fever dream

2020-11-222020-12-29 | ginger k. hintz

The stimulus of showing up, here, is a fevered habit. Prompt: insert your abject wandering into a space consumed by right-leaning ideas of lack fortified by institutional memory. You may be thinking insufficient curiosities flourish in dank places or perceived stimuli explodes into slow release, but if you’re not thinking about death, or its cousin grief, are you even alive right now? Pull from intermittent signals so faint they remind you of the softness of privilege, an edge of feeling safe. Remember that feeling, you’ll need it today and every day that follows you into the future. I agree, this practice has earned the boredom of recognition. Say transformative like you really mean it. I want to glimpse that specificity, again. It may be entirely possible the change we seek is not propaganda, or won’t be recognizable in the way we’ve been told. Repeat until fully integrated, until expansion is assumed. What if we understood our respective divergence like the quest of a glacier crawling unnoticed across outwash plains? In other words, your finish line will not be the same as mine. It’s the lived experience between habit and ritual—an autobiography of coercive fragments—that reminds me, it’s time to re-read You Must Revise Your Life by William Stafford. “But I make the lines be the way they are by welcoming opportunities that come to me, not by having a pattern in mind.” Miracles demand that kind of attention. Come, gather with me.

swallow

2020-10-042020-10-11 | ginger k. hintz

During the war, we felt the silence in the policy of the governments of English-speaking countries. That policy was to win the war first, and work out the meanings afterward. The result was, of course, that the meanings were lost. —Muriel Rukeyser

I consumed so much “information” throughout this very long weekmonth that this post is what it is. I know that too much intake isn’t good for me and yet I binge as if satisfaction could be found in declaration. Refreshing will tell me something new, smooth these edges of unknowing, and fill all the holes. At saturation, it physically hurts. Early symptoms are a tight chest and shortness of breath. Today the sky is a perfect California blue absent clouds and smoke. Fact: you can believe it but that doesn’t make it true. The barrel of the camera can cause dramatic harm. This is a threat. Surely witness reifies reality. I know some will say angles and their slants are beholden to the power that frames and seduction laps those edges but there’s more. There’s always more. Urgent thinking and wanting immediacy always take us away from the subject who doesn’t want to, ironically, be seen. The next spectacle must definitely be worth it? Any similarity to a person living or dead is entirely coincidental.

stuttering days

2020-09-20 | ginger k. hintz

If the water should cut my mind, set me free — Cat Power cover of Bathysphere

Claire Falkenstein, *From Point to Cone*, double-sided lithograph, 1977

This waste has a frequency. Fragmentation, ritual undulations.
Football snaps. Trees release their green grip as shadows lengthen.
Gritty details of fire and death dominate our collective vision.
Language is spoken as advice. Gather paper: cash, proof of identity, maps.
Consider packing the most precious of your valuables, nothing more.
Poets obsess over lyrical scale, enormity of loss and perspective.
I crave open space in the way a true horizon shows separation—land from sky.
If we believe these times are unlived, restricted and dangerous,
how will we evolve within the inevitable next adaptation?
Urgent expectations transition this chaos. Short-term addictions.
Thunderstorms from a ghost hurricane came through last night.
Focus on a feeling of ascension as our emotional worlds
and their borders dislocate from distracted penetrations.
You say deprivation. I claim radical self-interest.

enter the ember months

2020-08-23 | ginger k. hintz

“Some days in late August at home are like this,
the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar…”

— William Faulkner from The Sound and the Fury

Wallace Polsom, *Some General Questions* (2017), paper collage

Its salience starts inside you —
an intersection, a portal, a punch.
Greed is an expression of fear,
that kind of penetration measured
by depth, loss contextualized.
A landscape of insatiable memories
bordered by anodyne forgiveness
and tectonic imperfections.

