Ladyfest I.E. Sunday, August 2nd, 2-11 pm.

Everyone is welcome to attend! This is a community-based one-day art and music event. Ladyfest I.E. will feature creative workshops and music at Back to the Grind coffee shop in downtown Riverside, CA from 2-11 p.m. I'm presenting:
4:00 p.m. power poetry: the magic to transform
8:00 p.m. Ruth Nolan poetry reading



here is a more detailed schedule (Pharaoh's den is upstairs at the Grind)
2:00-2:50 p.m.
RYPA at Pharaoh's Den
Planned Parenthood at Back to the Grind

3:00-3:50 p.m.
Self-Defense at Back to the Grind
Zine Making at Pharaoh's Den

4:00-4:50 p.m.
Consent at Pharaoh's Den
poetry workshop/Ruth Nolan/at Back to the Grind

5:00-6:00 p.m.
Machismo in the Punk scene whole group discussion

6:15-7:15 p.m.
Food Not Bombs Dinner

7:15-7:35 p.m.
Jackie Joice Spoken Word

7:35-8:00 p.m.
Tuberculosis

8:00-8:20
Ruth Nolan Poetry Reading

8:20-8:45 p.m..
Coke Bust

8:55-9:20 p.m.
Sick Fix

9:30-9:55 p.m.
Parche de Ira

10:05-10:30 p.m.
For Fuck Sake

10:40-11:05 p.m.
all or nothing hc

this image can also be viewed at
http://i720.photobucket.com/albums/ww204/radical_grita/August2ladyfestflyer.jpg

Circus Circus Hotel Casino, Reno + Vegas and a Slinky T-Shirt

Ruth and baby Tarah wearing Irish sweater + Ruth and Tarah high school graduation party

So I realize she's doing the same thing I was doing at her age, and that is getting her own place to live. And she turns 21 on Tuesday. I'm going shopping for some bling for her, and maybe for me, too, and having a surprise party for her at her workplace-doctor's office next week (ice cream cake, same kind I had at her baby shower 21 Julys ago) and a nice dinner with the grandparents at Wally's Desert Turtle, a classic 50's place in Rancho Mirage. Lovely stuff. And I had to borrow $350from her in cash because I lost my ATM card last week, and she's parked her Lexus on the street overnight because her and Alex are out and about in his Camaro, and I'm putting together issue #3 of Phantom Seed literary magazine. Life in a shimmer world of mirage, we are so Palm Springs. I'm mom and I drive a modest Toyota RAV4. I do have a classic 1989 Nissan Pulsar T-Top that's parked in driveway next to the missing palo verde tree, with a cover on it, but it needs a battery.

OK, who writes about this stuff? I am starting to understand the idea of mid-life-crisis in its full blows.....this isn't a temporary hitch, it's a knockout in a glaring boxing ring, and, how did I get here? I'm only 46, and I feel 23. So, when did all this life procession itself by? I'm contracting images of trapeze artists and sword-swallowing strong men, baby elephants in pink skirts and a full bar that revolves on a kiddy merry-go-round.....the idea of "circus" of the absurd drives itself into the garage of my head. What hugely outgrown outfit is this costume of a three bedroom, two-bath, two-car-garage, swimming pool + jacuzzi house falling around my ankles? Weight has poured off of me in recent months, and the ceiling caves in. I'm the star of a one-woman-disintegration in slo-mo, happening too-fast. A wire slinky, uncoiling apart and together back and forth descending the stairs. The old kind, from when I was a kid. And when the wires got ever so slightly bent, the slinky wouldn't work anymore. And the wiring harness in that RAV4 was chewed through by a big rat that got under my engine hood a few years ago. Cost $6,000 mostly covered by AAA.


Tarah in Kaui, Hawaii at age 13

I am reeling from this sense of a sledgehammer coming down on my head. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm so single my teeth hurt. I'm so alone in this house the dog has now appropriated the wicker couch where my star blanket and panda bear live. My abandoned bed by night, the sleeping couch by day. I'm so single I'm digging up old coffee cups from a 1989 stopover in Las Vegas (Apple Valley to Zion National Park) to remember when she was a wee little thing. I'm so single I'm listening to the New York Dolls at full blast on a crappy PC speaker. I'm so single I'm abandoning my rubber bands. I'm so single I have my shiva deity parked at my left wrist. I'm so single a dusty printer is staring me down. I'm so single I might go buy a bitch on a rope soap set for one and a small bottle of marijuana-infused shampoo. It's time to go visit my cool, always-humorous and humor-finding D.J. and rockstar guitar and bassist brother Jerry, who lives in Silver Lake, L.A. and drives a smooth Mercedes. He'll ferret me around town to clubs and fun things and music scenes and help me get my mojo back, and he'll laugh at the wildest stories I tell, he's only 15 months younger than me and we always were close as kids.

