Praha 20, or Dr. Hacknwheeze Strikes!

Sorry for the lapse in updates, folks. Between hideous internet issues (sporadic, weak access, and an inability to use my laptop for internet) and my turn for the awful cold that's been working its way around my apartment, I haven't had time to write.

I'm headed to Vienna this Friday at the blissful hour of 5am, and I will be sure to write some very lengthy things once I get back!

However, I will leave you all with a poem I wrote yesterday. This is just a rough draft. I just finished a book called How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. It’s a total Eve Ensler prototype – a woman named Slavenka Drakulic interviewed women across Eastern Europe, and used their experiences, as well as her own, to write a series of essays about women’s life under Eastern European communism. This was my immediate reaction:

At 16 Vinorhadska, the bulb is out in the living room,
so I am reading by a small lamp and squinting with concentration.
And somewhere in 1991
Slavenka Drakulic
is choking on her laughter in the candlelight.
The sound tastes like dark beer
in my mind, the bitter first sips
of an education.

I live in the alien world of ‘post’ –
everything from feminism to war is in the past,
and the present is dressed in children’s clothing,
bright colors, soon to be soiled and smudged and grown out of.
My present is disposable, my politics are laughable and I, like my world,
have the blessing of a short memory.

On the streets of New York, beggars lie
slouched against piss-soaked walls and shout
at passers-by while I

stumble on the hem of a tattered jacket,
walking too fast to watch for the silent man crouched at my feet,
head bowed, hands out and fingers tight as if he were waiting for the rain to fall,
so he might get a sip.

After the revolution, people still saved the pieces of yarn that
pulled from their sweaters as if they were saving the warmth
for a day when there would be none.

And although I tossed that sweater long ago,
Slavenka reaches to me with words like balled-up fists
full of yarn and says, here. You’ll need these if
you want to live in our world. Consider this your welcome.