3:45 a.m. Two pieces of rye sourdough toast with vegan butter, almond-milk cheese, six Castelvetrano olives, ginger-mint iced tea, a glass of water. I can't stomach any of the cooked food in the fridge this early in the morning. A snack for the cats. 4:16 a.m. The gray overcast sky tinges the day with a melancholy lacking a referent. I lie in bed reading, conscious that the desire to make the most of the early hours competes with the instinct for surrender to these pillows. But my body is hungry—desperate—for sleep. O sleep! I set an alarm for 7:00 and let sleep carry me on its back. 9:03 a.m. I overslept. I have a meeting at 10:30, multiple deliverables throughout the day, and a feverish inbox. Taking pleasure, not pain, in these imperatives is an option, but I miss coffee right now. 10:14 a.m. A headward… Read More...

Generalized A.M. fatigue, though I am still able to corral my concentration and work. My brain, aware of the caffeine and calories it simply isn't getting, foments independent declarations. There are blaring but empty threats of non-cooperation. The mind and the will form an uneasy détente with each other. Occasionally there is a reluctant truce. I whinny passed their squabbles, beyond the bursts of raised white flags, and bring a small project to completion. My inbox still looks like a conflict zone. Reply, reply, reply. "I am sorry..." "Hi, apologies for..." "Thanks for waiting..." ♦ I go to the Apple store with a phone problem that turns out to be unproblematic. But wouldn't this be a good opportunity to get the battery replaced? It's currently operating at only 85%. That's gonna give you a lot less mileage than a newer one. I take the bait knowingly, like a death-conscious fish. One-and-a-half hours,… Read More...

  I wake up at 5:00 a.m., too late for suhūr. I had a dream the night before that I am gliding perfectly on my hands on the floor. Wide, confident handstands stretching from one end of an empty room to another. I do it easily and without strain. I stay with my head on the pillow for a few more minutes, trying to visualize the effortless handstands again. I do not draw the dream. ♦︎ I re-read an essay by James Baldwin called "On Being White and Other Lies," from a 1984 issue of Essence. No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country. "GENERATIONS and A VAST AMOUNT OF COERCION," I text a friend. "Jimmy B., right as usual," he texts back. ♦︎ One of the final… Read More...

3:30 a.m. A cold canteen of water. A green smoothie bowl with one-fourth a cup of blueberry granola, goji berries, chia seeds, and cacao nibs. 10:07 a.m. The on-and-off mental fogginess of the prior month has ceased. It is so unexpected, even magical, a transformation I text a friend about it. "Brain in wakeful state. Weird alertness. I have my focus back. Hmm." 11:01 a.m. In yoga, the teacher is talking about one of the hand mudras. She says it is a hand position of both giving and receiving, and demonstrates with her eyes closed. I think about all the hand positions I know from Catholicism to Buddhism to Islam, and the commonalities and differences of kinesthetic prayer. I hold my hands up and bind my fingers close to each other in a receptive hold. I stay on the mat a… Read More...

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4:43 a.m. Well, Day One for me, but Day Four on the official calendar. I was traveling (non-fasting) the prior three days, and now making my way back to New York on an overnight bus. It was the only way I could participate in a capoeira workshop in another city (with a mestre who only comes to the U.S. from Brazil sporadically) and get back early in time for work. It's a comforting sort of red-eye by land, something everyone I know surveys disapprovingly. My first pre-dawn "meal" is water and half a protein bar. I am hydrated at least, but suddenly faced with my nightmare scenario of not having access to coffee before the designated hour. My hands are tied. I am going to face this day knowingly uncaffeinated. I predict piercing headaches before noon. 4:56 a.m. We've arrived in New York. I'm listening to a podcast… Read More...

Five Questions with [...] is an experiment with flash interviews. The series on poets continues with poet Christopher Rey Pérez. Pérez situates his geographical provenance near Alamo, nicknamed the "Land of Two Summers." The land of two summers is also where I situate our friendship. First there was a chance meeting in the swelter of upstate New York—chance because I was on my way to live in Palestine for 11 months, and Christopher was already making a life there. Before he departed from Annandale-on-Hudson that summer he left a note with a sketch of an angelic donkey on my windshield. Then came the second late summer in Ramallah, the kind that teases with cooling winds before you're ready to face autumnal obligations. Christopher cooked Mexican mole sauce at his home. Under usual circumstances the elaborate meal would be called exquisite; in the context of entrenched occupation, I recall it as… Read More...