I'm so single I don't remember how to hang shower curtains, and so single I think the overhead fluourescent lighting in her vintage 1960 Palm Desert Country Club micro-apartment is cool. I'm so single I'm weeping gratefully that she is only 2 miles down the road. I'm on the other end of golf from her. Wildly swinging at a solo game I don't know how to play and have long resisted learning, all stubborn ten tennis years I've spent here (I used to be a tournament player as a teen/young adult, so that stuff is easy for me,) a tiny white ball bending in an arc towards the sun, and then out of site, the idea of finding the hole, a blackhearted joke of the lonely desert soul, nevermind the basket of yellow-green tennis balls parked in the garage, waiting to be hit into precise square courts, that's one game I know how to win. As if it mattered, my most-valuable-varsity-tennis-player trophy sitting on a shelf. Long before Tarah was born. We're not in high school anymore. Neither is she. Singlehood, a lightweight paperback book waiting to be put into script.


Tarah wearing the Slinky t-shirt + Mom, Catalina Island camping trip....Tarah high school graduation, 17, in 2006

My daughter, and most memorable recent lovers, are blue eyed with blonde hair. Except for Tarah's dad, black & brown and tall, stunningly handsome guy of Sioux Indian ancestry, former Army Ranger. A picture of him at 23 melts my eyes into summer ice cream, shirt off, red beret at perfect asshole tilt, and cold-blooded stare. I've gotta find those pictures he self-took of us in the desert back in the day, both of us holding AK 47's and bullet belts draped around my chest and waist, and the ubiqitous 12-pack of beer perched on a rock behind us...he runs a good sweatlodge and has good tattoos, he lives in Denver. I have been a superb mom. Even today, on moving day. I thought she'd take more furniture from her room but she doesn't want the dresser or bed. She did come back to do a load of towels and raid the cupboard: chicken soup, a box of couscous (I raised her eating exceptionally well) and other things I'll never realize are missing, I'm sure.

At least (or most) I have my writing career, they all say. Shit, I was never one of those late 80's, big-haired, reebok-wearing, Jane Fonda aerobic wannabes (though I did once do a gym workout to songs by the Pet Shop Boys with my friend Suzy, who had just had a breast enlargement.) No malls for us, just river rafting, camping, hiking, trips to Hawaii and Ireland, New York and the east coast.....and all kinds of museums and poetry readings, of course. She did the coolest kid things, like posh private schools and trips to Disneyland in limos with rich girflriends, ASB and proms, she was the only grandkid on both sides for years and all the expensive presents under the Xmas tree from childless aunts and uncles were for her, she even had her own pony in the backyard at one time! How might one such as I feel such angst, so independent I hiked remote desert peaks while 6 months pregnant, by myself, stayed on the mountain bike till my 8th month, and ventured to carry Tarah to the top of Mt. San Jacinto in a kiddy backpack at 15 months? "When she is out of high school, I get to do what I want!!!!"

To paraphrase my writer-friend Mary Sojourner, writing of one of her own perilous life passages, it's a bit like traversing one of the too-tight lava tubes that lace the underground around Flagstaff, Arizona, where we both lived in the mid 1990's (she helped me with my master's thesis of poetry, "Negotiating With Testosterone), walls sharp and unyielding but no other way through, and blacker than dark. Gloves, gloves, I need gloves. And new brake pads. Oh, forgot, my friend Mike just did the front brakes on the Toyota the other night, just in time. Now what, now what.


Tarah and some of the hands that fed, or ate....

Ruth's KCET Arts Block Poetry Interview

For anyone interested in hearing my poetry interview and reading on KCET Arts Block live.....

http://kcet.org/explore-ca/on-demand/podcasts/archive-page2.php

Scroll down on the KCET Arts Block column on the above link and you'll see the link to my interview.

In the interview, I expound somewhat diametrically on poetry, the desert, and...you guessed it, desert poetry, along with some of my own poetry.

Thanks to Ching-In Chen, my terrific and kindly interviewer (and stellar poet!) and my poetic consort and role model Juan Felipe Herrera, whose interview is coupled with mine on the link.

