sew

Give someone a sewing machine and with a little luck they’ll feed their family. Let’s Eat.

A sewing woman returned to her guesthouse. She splashed water on her face, changed clothes and spit into red roses. She kick started her cycle and went to the market inside a labyrinth.

At her corner stall she keyed multiple locks. She stacked numbered wooden shutters. She dragged out her Butterfly sewing machine, ironing board and manikins.

Dummies wore exquisite yellow, purple, blue, white shimmering silks decorated with sparkling faux-paws silver stars, moons, and small round reflecting balls. Her skill designed fabrics for women needing elaborate sartorial refinement for engagements, weddings, and cremations.

She stayed busy with serious fittings and adjustments. Her sewing universal process was selecting fabric, measurement, ironing backing, a ruler, white chalk to mark pleats, cutting, pushing her machine treadle, pins, threads, trimming edges, hand sewing clasps, shiny connections, and ironing.

Threads inside a slow prism flashed light and shadow as needles danced through cloth in endless conversations. Needles talked about traditional conservative morals and opportunity-value cost.

Thread followed their conversation. Together they measured precise calculations establishing a stop-loss number.

All explanations have to end somewhere.

Sky darkened.

Ceremonial drum thunder sang vocal intensity

Lonely lost suffering foreign tourists in Cambodia shuddered with fear

What if I die here

How will my family and friends begin to realize my pure intention to witness 1,200 years of dancing Angkor laterite stoned history gnarling jungles revealed by natural strobes 

Lightning flashed skies

Giant flashbulbs illuminated petrified children

Buried inside cement caverns

Eyes eating cartoon images on a plasma scream

Skies opened

Rain lashed humans

Some laughed, others cried

Tears dissolved fear

Sweet dreams, baby

Smashing blocks of ice inside a blue plastic bag with a blunt instrument created a symphony outside unspoken words as a homeless man with a pair of brown pants thrown over a thin shoulder sat down to rest. Shy women waiting for Freedom averted black eyes.

Aggressive women manipulated stacks of government issued denominations trusting an implied perceived value in exchange for meat, fruit, gold, and fabric.

Counting and arranging denominations inside broken light beams, cracked cement, mislaid wooden planks covering sewage channels, debris, feathers, jungles, and jangled particles they surveyed commercial landscapes with dispatched dialects near rivers revealing stories with fine stitched embroidery. Needles led thread. 

5 rhythms in dance

Relaxed, he asks what I dream about. My imagination, perception and sensation means scrubbing cloth, wringing out water, hanging cloth on hangers, ironing cloth, folding cloth, bagging cloth, weighing cloth, handing cloth to strangers, accepting money, smiling and dreaming of freedom. I dream dance.

He traces my forehead, breasts, and jealous thighs. He dreams I have a real life with real opportunities. Courage. Self-esteem. Freedom. Dignity. He takes me far away from here. We escape to a beach. I see silent crashing blue and white waves. Feeling the sun on my face I smell the sea. I run into blue/white water shouting The Sea! The Sea!

I wear a long white cotton dress. It feels invisible on my skin. I am brown and content. I am free. He memorizes my small brown hands, heart, head and lifelines. They are heavy deep real and calloused from laundry. He is gentle with me. I am a hungry animal. I release my repressed sexual energy. I trust him. I give myself to him.

I am a slave. He cannot save me. This is an unpleasant fact.

Edging my skin realizing sensations, I feel safe and protected. I curl into his arms.

Without words I say my family is poor. There is no chance for us. He’s been in country long enough to know how my culture works.

My father is seventy-three and ill. I have numerous aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces and abandoned relatives. They smell money when they see a white face. They beg for money with fake reasons. They play their woe is me sympathy card. They are traditional and narrow-minded. They suffer from ignorance, envy and jealousy and want.

Desire and greed is their master. I told them Thorny is my benefactor. Thorny thinks I was abused as a child. He found a doctor to assess my condition. They said it was too late to do anything to help me. My life is more silent laundry.

Thorny talked to my father using an interpreter. Thorny asked specifics - was she abused? Father said I wasn’t abused. Was she hit in the head as a child? Did she suffer from a head injury? No, no, no, my father said. He said something happened to me when I was two.

I think they are afraid of Thorny and don’t want to tell him the truth. He flew home for three months. He plans to come back and get paperwork so I can leave and join his family in OZ. Fat chance. My luck ran out.

I don’t hold my breath. I dance.

I exhale my dancing quest. I showed my lover and he’s happy for me. If it’s possible, he signed. He knows my father has to approve any relationship with Thorny depending on cash amount. Marriage is a big maybe like my sister did.

If my family agrees they determine a pre-paid wedding dollar amount, say $3 grand. There’s a pre-nuptial waiting period, filing government papers. Pay greasy greedy officials. The government requires foreigners to prove they make $2,500 a month. Everyone here has a hand out. A wedding party will cost $200-$5,000 to impress friends with our social status. Big deal.

My father is afraid to lose me. He will say no. My lazy sister needs a slave. This is my fate. I am happy. It’s all I’ve known, know now and will know.

My life dance is ambiguity, poetry, acceptance, independent detachment and creative imagination. Dance is isolated yet cooperating and independent. I believe in the magic of dance.

When you dance, for a fleeting moment, you feel alive.