Take comfort in knowing
plants turn light into sugar.
Tell me what you notice, and why.
I want to cross reference
my slanted smoky sunlight
with your details to create
time stamps, a rescue map
dispersed into winks of blue.

talking, for some, is filling time

2020-08-16 | ginger k. hintz

self-portrait in *Mother’s Day Daises* (Dorothea Lange, 1934), Oakland Museum of California, 2018

confirmation is a need
during Steinbeck summers
lifting up prayers
by day and profitable hour
just one way to count time
while Siberia and Los Angeles burn

a poet said truth is a promise
is conspiracy
is part of the weather
is a chain of events
an affect of algorithms
on our unconscious

this wanting desire to influence
counterfeit double consciousness
divergent as sonic traces
bending poetics of disaster
to experience thinking out loud
together on a mesoscale

rest, even in war

2020-08-042020-08-06 | ginger k. hintz

I AM TASTING MYSELF
IN THE MOUTH OF THE SUN

—June Jordan, excerpt from “Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L”

Maybe what we really want is hero stories
that also reflect happiness, where joy is
contextualized during epic and courageous
suffering. This desire, a creative impulse,
a strategy to have complementary thinking
break binaries. A knowing that innocence
can be misremembered. Behind the fog, bright light.
Remember when obsessive attachment became slack
from devotion? Of course we resisted our differences,
as much as we could, starting over —
again and each time evidence repurposed itself
to the contrary. A reciprocity of loss or maybe
more simply the effect of a parallax.
From a certain distance, we are all drifting along.
Idle in mood and expansive in perpetual conflict.

apophenia

2020-05-242020-05-28 | ginger k. hintz

“Sensuality. Our basis of being concrete about the world. It is lustful relationship to things that exist.” — Mark Rothko, from Mark Rothko From the Inside Out

Not quite epiphany
more
false positive
associations of pink
or orange to flesh
as displacement
or tender resignations
an unqueering
a gamble.

Such inconvenience filters the odds
into other’s perceptions, luck, or madness.
When our fists equal the size of our hearts
there’s recognition in that sovereign drama.
Beginnings blindspot endings.
All rhetorical approximations
become redundant.
Transitions, as in not yet.

Our histories are programmed errors
marked like rings inside trees
plastic as the immediate future.
Mystery strikes then bends
absorbing the unrecognizable
when opposites compliment
more than divide
potentially godwinked
impossibly divine.

time bound

2020-04-262020-05-12 | ginger k. hintz

How quickly can one dispense with the old bargains between defense and desire, adapting to a regime whose rules provide no felt comfort?

— Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism”

Helena Almeida, Sente me (1979), screenshots from Film von Sylvain Bergère

Inside this temporal state,
habitualization is the climax.
To date, public misery
is not officially worthy
of monuments or accurate measurements.
Finely stratified, your and my collective
future—active emptiness—is its own
embodied aleatory performance.
But what are we supposed to be
doing with this time?
Such insinuating can feel negative,
counterproductive as misdirected desires.
Overstimulated, I beg for revision
rather than tempt resolution.
These present hours unknowing.

flotsam

2020-04-122020-04-14 | ginger k. hintz

“For the alert body, the useless interval becomes a plenum.”
— Francis Richard, Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics

10 June 2016, San Francisco HOW DOES MY POVERTY RELATE TO YOUR PROSPERITY?

I obsessively check the feeds and the timelines like a salt lick. Distracted bait draws the largest crowds. People are bored. The death toll rises. Profiteers are euphoric for high demand drawn from historic lows. I look up the word “disinter” [verb: dig up (something that has been buried, especially a corpse)], then notice the grass in the park is ankle deep. Clouds break blue. Home becomes hysteria—a boundary state—shape shifting into the space in between, wrecked. In these unique times, it is best to rehearse worries to scale. Memory and risk are their own parabolic textures. Voided feelings now so very retro.

lean into the punch

2019-10-202020-03-28 | ginger k. hintz

“They are not allowed to distract the attraction.” The Tao of Physics

your hands wrote notes on the arch of my back
a syntax of bruised blues
confusing the map with the territory
you left elegant traces of comparative expressions
a relatively exalted possession
to sublimate time unspoken as gilded pleasure
a glitch forsaken, tender undulation

a wish

2019-08-182019-11-30 | ginger k. hintz

Berenice Abbott, Behavior of Waves, 1960, Cambridge, Massachusetts

In the same way orange trees are dormant in winter,
I saw a way to be — abstract as light, silence, form.
I am only a singular present self carved in this body.
I found time by counting the clock’s soft tick-tock
In tempo with the whoosh of a kneeling city bus & claw clicks.
I made a wish the Sequoias below live longer than me.

private investigator

2019-06-022019-06-04 | ginger k. hintz

When I added the dimension of time to the landscape of the world, I saw how freedom grew the beauties and horrors from the same live branch. — Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Blind swimmers (Effect of a touch), 1934, Max Ernst

Planets square, conjunct, and align according to ancient calculations. A replicable physics of perpetual routine and abstract distance. The wise have correlated collective visceral feelings to this constant celestial movement and, of course, gravity’s determinate pull. There is grace in this kind of emotional profiteering, an abundance that forces us to confront unknown questions inside a mapped-out-for-you future.

