seasons

clout farming

| ginger k. hintz
Let’s open those neural floodgates. source: unknown

I.
Canaries, the kind designed to warn, died
years ago and the audience pretended
not to hear their zero-sum absence.

II.
Did you see the etched spells
carved into downtown bus windows?
A cluster of worldbuilding signs—
anti-collections of gilded relativity.

III.
It is that time of day. Straight-ahead stare.
The inside lights have been turned on.
Fallow fields lie open, subjugated for influence.

IV.
Recently, a bluejay has become a surrogate rooster.
Declaring another day or scouting for tenderness?
Forget-me-nots in bloom, and our heads full-on empty.
A physics of being spooned, jammed, grazed.

V.
Summertime eyes, dry mouth holes, dots to be connected.
Hyperfixation as daydream, musical as chairs.

lonely crowd

| ginger k. hintz

“I dream too much, and I don’t write enough, and I’m trying to find God everywhere.”
—Anis Mojgani

weiners for sale, South Dakota, 2009

Pussy willows bloom. Predictive seasons
filter a fuzz of sunlight; valedictory
transitions hold onto their return maps.

This prayer is a practice of communicating.
A form of knowledge or disciplinary violence?
Experts debate experts into echoes.

Their meaningless noise fills sacred silence.
Our bodies desire ancient patterns,
a narrator’s reticence; sublime observations.

reprise

| ginger k. hintz
July 21, 2021, Oakland, CA, 6:10pm

Traveling at the speed of days per hour.
Is it okay to celebrate survival?
(All this death. It’s inevitable.)
Arranging for false openings—second endings.
What marrow should we salvage?
Oblivion becomes subjugation
when aesthetics have agendas.
Only at the very beginning
did the freeway quiet.
Now, faint signals of endearment muted
as claw marks or socialized hope.
(All this death. It’s inevitable.)
At this point in time, there might be enough
to carry the rest of us curiously forward
full from holding unanswerable questions
in all this cropped light.

sifting through the ruins

| ginger k. hintz

If we do not forget, what is there to remember? —Mary Ruefle from “On Secrets”

found reality on a construction site sign, July 2011, San Francisco, CA

Suspension is a type of prayer
in the same way hard luck is still luck
or how clicking clocks make meaning.
Ending another year with reconstituted rituals:
unwrap an orange, warm the house with lights,
leave no trace and lament the echoes.

Interiors become accomplices
in a cascading culture of closures.
Reminding me the moon makes no light
of its own, and I don’t know
is the most honest answer I have to give.
This response to an unknown call,
how deeply personal an endeavor.

delight of movement on a static facade

| ginger k. hintz
Cascade from PDX to SEA, April 2008

Radiator hisses fill the space left between
a bright sun in an empty blue sky.
Expressive clouds reclaim their territory.
Rain and miso ramen for lunch.
Downtown buses trail each other like snails
as layers of buildings are held together by math.
The remaining oak leaves hang like ornaments.
This week, scientists proved birds sing in their sleep
but most of us already know how the body tries to protect.
Are you the audience? Have you been disciplined?
If not, pay attention to how the slow accommodation
of western light adds to the rapidly sharpening darkness.

summer testimony (no. 4)

| ginger k. hintz

“What happens when you reposition agency away from power?” —Ocean Vuong, episode 227 of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

Hayashi Waichi, Large Chrysanthemums, 1981

I’m writing this down
as proof of memory.
The sky is almost always
a solid backlit blue
unless it isn’t.
A specificity shared
by anyone who lives beneath it.
Not unlike knowing poppies don’t unfold
until midmorning and being aware, now,
how summer here blooms—
if you’re paying attention.
Gradients of time punctuate
while light cascades unnoticed.
In other words, there’s devotion
and there’s feral experience.

relent

| ginger k. hintz
SFO to PDX, March 2012

#HolySpirit trends
as the jet stream moves
torrid seasons west to east.
The Arctic Circle holds tropical.
We start to make summer plans—
then actually book them.
“Space to breathe” or “create
new memories” congregate
fragmented within threaded comments
like when Roland Barthes says
in A Lover’s Discourse,
“this is the paradisiac realm
of subtle and clandestine signs:
a kind of festival not of senses
but of meaning”. Maybe this summer
will feel more like a communion—
public intimacy sanctioned.

wish you were here

| ginger k. hintz

“I find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people.”
— Marge Piercy, last two lines of “The Doughty Oaks” from The Moon Is Always Female

ART PEOPLE, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, March 2021

Spring finds us haunted. A seasonal feeling after witnessing winter’s passing, but it’s acute this year. Blue skies expanding. Nests of birds explode in sound. Time is the fulcrum. I love you fills the past, present, future. Now weightless, light cracks through early morning clouds. I thought about the scam of resurrection. Some never fully accept death as loss, permanence unchanged. They believe death can be cheated. The obvious irony is you’ll suffer from wanting what is not possible. Time is the fulcrum. Flexing, palming, sucking off temporal attention.