What do I see? I see a circle of movement, a connected unity, language in space. There are five rhythms in dance. You start with a circle. It’s a circular movement from the feminine container. She is earth. Then you have a line from the hips moving out. This is the masculine action with direction. He is fire.

Chaos is next, a combination of circle and lines where male and female energies interact. This is the place oftransformation. After chaos is the lyrical. A leap. A release. This is air. The last element of dance is stillness. Out of stillness is born the next movement.

I’ll dance until I die.

gestures use me

Shhh. I have a new secret lover while Thorny is in OZ. I am easy going with a willingness to share honest emotional moments. No commitment is a concrete-abstraction. My passion is immediate visual truth. My eyes are sensory awareness. I see voices. I am a voiceless one, quivering lips and tenacious touch with my secret lover.

I would rather be a tiger for one day than a sheep for a thousand years.

My sexual joy is shy. I dance tactile tenderness in silent breath.

My unfinished symphony lives with visual touch holding his small kiss on my spine. I do this because I love it. It is my heart-mind fate.

My tender lover comes to me in the heat of the day. He is kind. I welcome him with smiling eyes, gesturing a finger on lips, shhh.

He brings me luck. You can’t see it, measure it or hold it. I feel it.

My passion is deep and strong. My unlimited languages speak eyes, smiles, and hands. Gestures create us in space. Gestures use me.

My speech voice is missing. I make rolling guttural sounds expressing metaphors, similes, intonations, frequencies, meaning, sensation, time, space, ideas, dreams, relationships, secrets, my traditional family values, fear, passion, and joy.

By the time I learned the alphabet it was late in life toward primordial dusk. It was late in the moment before then and now. I am a long now.

It was late in the whisper of silent air singing from the trash collector’s plastic bottle. He pulls his rolling cart filled with cardboard. A muscular rhythm stirs somnolent dust on broken stones. The majority of people here exist on less than $1 a day. Rich land, poor people, greedy corrupt politicians.

I see, said a blind girl playing a cello in a demined cemetery. The more I see the less I know. You can’t step in the same river twice.

Possibilities and probabilities, chance and coincidence flutter from my finger fragments like butterflies. Unknown mysterious sensations fling from my signing hands. Fingers and hands are language extensions. Blossom being.

My lover visualizes me in tropical brown skin toned worlds. He imagines I join a hearing impaired community, get an education and a real life. He’s a dreamer.

I jump ahead in my story. It won’t happen. I am a slave.

He realizes my movements say I was born to dance.

 

talk to me

A young girl wore a permanent tear on her left cheek. She was not smiling. Her t-shirt had a picture of a skull and bones.

Danger! LAND MINES!

She said: Here I am. I communicate my reality to the world. Do you like my shirt? Can you read words or do you need a picture? How about a picture of a picture? I don’t know how to read so I like to look at pictures. Mycountry has 14.5 million people and maybe 6-10 million land mines.

Adults say there are 40,000 amputees in my country. Many more have died because we don’t have medical facilities. Mines are cheap. A mine costs $3.00 to put in the ground and $1,000.00 to take out of the ground.

I’m really good at numbers.

26,000 men, women and children are maimed or killed every year in the world by land mines leftover from ongoing or forgotten conflicts. Reports from the killing fields indicate there are 110 million land mines buried in 45 countries.

It will cost $33 billion to remove them and take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000. Cambodia, Angola, Iraq, and Afghanistan are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40 percent of Cambodian land is unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians are amputees. A prosthetic limb costs $3,000.

Talk to me before you leave trails to explore the forest. It's beautiful and quiet. I know all the secret places. I showed my picture to a Cambodian man and he didn’t like it. They call this denial. He said it gave him nightmares. He’s seen too much horror and death in one life. So it goes. My village is my world. Where do you live?

elemental

Curious beginnings determine her artistic sense of form, coloring stories of her village. Cutting, planting, harvesting, complete slow rhythm of life. Her skill shines with every new expression, her heart sings.

Her simple direct feeling is all sensation.

Art enables her this beauty. She describes what she draws. Her words fly through forests, colorful birds resplendent peacocks birds of paradise.

A blind conversation developed a through line. Turn a blind eye.

Blindness listened. Blindness heard muted laughter before intuition gestured pink floating word worlds.

Laughter danced with exhaled attachment.

Blindness danced on through late yellow faltering light penetrating bamboo leaves spreading themselves over banana baskets impaled on swinging posts. Literally.

A bike bell. A young girl sat quiet watching the V girl do her toenails. Cutting, trimming, lemon/lime soak, cuticles, clear before applying a silver hued glossy glean. Nail by nail.

Blindness solved the mystery of sight crying tears of silence. A van of blank faced white Europeans trapped behind glass held rampant desires and expectations on laps. Fidgeting with uncomfortable languages floating into inner ears. Assaulting their long painful strides navigating tomorrow’s promises.

Blindness resolved to practice the subtle art of Tai-chi with precision.

Blindness exchanged blue ink for a dark shade of green. A handheld hair dryer waved hot air over a shampooed head. Mirrors whispered secrets.

Elements of silence said farewell. A series of eyes investigated decompression while swallowing fresh yogurt with peach slices near afternoon’s languishing empty promises intent on discovering new, make it new day by day. Explanations have to end somewhere.

In her village, the other world, Blindness threaded new beginnings as her loom waited for pressure and tightness between notes feeling sunlight dress saliva beads blending a weave, texture, design, saying hello Beauty.