I.

In the place where you sleepwalk,
there are no more footsteps.
The ground is trodden down in spirals
with the imprints of hands that seem drunk.

Sometimes when I’ve been drinking,
my arms slink off of my body
and do things I’d never give them permission to do
if I were sober
and sometimes when I’ve been drinking,
my hands come home after a night of not being mine
and they are covered in mud from the wrist to the fingertips.

It has always secretly bothered and enchanted me
that my sheets smell like wet grass when you fall asleep in my bed.

“Jasmine Neosh will blow you away with her totally unsexy reading.” – K. Condic, 2009

Just a reminder for all, like, both of you that read this thing. I will be reading at the One Night Only release party with three bands I have heard are amazing. Also, there is a rumor, started by me, that I will be attempting a keg stand shortly after my reading for the first time in five years.

Saturday, December 5, 2009
8pm
@ Reversible Eye Gallery – 1103 N. California Avenue
Chicago, IL
$10 admission includes a copy of the magazine
Free admission with pre-order of the first issue

For those of you who cannot attend or who could glean nothing from this advertisement, see www.theonenightonlymagazine.com for details and pre-orders/orders.

Sugar Hill

I have been painting the walls of this place

in preparation for your arrival.

The decanters are polished and arranged in a row

and they a hold a sign between them

that says they have been waiting for your hands.

The tables and the windows have been dusted.

When the light comes in, it has a place to sit.

It can fold its hands between the set of my best silver

and find itself gorging on the warmth of my kitchen.

Therapy, return

News of my grandmother’s apparently pre-existing medical condition as well as the loss of not one but two very important personal friendships has driven me into a kind of emotional shiva. To make matters that much worse I have run out of cigarettes and the ghosts have begun to return. In an attempt to set myself back on some kind of proper mental course that I may eventually return from this Land of Sorrow with which I am so miserably familiar, I have gone on a search for my once ubiquitous but ever-mysterious guru and personal therapist, Gary. 

My new residence in Logan Square has been chosen specifically to place myself in closer proximity to Gary, as well as to my rather ambivalent brother Matthew, my on-again/off-again lover/arch-nemesis, and my favorite ghost. I had been looking for him for at least a week in all of the places I knew Gary to inhabit. I have searched the strip clubs of the west side, even the back rooms, even the bathrooms. I have searched the worst of the worst dive bars, the most disgusting and piss-rivered of alleys. It was on the last day of my search, when I had abandoned all hope to myself and taken simply to stumbling slightly drunk and on the verge of tears through the streets of Logan Square to avoid the prospect of my cavernous new apartment that I found him. He was sitting exactly where I should have found him, perched above the boulevard on top of an abandoned railroad overpass, his legs swinging over the side in a pair of dark brown trousers. I did not waste time wondering how he had gotten up there, what he was doing or where he had been. I found the nearest foothold I could and scuttled up the side and sat beside him, swinging my legs over also, while hipsters on bikes and policemen strolling the beat looked up curiously but did not tell us to come down. 

We sat in silence for a while. He picked at the knee of his trousers. I waited for an explanation but he offered none. I tried a few of the old “how are you? what are you up to?” lines but Gary has never been one for anything but business and he just pursed his lips and shrugged his shoulders loosely in reply. Finally, I let out with it. I told him everything, like how I don’t know what I want, who I want, what I’m supposed to be getting out of any of the relationships I’ve put a lot of work into, why my friendships are so new and yet so much more important to me than the time-honored ones, why I’m such a shitty daughter/sister/granddaughter/cousin/niece/etc., why I never call, why I can’t get as drunk as I used to even when my tolerance seems to have gone down, why sometimes the sky scares me, why I keep seeing people from my old lives when they have no logical reason to be there, in those places, why after I rescued that little boy from getting hit by a CTA bus I was so mortified that I had nightmares of children getting hit everywhere when I wasn’t looking even though the kid and his mother as far as I know are still very much okay and why goddamn it nothing seems to be working. He took it all in, nodding his head gently or seeming to, maybe it was the wind. When I finished, I burst into tears, asked if he had a cigarette and he gave me one wordlessly. I wept a while alone alone alone, and it dropped through my curiously swinging legs onto the pavement below, onto pedestrians’ heads, and they yelled “hey!” but did not press further, they continued on. 