Through the eyes of a non-believer, the sharpened edge of dilution, I miss you.

this is the best time of year to be a futurist

| ginger k. hintz

Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out.
Let it all pass. Let it go.
— May Sarton, from Volume One: Journal of a Solitude (Norton, 1977)

Photographer: Harry Gruyaert

As evening’s frantic pink light slips into a lavender twilight hour,
gravity continues to hold us in place like constellations.
We string and loop lights around the apartment to project
hope’s fractal reflections everywhere. Yes, we really do
have to keep going and salvage tomorrow’s fragile glittering promises.
Predictions of our survival will be found in the how of our doing.
When oranges begin to ripe on the West Coast, that’s the signal
to gather for the next new beginning. Heed tradition’s clairvoyance
and pull on the shiniest threads to prepare for a better future. Pop! Fizz!
Incite! Even in the expanding darkness, prophetic renewals
of mutual liberation trend as lack rages on. Hope brings so much to want,
manufactured and genuine, next year no longer waits.

going nowhere fast

| ginger k. hintz

“All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.” ― Blaise Pascal

BOARD IS AWARE, Westlake, OH 2012

I was told salvation is coming. It could be any day now. My earliest memories integrated this knowing as a worried occupation, equal parts faith in and fear of the odds. Much later, I learned trees share similar survival stories. Expressed urgently as generosity, with occasional pause to report danger, trees communicate through elaborate, networked underground comms systems. This year, they’ll wait for a response not aware their friends and family didn’t survive wildfire season. We all wait in this sense of unknowing as predictions of unimaginable loss dampen relentless holiday sales pitches. Our cumulative temperament is tuned towards intermittent reinforcement, an addiction to hope. 

Lately, as a ritual of escape, I wander between landscapes of turning Japanese maples and persimmon trees, flickering reds and faded orange, as palms stay evergreen while limes and lemons transform sour. Take this lust and ride its crest. I want to believe this could be a new beginning as waves of survivor’s guilt swell, then spread.

Poetic principles like allowing for improvisations and diligence of testimony guide my guarded thinking these vanishing days. I create deliberately, in curious inquiry of being in a state of suspended exile. Forgive me as I loop.

go in pleasure

| ginger k. hintz

“There is a sense in which we are all each other’s consequences.”
—Wallace Stevens, All the Little Live Things

DTF, July 2018, Oakland, CA

Every day has been a chance
to live within the margins
that remain and maintain
the rigor of keeping it together.

Some normalized themselves
to a saturation point when
conspiracies’ realities are
unconfirmed real threats.

The calendar says winter is coming.
Where is this god that so many claim?
The one that protects and loves us or
that other one that enjoys mercy.

Queer as feelings, speculation has left
us wild. Go ahead—we might as well
make our own temporal decisions.
Loud, quiet, loud. Fringed dynamics.

The greed of men. A sagging breast.
Haphazardly adjacent as ecstasy.
Our animal consciousness seek
what we recognize, warm refuge.

end of the 3rd quarter | 2020

| ginger k. hintz

Anthony Hernandez, Los Angeles #1, 1969

count the number of Tuesday’s remaining
this year, if lucky a new year is coming
calibrate your most latent expectations

distinguish stimulation from propaganda
if you need drama, watch the leaves turn

feel the unconscious dare of hope
swallow the sacredness of ordinary days

examine the materiality of fidelity; listen
elucidate future present tense

seek pleasure to root out despair
replenish your somatic prayers

consider how your routine is a rhythm
write down its verse, chorus, verse
review when you forget you are the bridge

stuttering days

| 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.

talking, for some, is filling time

| 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
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

yielding

| ginger k. hintz

Barbara Kruger “Don’t Make Me Angry”, 1999

volume won the day

what was said
had to be abandoned

because more was coming

this universe was not built
to accommodate more than one sun

Betty Danon, I am, 1978

call me when
the Afghanistan war
is over

Black Lines 1, 1916, Georgia O’Keeffe

 

fog obscures the depth behind it

 

Richard Barnes, Murmur, 23 December 2006

from my side of this wall
I am only a body
& the sky is a milky blue

I quietly compose performative debts
unchecked — they form treacherous habits
when written they  s t r  e t c h  smooth

I’ve ritualized these (now) ceremonial feelings
& marinated in their bone-heavy broth
as panicked days continue to pace themselves

salvaging

| ginger k. hintz

“but i am running into a new year and i beg what i love and i leave to forgive me”
— Lucille Clifton, from I am Running Into a New Year