Lykken Trail

I read a newspaper headline while I was at Del Taco in Palm Desert, where there are no drive throughs, and I ordered two hard shell bean tacos and a green burrito and read the story of how two hikers' bodies were found on the Lykken Trail just above Palm Springs, they both went out mid-afternoon last Saturday when it was about 115 degrees and super humid, it happens every year. Why don't the trailheads out here have severe heat warnings? You can't even fly an airplane when it's this hot. Extreme heat can, and does, ground flights here. There's a big disconnect between landing here in a new car with hella A/C, and stepping out....

Having been hospitalized several times for dehydration in recent years myself, and that with drinking mega-water and gatorade and doing all the right things (stay in shade, wear heat and sunscreen) and STILL getting way messed up, well, yeah, it's hotter than hell, and that's a concrete statement emblazoned in melting roads. Us and Death Valley sharing the nation's top temps last weekend. Even in the middle of the night. There is zero shade on these desert hiking trails. Barely even a bush. Shade is THE essential desert survival tool, that, and water. Lots of it, carry at least a gallon, not in plastic because the heat leaches poisons out, maybe a virgin gas can, in the car wherever you drive. More water, more water in a place with virtually none than most people can imagine drinking in their entire lives.

The weirdest thing is you can look right down onto Palm Springs, a thumbprint away, just below all those trails looping across the mountain flanks, so this adds to the sense of very false security. But the town is its own artifice, its own temporary erection on the waves of heat on its sand-scraped surface, so buying into any of it as real is a fallacy. A distortion of light on sand. Bending the mind. That's why people come here to drink and play, do things they would never dream of doing anywhere else - you've heard of what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas?

To begin to attempt an articulation of the dishonesty of this place: how about the covered naked bridge (how oxymoronic can it get?) above Indian Canyon Blvd, arching from one nude hot springs resort to another.....and, the fact that my daughter went to school with a young man whose parents own the resort....I've long gone to nudist-flying Deep Creek Hot Springs, on the naked high desert backside of the San Bernardino Mountains, so it was no shock to either of us. Over the top is an understatement for this place. Anyway, it's a lot better, but less interesting for sure, than an all-expenses-paid three day trip to the small town of Muscoy, wedged between Rialto-at the edge of Frisbee Park - and the murder-capital-of-the-U.S. west side of San Bernardino. I heard that one of my former poetry professors from CSUSB was murdered with a baseball bat in downtown Muscoy some years ago.

Maybe people are trying too hard. To get the the top of Mt. San Jacinto and back down in a day, and various folks have died attempting that one in both summer (120) and winter (ice), Cactus to Clouds is not recommended for the weak. A friend of mine, Jack, who is highly educated, from Vermont, and looks just like a young Richard Burton, has invited me to go, but, uh, well, maybe the Bump n'Grind, another hike down here, is more my style now, only 4 miles not twenty, and a mere 1,000 foot elevation gain and drop, not 10,000. Growing up in the remote desert, like I did, the only thing to do is drive way on dirt powerline roads and hike in the desert during the nicer months of the year; almost-frozen beer is for summer.

Well, what happens in Palm Springs doesn't even happen in Vegas. And those hikers may looked down and thought they were hallucinating, before they succumbed to the psychotic horrors of quick heatstroke and death, which probably set in within a few hours or less from when they handily started their hikes, the nursing home where my stalker's father died a few years ago in a blizzard of 120 + degree days, it's on Ramon Road near Kirk Douglas Drive and the waterfall at the Palm Springs Airport. Superglide.

Redlands Boulevard

Thumbprint

How can I live in a trough and graben indent between the Pacific and Continental plates so low the sea once through here crashed to shore, the valley of little shells. Uh, it's so hot it takes all effort to not melt, out for dinner at 9 pm and `107 degrees, misty humidity in the streetlights, looks like fog, and wind from the south full of damp air, thunderstorms somewhere. 45% humidity, which at 107 degrees at 9 o clock at night is...being shut in a bathroom with a hot shower going, full steam. Hard to breathe. Reggae is the answer and smooth dancing with tights on, looking into the mirror in my guest bedroom. I think a giant stepped here in between.

The dogs pretty much own my master bedroom now, I haven't slept on my bed for months. Bare mattress and Brindle is on it. He's the new mister of this place. It's his bed. I only go in there for clothes. He wears the gangster chain. Neither Shasta or he will go outside to pee or eat because of the heat. They subsist on dog treats. I sleep on the wicker couch. It started with Christmas ornaments. I have a star quilt and a panda bear. I'm going to my friend Gayle Brandeis' wedding tomorrow in Riverside and a baby shower also there for another friend in the evening, Amy Floyd from my Inlandia Writers workshop. She's having a little boy next month. Tarah is on a dime moving out, engaged, wedding's bumped up, and I'm paying for flowers.

