java

warm cup of coffee so delicious against my lips makes me close my eyes and go mmm

12pack

i see the football game's score
on the tv in the liquor store,
it makes me think of you.

then i scoff across the
gritty linoleum floor.

late november in wisconsin and
the ground so cold so hard, the wet dirt sticks
like it's frozen solid. the tile like sandpaper
beneath my boots.

piss-yellow fluorescent lights fixed in the ceiling,
buzzing and moaning,
with dead horse flies
like polka dots caught in the humming and the droning.
my ears twitched
the lights flicked

and

as my eyes make a decision
the variety 12pack gives me tunnel vision
with christmas colors like evergreen
and brick red.
then i wonder when i'll see your cute face again.

lockdown in bedroom.

disillusioned and exhausted today.

dogs n cats

the pup just touched noses with peanut. it was so cute. maybe they will be friends soon. but tiger still hisses and slices her claws into sierra's curious wet nose. i mean, all sierra wants to do is sniff tiger's little cat butt. however i don't think cats like their butts sniffed like dogs do. oh, the innocent miscommunication and cultural differences.

bad day.

dark hole, where are you? i'd like to crawl inside.

kidnapping

jessica is my life-long best friend who lives in phoenix and has been going to school for nursing, and supporting herself as a server at chili's for three plus years now. to be blunt, this summer she is getting shafted as far as scheduling and shifts go. she is working a double on the fourth of july. and believe me, jess likes to celebrate for whatever the occasion is. so this depresses her a lot, on top of all the other shitty shifts she has been scheduled so far this summer. here is my plan to rescue her:

dear jess,

consider this my pre-meditated warning. i will be sending a magazine-mosiac cut & paste ransom letter to chili's. i will be showing up at the restaurant while you are working. i will be wearing an american flag jumpsuit with an Uncle Sam face mask, and huge white boots with spurs. i will pop one of those confetti poppers in the middle of the restaurant during the lunch rush, then throw my head back and laugh menacingly, all the while flailing my arms for effect. then i will fake-karate chop you in the shoulder and take you out at the knees. i will run out of chili's with you dangling over my shoulder.

you have been warned.

love, brooke

poetry

poetry,
mostly,
i don't understand you.
unless you're ani difranco
or jenny lewis
or bjork
or even...
hot mamas like cherrie moraga, gloria anzaldua, and michele serros.
they're pretty straightforward.
and real.

other than that,
poetry that is too elusive
too metaphorical, not contextualized, too many similes
i just don't get it.

i just don't

i appreciate poetic sounds. like rap.
rhyming and rhythm and beauty.
and look: here's what i'm saying. not some random shit that i need three dictionaries and two encyclopedias to understand.

some academics say they like it. they get PhD's and stuff in it.
but man, "poetry"--
i just don't understand you.

who are the real baby killers?

In the very real and serious context of lower economic class women, and women living in poverty, abortion is not so much a choice as it is a must. With little to zero health care, with hardly enough money to support one's self, there really isn't much of a choice.
With that said, I want to quote Chicana feminist Demetria Martinez:

"The antiabortion movement has, like all social movements, relied heavily on political theater: praying the rosary in silence in front of clinics, crying out to women not to kill their babies, or demonstrating with blowup photographs of fetuses.

Why not march with photos of fetuses to the office of politicians who refuse to support universal health care? Or pray the rosary in the lobby of the senator who axes funding for battered women's shelters, job training, and day care--programs that would reduce women's economic dependency upon their abusers?

Why not march on the Pentagon and run a full-page ad in the New York Times on defense spending [and lack of health care] titled, "Who Are the Real Baby Killers?""

Take action NOW to protect women's health and reproductive rights in Arizona.

friday and i just wanna watch movies

the coffee is acidic in my stomach. i keep running to the bathroom.
it's friday and i don't wanna do anything. i need new running shoes and i need these blisters and bruises to heal.
that pretty bruise to the left is from a soccer game two weeks ago. some chick elbowed me right in the muscle. she had a really pointy elbow. tore up my bicep. there's a hard knot in the middle of it... ech.
i just wanna go workout! i did spend $47 on a summer membership to the UA rec center. gotta get my dollar's worth.
things i need to do today:
-kore press stuff
-read between the bars stuff
-get finger-printed for the millionth time for my new job at SAFS (yay for a new job!)
-finish graduation thank yous already!!
-go get more beat-up at my soccer game tonight.

