground for me, so hopefully that should be up shortly after "Innana." Who knows, maybe before even.

Here is a poem from "Trance Lost." I hope you enjoy and thank you for reading.

Queer in New Jerusalem

You say your guns will save you

when the Apocalypse rises to the surface

like a boil on the skin of the earth

Who is going to save me from you

when my scales pop out from under my skin

when my pine cone flower mandala blossoms

and drips all over the threshing floor

of my ever evolving tree house

and you are peeking through the window

thinking to get a peep,

but instead its just me dancing

in the myriad irradiated bulb light,

hoping to get a moment’s peace

as I step out of this corset

bound body suit that keeps it all in,

letting nothing escape, not even

My exhale

My sweet breath I have to shunt out

or I will choke looking out

on the world you built

where pine cone flower mandala

children have only

a grave as their home