I’m days away from another year around the sun. Three hundred sixty-five unbroken days of editing mistakes and expanding my realm of intuition.

These accumulating memories are a landscape bound to cycle back around to vanishing points. Gathered as collages and smelling like warm marigolds, all those shades of consciousness tend to the task of a well-paced axiom eventually becoming their own runaway speculative fictions. Nostalgia clutches just as much as it cascades.

The sky is always moving. I intend to continue investigating the figurative dancing light from that motion. Etching inventions into my own shameless shadow.

still life

2019-05-262019-06-23 | ginger k. hintz

Rivane Neuenschwander. The Silence of the Sirens. 2013.

The sky is mute.
My palms soft.

The future broke.
Your hands found me wanting.

Shared recognition creates intimacy
when the public body is an impulse.

Wild as blessings, and just as sacred,
I come wide, spread open.

Living a literal life
is an obedient life.

My feed is deepfake informative
so I reduce truth to metaphor.

Wandering ribs is a radical referent.
We’ve been promised what does not exist.

Birds bob and sway
above the frothy noise.

block the exits

2019-04-212019-04-21 | ginger k. hintz

You better just enjoy the luxury of sympathy / If that’s a luxury you have — Built to Spill

A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1946)

there is writing on the wall
but I don’t yet know what language of seizure —
of belief, suspension finds a soft corner

confidence is its own risk and reward
these longer days hinge on construction of narratives
a clever distraction from observing the narrator

listening is an appearance of doing nothing

when you are poor you learn how to end things
which is better than getting carried away
or in too deep, you must reserve your trust

even trees get tired of being predictable
show me extraordinary in this real-life panic scenario
then, intimately connect the sky to water like an exquisite corpse

anger and fear make us feel full

the ad said I needed magnesium harvested from the ocean
I want that kind of specificity right now
to notice more than anonymous eroticism

and recognizing yourself in that loop
in memorandum of understanding
a future tense — the feel of fist in mouth

an infinite fermata

2019-03-102020-09-20 | ginger k. hintz

I was seventeen, once.
I watched you take my hands
and never give them back.
The sun will fade you
even in this darkness.

apologia

2019-01-27 | ginger k. hintz

Joni Mitchell, skating on Lake Mendota, Madison, WI, Joel Bernstein, 1976, gelatin silver print

I’ve realized I have seen more Passion Plays than I knew. I come back, here, again. Today is another dispossessed day. News forms around emotions. I stopped believing in Saviors a long time ago. The ending is predictable. From above and from below, inside and out, this internalized desire for external validation starts feeling like an intentional defense. In 1971, James Baldwin said something will rest something will remain. Retraction survives in all this chatter. Context protecting accusers are familiar to me. I learned that language at home and in school. Resale is always at a premium. Redo. Undo. Redo again. Coffee and tiger’s eye stone, water, land and sky meet angled. This, now, is the everything I’ve ever wanted.

a very, very loud extended silence

2019-01-062019-03-28 | ginger k. hintz

I find peace inside California’s winter weather changes. They remind me I was never in control. During the eclipse, I dreamt girls were fist fighting under street lights. I woke up centered and kept all that scattered energy lodged between the spaces of my teeth.

Shock. Then awe. This is what they warned us about. Civic intimacies have been breeched. Residents clutch their pearl-handled pistols. Our movies show us acting surprised while winter mouths stay covered. Sighs are lodged inaudible.

Bound by the length of light, time arouses. I take these sacred fascinations and wrap myself soft and deep as the high tides. I search for conscience affect in its rawest and wildest form. This is a new year of stimulated objections. We have been warned.

_________________________________________________________________________________

title reference to: ‘The grave of the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke in Novodevichye Cemetery in Moscow is surmounted by a stone on which is engraved a rest beneath a fermata with a triple forte noted at the bottom: A very, very loud extended silence.’ —John Biguenet, Silence (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p.49.

music from the balcony

2018-12-302019-01-05 | ginger k. hintz

new wave vengeance frames this reflection. we are now, again.
2018: masses react and subjectively perform aggression.
yes, I do think differently. epistemic relevance matters.