3am

"do you believe in god?" he said, like it was a rhetorical question.
"no." i answered. i scooted to the edge of my seat and leaned over the table. the house was dark and the screen on my laptop set the room aglow. our faces were blue in its reflection. it must have been 3am. it was the end of summer, before sophomore year of college.
"do you like the dave matthews band?" he asked this time.
"yeah, i do." he started tapping the table with his right pointer finger. hard taps. the tap-tap-tap echoed off the old wooden floor in the midnight silence. i sat still, leaned over the table.
"you know," he said, "god isn't real." he shifted in his seat. the sweat was misty on his face, glistening on his hairline. his jaw flexed. molars grinding side to side.
"yes, i know."
"can i play some dave matthews for you?" his eyes were wide awake. i could see his cheeks clenching, dimples--contractions. his teeth dancing on one another.
"sure."
"i can't be mormon," he said.
"why?" i asked.
"because there is no god. how can so many people believe there is a god?"
my voice was soft, "i don't know. maybe they're afraid." i looked hard at him. he twisted in his chair. there he was, trying to be two people at once.

facebook, sent messages, no subject:

below is a facebook note to my best friend tony who is in new zealand right now. he wound up in a small town who is totally shut down on sundays... meaning he has no where to find food. he is also brave and adventurous and took of to NZ alone. he is couch surfing (or at least trying), being harassed by germans in the local hostel for being american (totally lame and rude), and just bought a small car to travel around in. he was traveling with some random conservative chick from louisiana who wouldnt help him pay for gas. ugh! anyways, here's my note... copy + paste = Today at 1:03am.

hey tony! hope you're alright and i really hope you found some food. i just met up with taylore and to my surprise aaron was not there. it was really nice!! it's always so great hanging out with taylore when aaron isn't around. it's almost like old times when T is really awesome. anyway, i met her at "The Shelter" which maybe you've heard of. it's a "go-go boots wearin', martini drinking, swanky groovy lounge" on grant and alvernon. THEN we decided to go to "The Mint"-- a total dive bar just west on Grant from the shelter. total dive bar! me, T, and robin sang garth brooks' "friends in low places" for karaoke. you would've loved it. i was definitely thinking of you all night. i hope you're doing okay. ian's a huge asshole but i know things will turn around. i can't wait to visit you in december! much love. oh and BTW... NEVER order mildly fancy drinks at a dive bar... aka Yeager... fucking $6.25/shot at the fucking Mint! can you believe it? i ordered three shots before we did karaoke, and it cost me goddam 18.75. insane. i'm still guilt-ridden over it. i mean cmon! just dont order classy stuff at a dive. they charge you big!
mike and i are planning a little hike tomorrow at mt lemmon w/ sierra. mike has never been to mt lemmon so why wait. we really miss you! and i know you wanna come home cuz it's lonely but i know you'll get past it. going abroad solo is totally crazy! remember my first night in hungary i completely cried myself to sleep. anywayz, you will find your groove. it's only just begun. much love. i really love you a lot. xox

my leaving

Today I am sitting here and I feel my leaving. I can feel my leaving, it is coming. I dream of it at night and I think about it all day.
I am also compelled to take on a project. This new clickity clackity shiny keyboard seduces me. I want to make prose and poetry on this keyboard. And then I want it on ink and paper in my hands.
Sudamerica... where are you? Here I come.

i don't like this summer.

today i am unshakably sad due to

• current events
• third world poverty under first world (corporate) exploitation and self-interest
  
• sexism and sexualization in mass media
• my (temporary 'til fall semester) summertime unemployment
• my dissatisfaction with my current role in the Grrls Project

usually bullet points 1-3 don't get to me, seeing as this is reality and i have to deal, but today i am particularly discouraged. bullet points 4-5 are really weighing me down.

i am also self-conflicted over my gut-feelings to write more, as in, maybe being published somehow someway someday. okay enough.

