AFRO-PUNK SCREENING THIS SUNDAY

APRIL 18TH 2010

It’s a well-known fact that female praying mantises bite off the heads of males during intercourse; they fuck them and immediately kill them. It’s considered sexual cannibalism. I consider it a sane reaction to an insane situation. The males pump more vigorously after they’ve been beheaded, which makes me hate them down to their gooey core. The truth of the matter is that the females would rather be eating, so the males often engage females in a courting dance in order to change their interest from devouring them to mating with them; it’s a manipulative distraction. As if they have any idea what’s good for her, or any idea what they are getting themselves into.

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Where I am now is in the woods of rural Ohio. No one is allowed on this land but women, so I don’t mind so much that I have to co-exist in a cabin with thousand of ladybugs. The place is covered in them, their little red cloaked bodies moseying along every surface or hurrying through the air with rice-paper wings. They wait up for me to come home, nestled on my pillow until I gently brush them away and turn my back. They guard the screen door that’s falling off its hinges. They swim in the toilet, meeting their ultimate end in a swirl of piss and shit, and they congregate under the sponge on the sink. I look out the window and there they are, spying on me from the outside. They must expect to have meals with me because every time I go to pour myself some cereal they are awake and waiting at the bottom of the bowl, or resting on my avocado, or getting impatient on the lid of the almond butter. As I sit with my laptop, they crawl across the screen and stop right in the middle. You never pay attention to us anymore.

In the UK, they are called ladybirds. How much more delicate and classy! Yes, I like that name so much better. The name is derived from paintings of the Middle Ages that depicted the Virgin Mary wearing a red cloak. The spots are said to represent the seven sorrows and the seven joys of the Virgin. The ever-virgin. I see nothing but fourteen sorrows there.

I sit at the small table in the cabin and reread Rebecca Solnit’s book, “A Field Guide To Getting Lost.” I open to the page where I left off last and find a ladybird’s carcass between the words, “blue” and “distance.” The blue of distance. It refers to the blue that lingers on the horizon, that moving blue that’s the color of longing and desire. It represents the things we will never obtain, the changes we’ll never see, or perhaps the things we already have and are willing to discard in order to hold on to that feeling. We can travel through the sky, but we can never live in it. Herein lies the reason we love tragedies more than comedies. You can never touch the blue on the horizon, and you like it that way. We linger on; some thing’s are always far away.

I spot a baby praying mantis crawling across the kitchen table and close the book. She’s the length of a toothpick and visibly nervous, crawling slowly among a congregation of ladybirds. She’s uncertain how to behave in front of the other ladies knowing that she will inevitably sin, according to their standards. But she will do whatever it takes to survive: abandon, destroy and hope for the best. With no idea what’s to come, she lives up to her name: She raises her front legs and prays.

EAT HER DUST (revised)

We formed a hushed audience to the absurd spectacle in the parking lot of the funeral home where the service for my great Aunt Margie was held. Her sons and daughters, my aunts and uncles, stood in an anxious circle waiting to grip a handful of ashes from the swindled urn. Someone, an uncle I presume, had stolen the small gold box from the altar when no one was looking. Someone else, a logical aunt perhaps, catered the impromptu event with small white conical paper cups from the water cooler. Huddled together, a grieving football team, they shouted and elbowed over her dusty parts. My father whispered, almost completely silently mouthed, all of his words to my mother: This is your family. A freak show! A dozen grieving lunatics scooping their souvenirs like Italian ice. My mother nervously sucked her thumb, a habit carried over from infancy. My eyes expanded like inflated balloons. We would have watched with our jaws dropped, but we feared the swirling ashes. We didn’t want to accidentally eat the remains or be unwillingly spoon-fed by the wind. We just didn’t want to taste her. When my mother removed the finger from her mouth, glistening wet, she took my hand and walked me towards the car. I could feel the warm saliva pressed inside my palm as I counted my steps, a nervous habit carried over into adulthood. I climbed into the backseat and smoothed the skirt of the black crushed velvet dress with a slick palm. The clinging gray flakes (maybe her pancreas, maybe her heart) smeared across me like finger paint. My words were never whispered, never mouthed, and only thought: I've never touched anything so dead.

& LATELY