Has a hard Time Making Friends

I'm checking my pulse at every stoplight
I am unsure who to be without you around
to create me, mold me into your carbon copy
lay flat on top of you, push me through
the xerox machine, make me perfect black
edges, make me speak like you do
hopeful and tragic and a little bit rude

I can't take the stare, eyes meet
I'm weak, I want to say, the fangs
are removable- most times--
my smile is delicate tracing paper--falls out &
crackles like burnt scraps

I'm not sure if you'd be okay with all of this--
all of the wanting, the fervent longing,
myt mouth wide open for you to slide
words into
Stare at me again, pose me,
a threat so I can react
adrenaline pulse through the crook of my neck,
a vein, purple bruise of the year

In former days I was less afraid
or perhaps I wore a loud mask
and put it over my face
so I could shout at you

I do all of my own stuntwork
I panic on airplanes and pull down my oxygen mask
Kerosine heart, I will
full-throttle,
jet start to your center
I will plow through rubble to find you
sleeping next to me, still perfectly warm.

Smoking is disgusting but veganism is awesome

So, a debate between my significant other began this evening as a result of me handing him my chinese food leftovers--- General Tso's tofu (and may i add it was quite bangin') Anyway, the usual protocol when I hand my carnivoire boyfriend something to eat that is Vegan is to say, "Doesn't it taste as good as meat?" His usual answer, "It tastes good but it doesn't taste like meat" was not sufficent enough tonight. Instead, he said, "You really do vegans an injustice when yous ay stuff like that. Yous hould justs say isn't it good?" He may have been right.

I have been vegan for many years---mainly because I am horrified by injesting the flesh of an animal and am a total animal rights advocate not in the Peta sense because I despise them) but in the same way I am a feminist. I believe animals deserve to be treated with respect like any other living thing...just as women should be treated equally to men...blah blah blah

Anyway, somehow the debate insued that since I am a cigarette smoker it negates the fact that I am vegan since it is "the most unhealthy thing a person can do to themselves." I agree, however am currently in the thralls of addiction and cannot see the light. Anyway, I argue...well at least I have a better chance of not developing "colon cancer." So the debate continues...

I felt the need to express that Americans have a higher cancer rate than any other country I acn think of yet many Asian and European countries have tons of smokers (any smoking is not so taboo there or outlawed in bars and resteraunts) yet they have a much lower rate of cancer. Can anyone tell me why? I am curious.... can a better diet negate the terrible effects of smoking???

If anyone has any insight on these matters beside sthe obvious..."smoking is bad" rhetoric...I'd be psyched to hear it.

Best wishes,

Zoe Alexandra

vegan smoker

The reason I write poetry

This poem popped up again in my Literary Analysis class. I understand it so much better than I had when I first read it 5 or 6 years ago. It is probably one of my favorite poems.

You Can Have it by Phillip Levine

My brother comes home from work
and climbs the stairs to our room.
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop
one by one. You can have it, he says.

The moonlight streams in the window
and his unshaven face is whitened
like the face of the moon. He will sleep
long after noon and waken to find me gone.

Thirty years will pass before I remember
that moment when suddenly I knew each man
has one brother who dies when he sleeps
and sleeps when he rises to face this life,

and that together they are only one man
sharing a heart that always labours, hands
yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?

All night at the ice plant he had fed
the chute its silvery blocks, and then I
stacked cases of orange soda for the children
of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time

with always two more waiting. We were twenty
for such a short time and always in
the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt
and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.

In 1948 the city of Detroit, founded
by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes
of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died,
no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,

for there was no such year, and now
that year has fallen off all the old newspapers,
calendars, doctors' appointments, bonds
wedding certificates, drivers licenses.

The city slept. The snow turned to ice.
The ice to standing pools or rivers
racing in the gutters. Then the bright grass rose
between the thousands of cracked squares,

and that grass died. I give you back 1948.
I give you all the years from then
to the coming one. Give me back the moon
with its frail light falling across a face.

Give me back my young brother, hard
and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse
for God and burning eyes that look upon
all creation and say, You can have it.

Read it and weep (or not)

Madeline
　
Oh no
No more
Come on
I do all I can
I do all I can
And when I can’t that just means
I have nothing left to give
To you or anyone
No more begging
No more pleading with your eyes
Grasping wrists
No more trying to pull my eyeballs
Out of my head
No one I love ever pleads
No one I love ever tugs my wrists
Ot tries to bend the pipe cleaner
Of my heart
No one I love bothers to call
They make pacts with the devil
They click their spurs down highway 61
They scream and they spit blood cum
But no one I love ever comes
When I call their name
When I drag my body toward mirrors
Rearrange the lipstick and outline
The eyes in kohl
And try to impress
In the wrong dress
A funeral dirge rings
The bells of my ears
I am always teetering halfway
Between hell and high water
I am always expecting the worst
When I turn around
Half expecting that you won’t be
There anymore
There are songs I sing with my heart
The pull of my face against concrete
The slip and slide of my thin skin
Breaks blood on pavement
My fragile skull snaps off the chicken bone
Of my neck
You know, you do all this to me, lover
You do all of this so carelessly
As if you spilled milk
As if someone else is there behind you
A nurse maid or a janitor
To clean the mess of me up.

Russian Prison Tattoos and whatnot

I am curious about Russian prison tattoos. I like them very much and am also scared of them. Such is the way with most things I like. I am almost always simultaneously enamored and terrified.

In other news:

I am back at college trying to earn my bachelors in English. I am taking a required botany class and also English 301-Literary Analysis and Critical Theory. I am overwhelmed as I work full-time in retail purgatory. All is well. I have no real complaints.

My prayers go out to Annie Le and her fiancee' and family. I work at a retail store on the Yale Campus so this atrocity hit close to home.

<3>

Zoe A.

Combat baby--- watch it

Ps. this is what I've been looking like lately. (note the beautiful Virgin Mary above our bed...Paul's Mom got in Bolivia).

xoxo

I will be appearing in the next issue of Psych Magazine
as well as Breadcrumbs Scabs Magazine

Still waiting for the next issue of Dogmatika to drop where you can read 2 more of my poems.


Luv Luv Luv,
Zoe A.

Highly anticipated Update

After a recent hiatius (due to slave labor---working 2 jobs--7 days a week...ahh) I am back with good news.

2 of my poems will be featured at http://www.dogmatika.com and http://http://theinfalliblechair.blogspot.com/ ---Ex Cathedra, a new magazine with publish 2 of my poems in the near future.

In other news, I'll be off to visit my parents in Albuquerque, NM in two weeks which is exciting as I desepately miss them and my beloved Shiba Inu, Sasha.


Also have recently taken an interest in Butternut squash!!!

Much love,
Zoe A.

More about me (as if this blog weren't entirely about me as it is)

Check out my short story, "Coffee Fatality" in the next installment of NANO fiction
http://www.nanofiction.org/