I AM NOT A SLUT--cut the stigma

Please… turn off all cell phones.
Patients… kindly give the office a 24-hr cancellation notice.
They care about my privacy. My rights

listed

right there.

My motor skills failing me, clipboard in grip. I try to make
them function properly
but they shake as I give the doctors permission to contact
my mother just i n c a s e.

I ‘ m 2 2.

The pen in my hand, some promo for some drug company,
slips in the sweat seeping through the creases
in my palm.
My mind swarming in the cerebral fluid underneath my skull.
My head preparing for the worst case scenario.

6 months ago the pre-cancer cells,
the dysplasia,
was mild.

But six months before that the cells, they weren’t even pre-cancer, just abnormal.
there in my cervix in my vagina.
a year later: where is my body now?
Three things can happen, says the doctor.

stay the same

get better

get worse.

My head preparing for the worst
and I take 3 ibuprofen.
goddam hpv. I even took those vaccinations.

colposcopy

The gyno lubes the lips of my vagina she cranks the cool metal opening my cervix
she flashes a light down there like it’s some kind of live-cave
i smell vinegar and the crank cranks harder she takes the scissors
and I can hear the snip clip clip up through the
inside of my ears
I can feel the sharp ends slicing me on the inside
hot warm liquid juices up in my vagina, spills out--reacting to the trauma, i bend my head back and squeeze my hands into one another
and, behind her medical mask, she asks me what my major is
my muscles cramp against the crank while she swipes cotton along the fleshy cervix
the freshly cut, bleeding tissue
and I say Creative Writing

the blood, it burns me inside out

My mother, she had to find out the first time because they accidentally called her, but according to my charts she wasn’t allowed to know any of my information. I prefer not to tell my mother things. So they didn’t tell her, but said please contact your daughter, her pap came back abnormal.

HELLO.

Dontcha know not to say that sorta thing to a mother? C’mon.
My mom, she was accusatory. How many partners have you had, Brooke?
My mom, she was degrading. Who gave this to you Brooke?
It does n o t matter who gave it to me. It doesn’t matter.
My mom hisses. Like the S-word is about to slide off her tongue I can feel the rage.

She wouldn’t stop asking. Harassing, like it was shocking I must’ve had so much sex with so many people to get this disease. Disgrace.

Her nasally voice, “Gosh, Brooke, you don’t have to be so easy.”
Me, I was ready to stitch her mouth shut.

Over thirty kinds of HPV.
My best friend got the kind that gives you warts.
She was in the gynecologist’s office every two weeks to freeze them off her clit.
The pain, she said, the pain, she cried.
A woman, sitting next to me in the waiting room she cried asked why I was there
maybe she thought she was being friendly
but when I said HPV
she got up and scooted down three chairs from me.
You see,
the nurse wouldn’t even look at me.
And I was gone, away, in another country.
If o n l y I woulda known
that she was gonna be: completely alone.

It figures that men are the carriers
and women are the victims.
Could you even i m a g i n e if men were the victims
and women were the invaders?
The thought almost makes me laugh.
It almost makes me laugh.

I AM NOT A SLUT I want to yell to my mother.
Yeah I’ve fucked women, and men,
but I AM NOT A SLUT.

Research shows we are not alone.
Over half of sexually-active people get hpv.
That phone call the doctor my pap abnormal.
Not normal.
every pore in my body bloomed, like a flower on fast-forward
sweet sweat,
fingertips tingling up to the teeth,
my heart humming buzzing numbing: abnormal pap.