THE MUSIC FROM THE BALCONIES NEARBY WAS OVERLAID BY THE NOISE OF SPORADIC ACTS OF VIOLENCE, Edward Ruscha, oil paint on canvas, 1984.

What a savage year. Calendar time and actual time disassociated. Let go or be dragged. I got dragged and then I let go. In this protracted state, I mended critical boundaries and broke open new patterns. I made the days useful to me. I wrote about cowboys while breathing in fire. I listened and was seduced. I transmuted silence, my way. Drowning in manufactured violence and drama, we held each other longer and tighter. I saw urgency extract exquisite ideas and leave behind ghosts still in motion. Recognizing that glitch, I give myself infinite permission to fail, to risk, to revive. I still believe revolutions are frenetic desires and armor myself contextually. Curiosity is my ideal pace. I follow cats and poets. I came into this world greedy. I need reminders when my body grips fear: be awake for soft pink sunrises and orange suns floating into fading darkness. It is my responsibility to source these personal validations and ritualize inspiration. Reflex grace. Find balance in distractions and create sacred ceremonies with your hands on my hips.

wish list

2018-12-09 | ginger k. hintz

maybe I do want you to feel intimidated by me

Rochester, New York, Nathan Lyons, 1978, gelatin silver print

I want a revolution as reckless as cowboys with broken backs.
Throwing restraint to the western winds, a favorable direction,
& towards that edge where darkness is shaped into possibility,
I wait familiar in shy quiet impatient.

I want a revolution as prolific as chants for collective safety.
Born from burn scars so large you can see it from a distant
universe, a reminder we will never be in control so long as
money motivates our hustle for pretentious liberation.

I want a revolution as tender as loving in present tense.
An immediacy that respects our inherited kinetic energies.
Until then, I’ll gather productive & discover curious tensions
sensual as thunder replying to lightening’s transfiguring danger.

In protest and in wealth, I want a revolution that gives as much as it takes.

difficult knowledge

2018-12-022019-02-19 | ginger k. hintz

*Below Zero (Fahrenheit)*, Lake Erie, Pennsylvania, Josef Hoflehner, 2015

as perennial pipelines heat prairie homes
I dream of drifting oceans & waves of snow

effluence affluence

I have been told so many times & so many ways
this world is ending

omen amen

I’ve taken to stealing lines on borrowed time

censor center

somewhere in this self-immolation is discipline
the denomination of need

fractals

2018-11-252018-11-25 | ginger k. hintz

I. Writing; an act of stroking paper.

II. The aggressiveness of buying and selling resistance, as seen on TV, makes me wanna disassociate.

self-portrait in *Wave* by Pirkle Jones, 1952, gelatin silver print [Oakland Museum of California]

III. Competitions of sadness are trauma tiers.

PUBLIC NOTICE, 14 September 2018, Oakland, CA

IV. It’s ok that I don’t fit in she says.

V. If I write a word today, just one, that must be enough.

paradox of desire

2018-11-042019-01-07 | ginger k. hintz

I almost never buy in bulk, although I appreciate the expression of commitment. My lack of bulk desire is rooted in one of those childhoods funneled through scarcity politics, of all kinds: spirit, body, voice, resources, access, stimulation. My earliest taste of cultural politics were synthetic extractions grounded in epic narratives of fatherly protection. A practice endured through sacrifice.

There was a seduction to all that nurturing, an attention and encouragement to focus on one’s most intimate self—the soul. If followed correctly, there would be saving.

In all that repetitive redemption, there was a sense of safety—false as it was. I ache for those early feelings of learning about abundance. When the simple was profound, like the sound of snow falling.

These days are starting to feel retrograde, astrologically speaking an illusion. My dreams are looping, again. I’m taking all these memories, the bulk of them, and feeling nothing but an offering to grieve for what was taken, withheld, starved. An invitation of acceptance, a different kind of suffering.

periphery of justice

2018-08-192018-11-24 | ginger k. hintz

“Most of the time, I think we’re embodied because we are supposed to be. I don’t think the goal is to leave our bodies behind, despite what many major religions tell us.” — Dana Levin

Santiago Moix, *Rippling #34*, silkscreen monotype, 2012

Economists believe
things that are abundant
have less value,
example: love.
A cheap cadence
mutated and wound
around a swelling chorus.
Shut tight. Loud as bodies.
Imagine if we answered
all those blushed curious inquiries
and followed constellations
to rewrite retrogrades.
Speaking softly enough to
understand its sacred feedback.