“Damn it, Gary, say something!” I demanded, wanting to shake him, not knowing what to do. 

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said evenly, quietly. “But I’m not exactly sure who you are or what you’re doing here. I don’t really know what you want me to say.”

He turned back to the front and stared off casually. I sat beside there for a while, swinging my legs. It took me a long time to climb down.

Release party

Chicago’s own The One Night Only magazine has asked me to participate in their inaugural voyage (because obviously all magazines are ships) and I am of course immensely flattered to contribute myself in the appeasing of their pagan gods.

To celebrate said inauguration, there will be a release party at the Reversible Eye Gallery on December 11th with music, poetry, and free drinks. I understand that pre-orders have already begun (although the cover fee at the release party will get you a copy at the door). I have contributed a creepy/sweet (sweepy?) poem called “Audiophile” about how I used to record all of my telephone conversations for nefarious and less-than-sexy purposes.  Also included in this is an interview over breakfast with apparently beloved band poet Thax Douglas, so keep an ear/eye out for that.

 

More information available at theonenightonlymagazine.com and here, as the address, etc., become available.

AB

A: It’s stupid to think that the right story or what the fuck ever will win him over again.

B: I know.

A: Are you still doing that?

B: Maybe.

A: So yes?

B: I said maybe.

A: Well what does that mean?

B: It means maybe. It means yes and no or fucking neither. I don’t know, man.

A: That’s stupid.

B: I know. Not a whole lot I do is really all that smart.

A: That’s stupid.

B: I don’t think I’m going to get him back anymore.

A: Good.

B: That doesn’t mean I’m not writing it for him.

A: I don’t get it.

B: Of course you don’t. Of course you don’t.

A: So what then?

B: Nothing… Nothing.

A: (Looks at B)

B: (looks at A)

A: Do you want a cigarette?

B: Yes. I do.

B: (fumbled sounds. Exhalation)

B: Thanks.

A: No problem.

A (looks at B)

B (Looks at A)

(They both look away)

A: You’re not going to win him back, you know.

B: I know.

A: You don’t care, do you?

B: Not one fucking bit.

A: Okay. Just so we’re clear.

It is so rare that I make myself laugh as well as someone else I feel like I should share it

Facebook conversation with local performance poet Shawn Guiney

Shawn

you didnt say goodbye i barely saw you last night!!! WTF

1:20amJasmine

I know, I’m sorry :)

1:20amShawn

:(

1:20amJasmine

I am sort of like that random ethnic friend in bad urban-targeted movies about dancing.

I just come to make you feel rad and then I leave and no one knows where or why I went.

1:21amShawn

LOL awesome

1:21amJasmine

Did you continue to enjoy yourself, in spite of my hitherto-unexplained departure?

1:22amShawn

lol yea till i vomited lol

why did you leave so fast?

1:23amJasmine

Stephanie, Andrew and Emily were all leaving at once and you were presumably making out with that girl so I didn’t want to be all alone at a party in a strange house full of people I did not know.

Or was at least not drunk enough yet to think that was a good idea.

1:23amShawn

lol oh thats when it happened

1:24amJasmine

I am actually mortified of large groups of people, especially people in the middle of an activity like pumpkin carving.

1:24amShawn

lol it is dangerous

1:25amJasmine

It is brutal and arcane. Too much propensity for cutting out the hearts of things. Could have turned into the Manson family shit at any moment. I thought it best to leave.

I mean, they were even cooking the seeds. That’s like what warriors do in the old world. They eat their enemies to possess their power.

And pumpkins are mad powerful.

1:26amShawn

LOL you entertain me

1:28amJasmine

I try. Really I am just glad that your vomiting did not drive the congregation into a frenzy

1:28amShawn

i watited till the end

1:28amJasmine

The seeds we salt and eat are sort of like the vomit of pumpkin existence

1:28amShawn

it was the perfect timing

1:28amJasmine

I like to vomit at the ends of bad jokes I tell.

1:28amShawn

LOL

1:29amJasmine

If it doesn’t go over well, I must’ve fucked up the punchline because I was about to get alcohol poisoning.