Why wasn’t I there, with my best friend? To hold her when other women wouldn’t. Take a look around you.
Do you know that 80% of women will have had genital hpv in their lifetime?
Do you know
that I would have rubbed my vagina on that nurse’s face.
HOW DOES CANCER TASTE BITCH.
We’re supposed to be sisters through this.

one word

One word: queer. This word to me is everything. It is personal, it’s political, it’s individual and it’s collective. To me, I like to think of QUEER as anti-hetero, cuz I’m politically angry like that. And I don’t mean anti-heterosexual people, but I mean anti-heterosexual enforcement and media. I mean ANTI-compulsory heterosexuality, ya know like sister Adrienne Rich, I mean ANTI-heteronormative. And I don’t mean the individuals who are heterosexual, but rather the expectancy of it, the supposed normalcy of it, and the societal privilege that comes with it. QUEER. I love this word. I love its reclamation, its salvation, its declaration. QUEER. I love it because it’s androgynous, ambiguous, malleable, and bold. QUEER. This is the gray area I call my life, the identity that allows me to be who ever I wanna be, and LOVE who ever I wanna love. QUEER. This is the continuum I call reality, the space I call freedom. It is limitless and mixed and mobile. Queer. Yeah it’s okay if you think this, I, may be strange or weird. Somehow, not normal. But that’s okay. Cuz isn’t that the point?

all hail

All hail to the chief.
If I tell you something, believe it.
If you read something I give you, believe it.
If you see
what I see
on that t.v.
well you need to kill it.
You need to kill it.
Cuz that skinny chick
that annoying bitch,
she ain’t real.
That ain’t fuckin’ real
You can’t watch t.v.
cuz what you should see
ain’t gonna play on that t.v.
And if what you should see, is playin’ on the t.v.
well then that’s just ironic.
And it’s still not real.
ALL HAIL TO THE CHIEF.
And just keep feeding the t.v.’s
just keep reading the magazines
and just keep smelling that smell
of Abercrombie and Fitch, you know, you can smell it from the other side of the
mall. And you keep on smelling it, smelling it long after it’s gone.
So here you go, read this instead.
And no, I am not going to tell you the answer.
No, I am not going to tell you this from that.
Just, l o o k both ways before you crossover, and
figure it out yourself.
Don’t you ever get bored of watching the same damn thing,
don’t you ever get bored of hearing the SAME DAMN THING.
And, ain’t it kinda strange? Kinda weird? Just look around. There’s something weird
going on
around here.

La Malinche, Doña Marina, Malinali, Malinulli y Malintzín Tenepal

She has many names. She was born around the year 1505 in the Coatzacoalcos province, with the Aztec birth name Malintzín Tenepal (or Malinal). Her father was a tribal leader, and being born into nobility gave Malintzín special privileges of mobility and education. When Malintzín was young, her father died leaving her as his inheritor, until Malintzín’s mother, “still very young and beautiful” (García 123), remarried and bore a son. In order to pass on the inheritance to her new son and husband, Malintzín’s mother took Malintzín away in the night and sold her into Mayan slavery. Is it so ironic that la Malinche is the coined socio-historical term for vendida against her own people? Malintzín’s mother had a servant whose child coincidentally died, and used this dead child in Malintzín’s mock funeral so that her tribe would not discover the treachery and greed. In the essay Malintzín Tenepal: A Preliminary Look into a New Perspective, author Adelaida R. Del Castillo says, “To be sure, it must have been a very painful, traumatic and confusing experience to have gone from the drastic transition of Aztec princess to a Mayan slave” (García 123). Castillo insists that one can only speculate about Malintzín’s life experience between being sold into slavery and meeting Hernán Cortés, yet some historians say her Mayan slave life was that of “daily toil and drudgery” (Henderson 4), with a perpetual to-do list of food preparation, domestic chores, and caring for the children.
Then the (infamous?) Hernán Cortés arrived to her Mayan village and conquered its peoples. Out of their subservience to the new conquistador, Cortés was given Malintzín as a slave woman among 19 others and lots of material treasures. Malintzín was then christened Doña Marina by the Spaniards, because her intellectualism and knowledge and physical Indian beauty stood above the rest. According to Spanish recordings, Marina is described as compassionate, generous, understanding, and incredibly brave (particularly exceptional for a woman). She quickly became an essential to Cortés and his army when she could translate between the Aztec and Mayan languages. Marina quickly learned the Spanish dialect and was fluent in all the necessary languages. She is recorded to have always been directly at Cortés’ side throughout the Spanish conquest of the New World.
This is how Marina is commonly recorded in history: as the translator for Cortés, and further the essential tool that led Cortés and his followers to victory over the Aztec empire. Without her, most will claim, that Cortés could have never succeeded. She was not only his translator, but a guide, a consultant, “the nurse of defeated soldiers, the comforter of Cortés” (Adams 11) and sometimes an advisor. Because of la Malinche’s apparent devotion to Cortés and the Spaniards (the enemy, the colonizer) she is reputed all over Mexico and the U.S. Southwest Borderlands as the ultimate sell-out, a traitor, an evil-doer against her own people and family. Yet in a realistic context, what kind of personal experience did la Malinche have with her own family and people? She was sold into slavery by her own mother, and the tribes and villages of the Aztec empire were complaining endlessly about Aztec Emperor Moctezuma and his human sacrificial ways and bad taxing. So who turned their back on la Malinche? Like Castillo argues in her essay, one must take in multiple layers of historical information, not the sole fact of her as a translator, in order to carefully consider a “comprehensive account of Doña Marina’s behavior be given, for her actions were contingent upon the historical events of her time” (García 122).