__________

title is William Stafford’s reference to “that feeling you have when you go along accepting what occurs to you and finding your way out somewhere to the rim where you are ready to abandon that sequence and come back and start all over again” (Writing the Australian Crawl)

sounds between notes

2018-08-13 | ginger k. hintz

I don’t swim away from
the greedy snapping of breath,
but my throat…well,
terror owns each kiss.

stanza from “Here” by Amber Flora Thomas

As waves of morning light
survive extravagant centuries
I follow a thread of words
primary gravity safety
broken just enough to fit in

a 21st century dream

2018-07-222018-09-14 | ginger k. hintz

I am at war with the obvious. —William Eggleston

I get nervous when people start talking about wanting to own things:
land, houses, ideas.
This present moment feels like freedom,
a highly volatile state.
In my dream, I walked US-Highway 12.
I passed community banks flush with bartered dreams
and gas stations promising consistently low prices when paying with cash.
The ghosts all drove cars and didn’t bother me.
Lucid, I believed I was back in Berlin. I was brave.
I woke to trees taller than houses.

delayed gratification

2018-06-172019-02-01 | ginger k. hintz

“There’s always a lot to do before you get to go to heaven.”
— Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

when the sun sets pink, orange, and red
broken moving clouds spread
like velvet like compulsion
action stretches idle smooth

reading read is different from hearing read spoken
or why I adore hiding words in my throat

formerly private as guilt
what came first
sky
or water

altered
like states of being with
or without you

regenerative loops: believing in a tomorrow

speculative practice

2018-05-202019-01-04 | ginger k. hintz

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

T.S. Eliot, from ‘Preludes (IV)’, The Waste Land and Other Poems

Motonaga Sadamasa (Japanese, 1922-2011), Untitled, 1965. Oil and synthetic resin paint on canvas laid down on panel, 91.6 × 116.7 cm.

concerts of effort
sounds better inside a fragment
forgive that this starts out so slow
posting at me to me with me
I’m casual to realize
to follow your our vision
is to be organized into spacial moments — threads
a witness of curation
the: father son and holy spirit

faith is within your standing
some think it is earned
as for me I was taught to be innocent
later learning curiosity had its own beneficiaries
a lesson on just how few original ideas are assigned majestic
fueling dark appreciations for wild abstractions
until it is as uncommon as creating reminders to breathe
I know this all sounds strange
you can call it: new wave vengeance

glitter path

2018-05-062018-05-07 | ginger k. hintz

she was ruled by suggestion
rising to meet pre-summer light

photo capture from the Museum of Things (Berlin, Oct 2017)

he suggested we advance an aesthetic education¹ to get what we want
types of promises full and drawn from expansive inhibitions
scattering chaos beyond an endlessly deferred absent presence²

suspended in seductive panics
we are nothing but restless territories

within this gossip of change
she spins out a series of poems about mirrors

in pursuit she hunts for theoretical pleasures
positioning against as something for
glittering distorted at its apex

___________________

1. Roberto Bedoya, Oakland Cultural Affairs Manager
2. Ben Anderson in Modulating the Excess of Affect, a reference to morale as the horizon of governance

trade wars

2018-03-252019-01-06 | ginger k. hintz

“the first 50 hours of resurrection are beautiful,”
says the man holding the door

–Tongo Eisen-Martin, excerpt from remove my heart racing, and babylon is fine

we learn to trust wars: cola, sex, cold. as acceptance forms rules, we smooth out the most deprived ideas and prioritize all threats as urgent. in theatres of conflict, repetition is grandeur. this translation officially makes mob landscapes familiar.

that’s why when your hands brushed against my sharpest edges: my heart, my gaze, my inordinate sense of danger; I felt intimacy performed as spacial intervention, an interlude. your fingers interrogated and found hard answers wrapped around tender legacy. we became undone. mapping unearned dreams onto each other’s gravitational pull, an attraction, we made our own stars.

future philosophers will discover these tensions and name them holy

transference

2018-03-182018-03-19 | ginger k. hintz

and where
did that love
I gave
go?