Rosy sunset yesterday. I sat on the rocks above Box Springs in Riverside as the sun began to go down. For a long time. On the edge of wilderness, limned by the merge of freeways. With a safe and nurturing friend. We shared a power spot, inhabited by Cahuilla Indians, until it was more than completely dark. At the base of the sacred mountains, a place I've learned to hike and love when I'm making my rounds from the desert to the I.E., still doing it for now, more than 2 1/2 years and no sign of the pilgrimage letting up. I realize that the best thing for me to do is sit, wherever I am. So yesterday, in evening air that was beautifully cool, I sat on the rocks at Box Springs until I felt the scenery circling around me. Like red-tailed hawks above the Asistencia and Mary Jane Cemetery on the other side of the ridge.

Mike Cluff a poet/teacher friend offered to help me put together Slouching Towards Mt. Rubidoux Manor. As did another of my students. April Durham, co-editing Phantom Seed issue 3 with me. Saw Reggie Woollery, my friend and also the UCR-CA Museum of Photography artistic director at Back to the Grind. And Frey, from my writer's workshop. I'm doing a poetry workshop for Ladyfest on August 2nd. I'm scoring the submissions for Sun Runner magazine writers issue; that's a desert magazine out of 29 Palms. My friend Wendy will meet me at Gayle's wedding, and my friend Michael will go with me. Chrystine my drum priestess held a drum circle in Idyllwild today and then she called me. Kath Abela & Deb Kolodji invited me to a poetry workshop. Very sweet friends. Keeping me knitted in the loop. I'm a kite without a string. Tarah is moving out next week. I am in the big house alone. Me and the A/C.

A friend calls to tell me that there are only two places hotter than where I am tonight: Thermal, California, which is only a few miles down the road from me, and Death Valley.

My daughter, almost 21, is drunk

FUCKING ASSHOLE
there, she said it and I echoed it.
My good friend C. the drum wizardess
says to articulate my power
and, well, it's better
than driving the car on the freeway
going 120 miles per hour,
couldn't do that anyway
the car is out of alignment
and I think the tailpipe is falling off
my friend M. a car buff as it turns out
had my car over the weekend
and he detailed it out, even
did the tires, fixed the garage door opener
and taught me where to put it
on the headliner and where to push
to get it to connect, he is one with cars
and he's so cool he refused any money from me
the sign of a true gent, a real friend
doing something from the heart, for free

ahh, whoops, young adult angst revenge!

THE HEAT IS A MOTHERFUCKER
and it's all okay, TAKE ME ON, 114 degrees at noon
10 pm and it's still 102
get in the pool? no joke.
the water's about 92.

FUCK THE BANK
so the house is $100k upside down?
Sometimes she's the mom these days
and I'm some kind of 13 years old.
Funny stuff, huh?
ha ha ha ha ha.

nowhere to run, time to walk
she's going to drive to her boyfriend's
she's having a meltdown and hit her head on the wall
and he won't answer his phone
my fault, I bought the wine
and the bud light
and I'm drinking none.
I, well I, have awesome prescription drugs.

She cooks dinner for his --34u47847$&%($%&( mom
gets screamed at
cleans up their couch after the cat has diarrhea on it,
pays a lot of their bills
listens to witch-mom's wine-soaked convolutions
The kids love each other
it's all good with me
even if my daughter is paying for the wedding.
Ok, yeah yea, they're in love. Uh huh.
Best of all, he's a very, very good man.
In spite of tonight. Give him a break, he's only 23.

Uh, where are the parenting books?
Hello, 1-800 post partum parent, yes?
almost 21? teach her to pole dance.
move out of the house (you, not her)
go to the Cobalt club in L.A.
one night it's poetry,
the next night, it's punk rock.
That's right, I grew up on the Sex Pistols.
Okay, okay okay

I'M GONNA HAVE IT MY....WAY
good. She's decided to call the fiance
to duke it out on the phone
why is he putting together
a crossword puzzle with his mom tonight
instead of being here with her?
When she's had a horrible day,
she's been working too hard,
taking care of them.
I'm glad glad glad she's here.
The upside down pineapple cake
sponges us together tonight
and the cherries on this one
are plump and real and they're not
even cut in half like a non-ass.
Take that, cynics.