1:29amShawn

right a book

1:29amJasmine

And then I am the warm pukey nucleus of life that the whole world loves to gather around and clean up after

1:30amShawn

thats special

1:30amJasmine

It is a good place to be.

1:31amShawn

pergitory

1:32amJasmine

Purgatory is the most passive-aggressive of afterlife options in Catholicism

I have a huge problem with it.

1:32amShawn

hee hee

1:32amJasmine

It is almost as bad as Ohio.

Almost.

1:32amShawn

i think you would enjoy hell to much so i think i will send you there instead

what about arkansas

1:33amJasmine

Did you know that the actual theory regarding Satantic genitalia was that it was made of ice? Because in Dante’s circles of Hell, the final circle was actually quite cold, because it was so far from God’s light and warmth, like Pluto

1:34amShawn

interesting

1:34amJasmine

So if you ever hear me cursing someone with the frigid dick of Satan, you’ll know why.

‘Cause it’s accurate.

1:36amShawn

thats hot

1:36amJasmine

No, cold.

Quite.

A fine explanation of the way to tell a story

The way it comes to me through my old teacher, Mort: “Well, how do you make a sculpture of an elephant? You get a block of wood, and you cut out everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.”

Which is all fine and good, and the best craft advice I have ever gotten. But what if you’ve forgotten what an elephant really looks like?

A facebook comment that was too long and needed to be clipped

When I die, shoot my body into space.

Tell my children that I’ve left them,

that I hopped onto the back of a westbound jalopy

and am bouncing through the countryside

with barrels full of booze by my side

sleeping in a communal bed with circus performers.

Take them to Cirque de Soleil every summer.

Tell them they’re related by blood to certain myths

and we have a family-wide romance with theory.

Fill their sleeping ears with traincars

that burn in the night like a grieving forest

and adorn themselves with landscapes they’ve conquered.

When they’re old enough,

tell them that I’m sorry.

Tell them that there are roads in this same country

where my ghost climbs trees to string ropes between them

and somewhere I am there playing cat’s cradle with the moon.

Most importantly, please tell yourself the same thing.

Children can always sense a liar.

When I die, tell everyone that I’ve got better shit to do

than lie around in the ground all day, static, and boring, and gray.

Ghosts in the bookshelf, ghosts in the stereo, ghosts in the bed. Ghosts ghosts ghosts.

I am currently on page 695 of Infinite Jest, having come back from a very necessary pile of cigarettes.

My brother in arms has a great deal of scorn that is masking something else, probably anger and pity, with regard to my List of Dead Men I’ve Loved, a list that he has expanded for me to include Dave Foster Wallace. The list was a joke, once, a “can you believe this? This is true. This is absurd. I can’t believe this. But it’s true,” type of thing, to ease people into my strangeness by just going ahead and showing them how strange I really am and laughing at it, which I’ve found is just the easiest way, this balls-out “I say weird shit, and I’m always right and always honest when I do so you can’t be mad at me or hate me” thing that for whatever reason (on this I only speculate privately and briefly) a lot of people find endearing. The thing no one has pointed out to me yet is the grand coincidence that most of the people on my list lead absolutely miserable lives, internally. When I expand the list and go over the people who I have felt most sympatico with, people who I could point to, whose art or whose lives I could point to, and say “they get it,” it’s startling how many of them chose to, as DFW would say, eliminate their own map for keeps. I am not suicidal and am not so given to idolizing anyone anymore that this strikes me as romantic. It’s just an unfortunate coincidence, or less than that, an abstraction, the fact that we are all, the people on this list and me, insanely fucking lonely on some almost primordial level, cosmically fucking lonely. What has enabled me to endure is mysterious to others and almost beside-the-point, it is so stupid and simple. There is no question in my mind that it will continue to allow me to endure, if only for sheer stubbornness. But, I mean, fuck, man. You have to look at it and see the coincidences, and when I go through the list of living people with whom I identify, wonderful artists and people whose talent could make our lives mythic, there are a handful that I know will probably be added to this list of mine for all of my efforts, and the whole thing, the endurance and the failure of it in others, well. It just makes the loneliness all the fucking worse.