arousal is an anchor
like empathetic inquiry
or side show hustles

echoed relationships
redirected
form finds its subject

we commit to process
over outcome, again
shift to abundance of solutions

technically we are identical
with differences called out
our unconscious a shared language

the news repeats:
rot
patterns

it is a drowning
a baptism
an act of mercy

dirty light

2018-03-112019-03-28 | ginger k. hintz

“The shutters were stuck. Then I grew absent minded.”
Des Moines Register, Iowa, July 3, 1938

stretching beyond monetary value: this is more freedom than security can buy

if I wake up open to what will unfold
I am ready to claim I had a good day
specific as memories stored in the creases of expanding curves

& still I rescue myself when hope feels violent as an open hand
where fortune’s fault line is externalized validation
nested into dreams of trying to get somewhere
my body craves stillness

I press the coffee before anything begins

remember when we took turns burning wishes into the folds of our stomachs?
it was the safest place we could think of
no one dared touch us
there

I heard you took my name
and sewed it into your eyelids
stitches fragile as trusting strangers & friends
an exquisite waltz like light shining in distant flat darkness

transfixed politics

2018-01-282018-04-01 | ginger k. hintz

Our bones are built of spirals. – Joy Harjo

our wildest prophetic imagination
has led us here: a shattering of sex
uncomfortable
deep
looking

II.

calm & concentrated
I saw two waves lock
like elk horns
then embrace

III.

truth of feelings
as charm offensives
as wet feathers

IV.

divine signs
pushing forward

V.
smoothness is both a measure and a lack of roughness

hook & claw

2017-12-102017-12-11 | ginger k. hintz

Geh in der Verwandlung aus und ein.
[Be conversant with transformation.]
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonette an Orpheus

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

i believe in omens
and my own ability to shatter and reform
— Jill Khoury, excerpt from “Sixteen”

oh righteous revelry
please indulge this faithful attempt to clarify

so many modern relationships still lean feudalistic
as nobles dance to blue note promises & scheme for eternal life

it rings visionary to trust what is mine was never yours to take
a redundant mythology now inadequate as waning winter light

temporarily, we sense an emerging surrender to the hushed hues of sexual panics
on a grand scale psychic interiors were smoothed flat like apathy or political truths

there was a collective ache for a state of respite from all this revolutionary suffering
as conviction loops into endless realities it is our sacred duty to carve out revelations

we are only possible when testimonies illuminate just beyond the sharp edges of darkness

sub rosa

2017-11-052018-11-24 | ginger k. hintz

“And is is strange how experiences blend and enhance each other.” — William Stafford

It is not that what I know today is necessarily different from what I knew yesterday, or that I have replaced prior knowledge with a brand new extended spectrum of understanding. It is more subtle than a transaction, more gracefully defined as complexity. This feels like transformation. A shift.

Love fits into this equation as a multiplier. The critical variables that come next are a matter of routine, a particular and conscious genre. A ritual.

There is always more. A compilation.

front lines

2017-09-092020-09-06 | ginger k. hintz

Eskimo Polychrome Wood Maskette, Alaska, c. 1880

In the distance, cars traveling the freeway became an auditory illusion of waves successively breaking on a transitory shore. The vehicular friction of simultaneous opposing directions creates a lullaby of persistence. Out of that euphony, a collective future sways.

Scientists agree that’s why our horizon is in flux.

I am from a place where personal belief in immortality shelters empty and expansive isolation. A place where desire modestly tucks itself into sanctioned quiet spaces. Its slow release is championed as strength, a virtue. Imagine all that repression sharpened into secret symphonies. How the fantasy of that released deviance dances in mortal bodies designed to betray through lust.

We return to where we came from.

There is purpose in the orchestration of such retrograde energy. As that motivation braids itself to creative practice, my habitual search for external validation has gone missing. This translation, more joy than sorrow, is a different remedy for endurance. The harvest is ready and yielding.

a whole orange, floating

2017-07-092018-04-02 | ginger k. hintz

“you might as well answer the door, my child, the truth is knocking.” — Lucille Clifton

artist: Scott Reeder, *Real Fake*, 2013; photo by Rachel Cromidas; location: Trump Tower, Chicago 2017

the hand’s sensitive intelligence
a found erotic reference
dangerous as a nation divided
beggars and thieves and other

whispering cacophonous choruses
our fears spill into codes
a new kind of Reconstruction
stumbling into mosaic beauty

he said the issue is not opportunity
while we stay flat footed, even in heels
summer jackets hide shame
in that way, it is easy

what is beneath the surface begs
it howls
remaining grounded has a sinister side
backlash by way of prophetic referent

cultural fronts

2017-06-182018-11-24 | ginger k. hintz

Wherever I go they quote people
who talk too much, the ones who
do not care, just so they can take the center
and call the plans.
— William Stafford (excerpt from Deerslayer’s Campfire Talk)

