Pass the Flask You Hag: Losing My Virginity at Bowery Poetry

This weekend, George Wallace made my month by allowing my up onstage for Beat Hour @ The Bowery [Poetry Club]. The bill also featured PHIL ASAPH, TED JONATHON and ROBERT GIBBONS and an impromptu finale by Russ Green. I am honored and thankful to have been allowed onstage with them.

It was my first public reading and I was absolutely fucking terrified.

Fortunately, someone got all my public onstage awkwardness on film.

I ramble about about old drunken aunties, divine relationship-enders on the Bayou, the importance of underscoring during blizzards...and about Mick Jagger's shirts. Because let's face it, they're the highlight of any closet. 

Kimberly Kaye at Bowery Poetry Club from Hannah Miet on Vimeo.



Hannah Miet at Bowery Poetry Club from Hannah Miet on Vimeo.

Be gentle. It was literally my first time. 

little awed sighs

With all the blizzarding lately it's been impossible not to look up. Or to click play, then get all sentimental.





Sixteen, sitting cross-legged on a beige suburban carpet,
thawing out two sets of hands and wearing wet wool socks.
You plopped us near the picture window in my parents' house
for front row seats to the lit blizzard falling from the sky.


At some point Lauridsen's "O Magnum Mysterium"
started rivering out Dad's dusty stereo speakers--
a holy hail of voices too divine to be a hymn.


Neither of us could explain how frantic snowflakes synched to solemn notes,
or why our chatter suddenly melted into stares and tears.
We'd stumbled upon the alchemy of little awed sighs.
You clasped my hands silently, like sisters in a Bronte novel--


We thought we must be the only two in Jersey to ever see real magic. 


Now the snow's a fucking mess that ruins new suede shoes,
leaking into murky pools that turn subway steps to bear traps.
Still, I plop near gritty windowsills and stare out urban windows
matching our old spell again with anything falling slowly.
"Et admirabile sacramentum ut animalia viderent Dominum..."


I never could speak Latin.


When snow blows those words back to me I'll always think they mean:
"Little Girls never forget the time God let you see him."

Shameless Self-Promo Moment: THE ECONOMIST

I was published non-poetically in THE ECONOMIST. Happy New Year (except to you, former college econ professor, who gave me a D+ even though I passed all the tests because I never went to the class on lecture days. I TOLD you it was useless busy-work, but you just wouldn't listen...).

Mick Jagger's Shirts: Exhibit A

Mick Jagger's shirts are not like other shirts. They possess many powers. They absorb many secrets. Mick Jagger's shirts want to live among us and are here to make us happy.

Mick Jagger's shirts have the ambition and resources to wear a rock star while other shirts chose to wear ordinary people.

Mick Jagger's shirts have seen things that they can never un-see.

Each one of Mick Jagger's shirts contains a single thread from the Shroud of Turin sewn secretly into the architecture of its fabric. The God Particle is said to be one of Mick Jagger's old buttons. It popped off the top pocket of a brown corduroy button-down with fraying cuffs and a coffee stain on the left elbow one afternoon in 1967 after Mick Jagger snagged it while zipping his jacket.

Mick Jagger's shirts can neither be created nor destroyed. They come into being and pass out of consciousness, manipulating the void. They occasionally surface on eBay, but only to those who need them most.

I sat behind one of Mick Jagger's shirts at an off-Broadway show about a shipwrecked man who eventually rode a sea turtle. I stared at the back of the big, bulky, green and white Bill Cosby sweater wearing Mick Jagger to the theater, and understood instantly that to touch that shirt would be to absorb all the knowledge and understanding of the universe, to achieve enlightenment through a woven, wool conduit.

I decided that I was not yet ready to achieve enlightenment.

Here is another one of Mick Jagger's shirts:

A Lesson in Holiday Prop Choices

it is not impossible 

to have a rip-roaring fight

complete with “Fuck You’s” and finger jabs

while an enormous fresh pine wreath topped with a red bow

is wound around one shoulder like a halo

it may, however, be impossible to do it

and be taken seriously

by anyone 

M.F. Rey's Da Bomb

Found this piece by street artist/graphic designer M.F. Rey the other day. Organics meets pyros. Like the kind of bomb you'd buy at Whole Foods.

Or the kind of stencil you'd blast onto the doors of Whole Foods.

M.F. Rey's "Dynomite":

Dig.

insomnia postcard: you and i and later

i sometimes wonder who will be there when i've grown ancient

who will be alive then, what others will have accumulated

which faces will have come and gone or left and reappeared-- 

returned because they forgot their jacket,

then stayed another decade

i hoped it would be you, this time

that on a bleached-out park bench among squirrels doing calisthenics 

we'll take seats on opposite ends with notebooks and the dailies 

or a bag of stale crushed donuts 

to toss out to the birds

maybe we'll read quietly, or mine raisin-brains for survivors
then ink them down silently with arthritic, knobby fingers

maybe we'll abandon books for chatter about faces going by

and all the time gone by

and how it does get easier,

it seems, 

for people to say good-bye

and do it all while passing a flask of whiskey back and forth

as if we were firm-breasted and unlined, 

anything but shrunken aunties grinning through tea-stained teeth

i hope you'll have wide streaks of grey that run from temple to neck,

wear bright red lipsticks thick as paint that bleed just at the edges

i hope i still wear too much black and have by then adopted

a habit of wearing hats with oversized broaches stabbed into the rim

it happened then. remember?

i do. or don't. 

you do.

and there was that other time--

just pass the flask you hag…