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  By gripping him toward the center of an edgeless canyon— He, more beautiful than the dawn. Blueberry your man: squeeze his delicate inner tannins into a clean saucer. Watch his watermelon seeds pool into a dark portrait, The whites of his eyes shining like cool daybreak. Lemon your man in repetitive extraction, then Affix your gaze on his melted sacs and looping rinds. Tamper with the excess pods until they liquefy into a hydrous substance, Your man stirring in a cloudless bowl. All mammalian boundaries between you now dissolved, See to it that no parts of him go wasted, not even The thin folds of his segmented membranes, his fruit’s falsetto. Pineapple your man until his ovaries flower into individual sugarloaves Juiced, follicle by follicle, as a proudly bursting blood orange.   Read More...

Previously: Alphabet of an Unknown City, A-M ni oblit, ni perdó This graffiti keeps crossing my path in Barcelona like a declassified article. The untranslated Catalan works fine if you use that familiar Romance language pincer as a grasping tool. Babel or Barbarian? The trill of vernacularized Latin enfolds me into its secret society of millions, a famiglia without a don. From “gibberish,” noun, a. el galimatías (m) “I can’t read the graffiti; it just looks like gibberish to me. – No puedo leer el graffiti; me parece puro galimatías. b. el guirigay (m) “The singer doesn’t enunciate her words, so it sounds like gibberish.” – La cantante no enuncia las letras y por eso suena a guirigay. c. la tonterías (f) “The senator’s speech all sounded very grand, but it was just a bunch of gibberish and empty promises.”… Read More...

Next: Alphabet of an Unknown City, N-Z almost-thief Señor, señor: What is your hand doing in my luggage? (but because I have been in the country for only twenty minutes, I scramble the words, fishing out the Portuguese bagagem instead of the Spanish maleta, a Portuñol his face registers as a sarcastic grimace) Señor: I am missing a credit card. What do you know about it? (his nails are short except for the left index, digitus secundus, trigger finger, the tip extra-long and sharp; he has neatly perforated the upper seam of my wallet’s zipper) Here, take my seat. I insist. So you don’t ruffle through anyone else’s belongings. Do us all a favor— (onlookers staring; one baby stops crying and sits up straight in his stroller to take in the scene) Señor, señor: Your look of disdain for me confounds… Read More...

On the first day of this year, I climbed the Bunkers del Carmel in Catalonia with 36 long-stem roses, purchased for 3€ each at a flower shop in Can Baró, the enveloping neighborhood. In exchange for one rose, I invited people to record a secret, something which they had never before revealed or wished to keep private. They were encouraged to do so anonymously, semi-anonymously, or pseudonymously. A couple of weeks later, I transported the secrets to the U.S., and translated them from Spanish, French, Catalan, and Italian into English. In New York, I invited 36 other people to read the secrets aloud at a performance in Pioneer Works. The Bunkers are the site of a former anti-aircraft defense system during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. Later, with the accoutrements of anti-fascist warfare dismantled, they became informal housing or "shantytowns" for thousands on… Read More...

Part One here; Part Two here. Bio is a text written / deleted / rewritten on Twitter dot com for one year. That accumulation / deletion / recomposition is now a 736-page book that contains zero tweets. It will be released in May 2018 by Inventory Press. There's no dedication page, but it's informally dedicated to the internet. And to Palestine, where most of it was written. "How do you use a medium against and within its own confines?" That was the last question I posed out loud to myself about Bio when discussing its motivations, propositions, and process. Since then excerpts of the project have appeared in The Animated Reader: Poetry of Surround Audience, an anthology of the 2015 New Museum Triennial (edited by Brian Droitcour). I've also had a chance to discuss it in various contexts, most recently in late 2017 at a closed study workshop at Stuart Hall Library in London. Curator… Read More...

A letter by Denise Levertov to William Carlos Williams. Levertov, born in Britain, emigrated to the United States in 1948, and became a citizen in 1955 at the age of 32. She subsequently lived in Mexico for two years before moving back to New York with her husband and young son. She and Williams shared a correspondence lasting from 1951 to 1962. Any resemblance to real people is purely intentional.  Calle Crespo No. 19 Oaxaca, Oax., Mexico November 24th [1957] Dear Bill,             The construction began at a more reasonable hour today, 8 o’clock instead of the usual 6:30. That 2 rooms & a kitchen could be in this much of a muddle! There was a fault in the plumbing they didn’t catch until there was plaster over it. Now they have to start all over or moldy pipes & burnt… Read More...

I am currently living and working in the U.K. on an art residency at Wysing Arts Centre. Here are some upcoming solo and collaborative events in Cambridge, Nottingham, and London between now and January 2018. 29 Nov 2017 Visiting Artist Lecture Fine Art Research Unit Talks Anglia Ruskin University Maryam Monalisa Gharavi is a visual artist, writer, and theorist whose work explores the interplay between aesthetic and political valences in the public domain. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Film and Visual Studies from Harvard University and an M.F.A. in Film/Video from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Wysing Arts Centre. Gharavi's current work is invested in the live film, or uses of "liveness" in film, video, and performance that activate through restaging, reenactment, remaking, or other transformational strategies.… Read More...