May 2017 (detail Oranges on Fire, 1975, Larry Sultan & Mike Mandel)

sifting accents, hardwood hustles, and transitory migrations
this is a time for wild-from-abandon imagination
blame the devil or self-manipulation for this perception

like the draw of a well positioned salt lick
he spoke of competition for promised visibility
extending territory by adjusting the frame of domination

even though desire and loss are higher forms of inspiration
we feel motivated by such assurances
taking all of this as seriously as reflections that have no anchor

if it’s true there is more hope in intention
let that reality bruise
endlessly

sanctimonious

2017-06-11 | ginger k. hintz

Olivié Ponce NS1, 2011, enamel on framed plexiglass

Have you noticed the ports are heavily guarded?
Sea-salted windows cast sun shadows.
Layered cloudy fog entwined itself.
Such magnificent light!

We regenerate like tides.
As often as unjust references stick
to justified historical consequences.
This is not about you. Please stand back.

Relentless as waves and immeasurable as release,
we stand on shores carved by power.
Oh yes! We do want revolution.
In these dreams, we are holy reverence.

tender data

2017-05-142019-03-28 | ginger k. hintz

It’s not about truth. It is about faith. An orientation where the future has cult status. This brand of dislocation has been exalted to attract maximum anticipation.

II.

keeper of promises
a prophetic mothering
finally overcome, the sun pushes the moon to perform

III.

Our bodies warm with use.
Your eyes close in respect.
Private consumption whetted.

IV.

This is my origin: he celebrated our birth with strangers while she bled alone. As romantic as it may sound, this is not an apology.

catharsis

2017-05-092017-08-30 | ginger k. hintz

“Pale with the secret war of feeling.” — Charlotte Brönte

If there is something you need to say
say it now. We all have a way of moving
ever so gradually to our respective corners.

Misfortune finds the deserving; a symbiotic betrayal.
Extractive in nature, asking for what you want exceeds
loyalty. Linear in scope, this practice is my liberation.

Lips seek softness.
Teeth form defense.
What are the standard deviations of love?

Light’s capacity is to fill darkness.
Protect me from what I have learned.
May all justice be transformative.

At the end of the day
desire always wins.
Tender hooks of undulation.

versuchung

2017-04-162018-01-29 | ginger k. hintz

“The deep is in riot, the coastline is quiet…” Archers of Loaf, Chumming the Ocean

Laura McPhee. *Snowmobile Headlights*, Valley Road, Custer County, Idaho, 2004

the entrance is always different
always dramatic, the clouds look bruised

chaos its own predictability
then a King of Cups tarot card was pulled

light appeared filtered as if from inside a cathedral
poetics expand silently like prayer

temptation deserves awareness
that feeling: listen

nested privileges
unwound to their most fragile state

this is ephemeral revelation

communion

2017-04-022018-04-02 | ginger k. hintz

sunsets are starting to look Pacific coast again
pink light lengthening its reach
as clouds become incarnations of stampeding horses

(apocalyptic if that is your orientation)

the crown of flowers was her own creation
made from remnants of first-date napkins
forming a graceful relationship to reciprocity

those echoes found delayed in repressed rhythms
where she returns to these kinds of questions
as murmurations as stimulations as exchanges

(our intimacies measured by exhale)

she dreamt in currency, in time
scaling up as undoing: euphoric
this consecration mine and yours

open-sourced feelings

2017-03-192018-04-02 | ginger k. hintz

I’m here in a room and I have things arranged.
I have them likened to code, so they can often be changed. — Karate, Bass Sounds

I haven’t found the perfect way to describe you
sincerely shouting victories is something else entirely

the sun rose bland and round
that space between sky and water
absorbed all this energy

such openness feels chosen
I taste frustration on your breath
advancing in spirit and stature

aggression is its own logic
he hit you for the same reasons
he hit us: for your own good

a model of volatile benevolence
in political frameworks, the body does betray

waking up becomes a compulsion
reengineering you get what you ask for
I send this postscript as an invitation

reduction

2017-03-122018-04-02 | ginger k. hintz

News cycles are dominated by Russian dramas.
No one mentions rape in context anymore.
We’ve taken solace by decoding mass rhetoric.