Works Cited
Adams, Jerome R. Liberators and Patriots of Latin America: Biographies of 23 Leaders. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1991.

García, Alma M., ed. Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. New York, NY: Routledge, 1997.

Henderson, James D. and Linda Roddy Henderson. Ten Notable Women of Latin America.
Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1978.

thursday night

laundry machine whirling, pounding fast. the shower mat whipping hard around inside with the blanket that has spoiled milk stained on it from the kitties tipping it over. dishwasher whirring. whirr whirr. lots of dishes finally inside cleaning. all kinds of silverware, all my cereal bowls, my favorite coffee/tea mugs and also the spatula mike uses to flip his grilled cheddar cheese sandwich. the frying pan is in there too (after many uses).
coffee stains brown outlined like an amoeba on my countertop finally wiped away with fresh pine lemon scent sanitizer. after inhabiting its spot near the coffee pot in front of the microwave for a few days. longs days. now it's thursday, 11:30 pm and some of these things are finally cleaned. but not my bedroom so much. a pile of clothes lumps high next to my dresser and i am not sure what is clean and wrinkly, and what is dirty and worn.
counter tops rinsed off. days-old cooked frozen-pizza crumbs fed to the dog and wiped onto the linoleum floor. garbage truck comes tomorrow, so we take out all the trash and recycling then open the garage and put the large containers out onto the street. fresh deodorized bag goes into the kitchen trash bin. i dump crumpled aluminum foil inside, the holder of our hooka ash.
i creep into my sister's room, collect all the 2/5's full hard-plastic cups and nearly-empty fountain soda cups and dump the remains down the sink. recycle and dishwasher bound.
still listening to the whirr whirr and the whirl whirl.
maybe i will get to the clothes tomorrow. maybe my sister will empty the dishwasher. maybe i should throw away that old yogurt in the fridge.
don't forget to mail mom the W2 from brooklyn pizza co. what's the point of filing freakin taxes from a $7.75/hr job anyway. who freakin cares.
don't forget to fill out the time sheet for kore press. don't forget to turn in the attendance sheet for the grrls.
don't forget to pay off the $11 co-pay bill from psychotherapist Dr. Grossman's office. $25 co-pay? yeah right more like over $40 co-pay after the fact they tell me. no more of that stuff. that $11 bill has been sittin there like a dusty old candle on my desk since last semester.
don't forget to make a dentist appointment and don't forget to rebuild the resume. oh the resume.
don't forget to check the mail box! tell mom you bought another $5 movie off of on-demand.
peroni is one of my favorite beers, especially on a thursday night when i need it most. thursdays i need it most.
don't forget to laugh. just don't. set the alarm clock 7:04am.