empty flowers
velar velar velar alveolar
debris:
Trumpet vine can attract hummingbirds! It can also cause humans to break out in a rash! See below!
oh oh oh:
This August, I’m collaborating with Silver Eye Center for Photography to bring you a photography + ecology reading group—FORECAST.
We’ll meet once a month to discuss Michelle Henning’s A Dirty History of Photography and exchange ideas about what it means to photograph a changing, weirding world.
Anyone with an interest in photography, ecology, plants, environmental studies, eco policy, etc. etc. etc. is welcome. Find more info on the Silver Eye website.
and then also:
Glory to god in the highest, I guess. Or pumpernickel to Penelope in the Catskills, maybe.
Socks to Susan in the shoe department.
It all sounds like something being sent. Morning glory is a flower, half of which is being hefted heavenward—but what is that half? What is glory?
No, really, I’m asking you. My question is not a rhetorical device. I’m not asking “What is glory?” so that I can demonstrate my mastery of the dictionary, or my ability to reason a meaning from several sources. I’m asking because, to me, glory has always been an empty word.
“Glory to god in the highest,” is something I said a lot as a child and it meant very little except that it was important to say. Knowing what glory meant wasn’t the point. The point was saying it, proving that I knew god deserved glory, whatever that was. And what mail carrier has time to inspect every delivery? You get things where they’ve got to go and move on. Before I’ve even begun to ask where “the highest” is, I’m saying it again: “Glory to God in the highest!”
God deserved everything, as far as my church was concerned. We were like boymoms for Jesus: our baby can have anything he wants. Our baby, who’s also our father.
Do you see why I have trouble with words?
And now I keep writing about morning glories, those shocking blue pink flowers, and I feel confident about what morning is, but not so confident about what glories are. One time-tested method for exploring a word you don’ tknow is to repeat the sounds of the word until something like a resonance forms.
So, go do that. Go say “morning glory” over and over again—for minutes upon minutes of your flashing life—until something is there.
Here, I’ll start.
Right between the two words, where -ng meets -gl is something like a bubble opening a surface. Or a gulp. Or a drowning person thinking they might not be a drowning person.
Is that glory? I do not know.
Upcoming Performances & Readings
the future is a trap!
okay:
I have poison ivy again, I think. Or maybe a trumpet vine rash. I’m very popular.