I can imagine you beautiful and calm.
Our wandering like scrolling.
This landscape so literal.

Receipts as evidence as expressions.
Fisted conclusions neglect.
A rote search for light in darkness.

Time stretches into manufactured units.
By heart standards, this feels eternal.
Populist hyperbole interpreted as desire feels

dangerous

Some argue identity is residual.
You know it by its attributes.
These compulsory dreams are viral transfers.

Motives unmoored as debts to consent bloom.
Layered political pontifications soothe like lullabies.
I dare you to find love in this absence.

Liberation aside, how does this make you feel?
Inductive reasoning seduces. It penetrates.
Yes, this conversation is a calculated intermission.

Wait. This is my understanding of your manipulations.
A respite of obviousness – of borders unarmed.
Let us, both, reductively fade into this capture.

shame wars

2017-03-052018-04-02 | ginger k. hintz

Is irony the binary of literal?

Marta María Pérez Bravo - Para Ayudar a un Hermano (1994) — Marta María Pérez Bravo – Para Ayudar a un Hermano (1994)

Receptivity is a form and function of power.
Tree tops soften from light’s pressure as rays break to bend.
Collusive collaborations are their own manufactured commodities.
This contemporary capital vision is a muted song from the past.

Borrowed promises, fallowed lives, and lustful rationalizations are systemic desire lines, whose paths of consequence are worn clear. Your biases are showing. Bad.

We, all of us, are reclaiming pleasure.
Things are so intimate, so personal, these days.
Tensions and conflicts splayed.
We leave literary marks as evidence.

On whose authority is the question we need to be asking.
A different way of understanding omniscience. Please validate.

My sacred spaces need me.

Russian gossip

2017-02-262018-04-02 | ginger k. hintz

We ignore the narrator by only focusing on the frame.

Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, “The Promises Were So Sweet,” digital print on poly satin, 2010, Great Plains Art Museum Permanent Collection.

The city moves, bends, and swallows.
An act of congress, a coming together.
He presented himself to me. I kissed, gently,
his upper thigh. Curated outfits, a collection of pants
and blouses, roll past me. Lunches bounce inside bags.
I keep writing to feel around the noise. Reinvested
memories, commitments, and occasional flashes of violence.
Internalized scandals are my own reputation to manage.

The train was crowded. No one could complain
about unwanted touching. I imagined her hand
moving slowly, without detection, up and between
my legs. Her fingers, warm and steady, found
their destination. Leaving behind permanent
invisible notes, secrets scrawled on the inside.
Messages shared as rumors as indisputable
associations like light shining through solid objects.

please

2017-02-192018-04-02 | ginger k. hintz

Make me laugh so I can stop breathing in this sadness.

There is suspicion around all this effort. Parcel out the doses.
Not all poems are meant to be serious, or anything at all.

The ocean is self-conscious in that healthy enlightened way.
Gratitude notwithstanding how this will unfold is mine to own.

Each admittance a proxy for loving so deeply.
Frames are other’s dramatic interpretations.

Never forget water dissolves rock and values aren’t talking points.
Your subjective reputation precedes you, so does your community.

Create your own triplines. Let go of tipping points. Launch reflexive debates.
Send shock waves of radical thoughts, mythologize perversions, and make hope relentless.

Narrate yourself beyond binaries. Imagine yourself unbought.

legislate the weather

2017-01-292017-02-03 | ginger k. hintz

I want to put you in a light that will hurt your eyes – Polvo, Feather of Forgiveness

whisper

He said he was going to take a walk around the block to clear his mind. Stretch his legs. Escape. He never came back. A map of states’s preferences for corn or potato chips forever frozen on his desktop screen.

Battle for references, a retirement to the absence of —

On Wednesday, I was reminded artists should “support each other religiously.” This community-level policy is seductive, whose root is “to lead astray.” Oceans of context transfer nervous energy. Is thinking out loud unprofessional?

Partisan frames explain our borders, infilled voids.

It’s come down to semiotic analysis of utterances. This weekly cathartic release looping endlessly to create a low frequency hiss. A similar process to the way valleys take the weight, form, and shape of foggy mornings or as secure as refuge.