“your dream is my nightmare,” (trans. google) Berlin 25 Oct 2019

Always, an airplane in the sky. Our big, beautiful world is dying. We string colored lights in windows. This time of year requires letting go of what cannot be undone. The freeway flows forward, always. Birds sing in tune with worn out brakes of city buses. Today I will laugh. Where does the grotesque fall away and where is the real? Knees. Ribs. Pelvis. Hips a spacial reference to another’s manipulation. My body woke me in the middle of the night. I wasn’t sure if it was fair to tell you this truth. I disassociate enough to protect my sensibilities and made myself small to accommodate your vision of a world that owed you. I kept my mouth shut for fear of casting a shadow on your carefully carved out spotlight. I need new vocabulary to describe this headstrong ritual. Joy and excitement is replicable but they won’t be to scale. Yesterday I watched a woman kiss pigeons. Gently and respectfully, she kissed the bravest on their greedy beaks. In a sea of bread crumbs and feathers, she shared her love with those who surrounded her. Come back into it. My body won’t relax. I pick up the slack. Evening’s receiving light follows me home.

slow blink to xmas

| ginger k. hintz

Always to shine,
to shine everywhere,
to the very depth of the last days…

-Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky

Arnaldo Pomodoro, Untitled, 1984-85.

Celestially speaking, we all belong to a restrictive social class.
Cumulative in our longings, we render dependency as emergencies
[how romantic to feel each other’s interdependent commitments].
We take our love-starved coordinates and plot collective orbits.
Moving at the textured pace of gravity’s grace, time fragments.
Do not worry. This scattering happens every year. Remember?
What will you pick up and carry into tomorrow? The new year?

morning shadows

| ginger k. hintz

Do me a favor this morning. Draw the curtain and come
  back to bed.
Forget the coffee. We’ll pretend
we’re in a foreign country, and in love.

Raymond Carver, last stanza of “The Road”

Helen Lundeberg, Islands, 1986. Acrylic on canvas, 127 x 127 cm.

There’s an urgency when you wake up in darkness. Instinct tells you to trust that light is coming. The sky opened a hazy lilac. Morning shadows sharpen. I’ve misinterpreted the danger inherent in matter cannot be created nor destroyed. Navigating productions, stilted formations misunderstood as lyrical responses, becomes a performance. Often, soothing a distraction.

I learned early that soft touches were to be saved for moving someone to confession, then towards salvation. For all those end-of-days Sunday warnings, I am not prepared. This is a special kind of denial, an abject version of faith.

“We should have known” has signaled subtle shaming. Didn’t you hear all those rumors?

The moon is new. At the moment, there is no wind. My body remembers this fear. My sense of distance expands in the pink layered light.

I’ve kept this on the tip of my tongue, at the rim of my mouth, inside my lungs sweet like a curated secret. I tried to write around the noise but this is the silence that found me.

enter

| ginger k. hintz

Out One, 1971, Jacques Rivette

“Variety, multiplicity, eroticism are difficult to control.” — Barbara Christian, The Race for Theory, 1988

the world has been ending
since humans monetized time
selling stories elegant as tree rings
interrupted only to loop

together, attention affects gravity
softly gathered in quiet
found in the folds of endurance
atoned — we focus on the migrating season

elegant in its infinite chase
an autumn sun rose ripe
peachy explosions
light bloomed dandelion bright

take my hand, let’s walk
to the edge of town
I promise our sky opens
if you listen to its longest shadows

moving diagonally in a blur

| ginger k. hintz

Lill Tschudi (Swiss, 1911-2004), Venetian Lines I, 1950. Linocut, 26 x 28 cm. Number 16:50

god is absent these manic days
and still, we try to be our best selves
(even my plants have grown inches)

find your lazy gaze focused
there is forgiveness in being temporary
(pink light burns morning fog)

abstract detachment feels like coping
dreamy summer days tumble us smooth
(bone white clouds break open)

difficult knowledge

| 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

vintage fascination

| ginger k. hintz

Gregor Beltiz, ss-titre #2, série Les boîtes des sentiments, 2012

Last year’s fire season
wasn’t the first time
I took my breath for granted.
I had been choked before,
by father and daddy alike.

My body memorizes
with appreciation.
This way of knowing a matrix,
a structural ethic.

As fire’s light establishes
rapidly diminishing distances,
tradition finds strength in time passing.

Our days are paced aggressive,
a seasonal norm. History is recorded
furiously as language reflects
fractured frontlines.

Be worried.
These western fires
will reach you,
soon.

paradox of desire

| ginger k. hintz

October 2018, Brooklyn

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.

 

conscientious imposter

| ginger k. hintz

‘I see’ ‘with my voice’ — Alice Notley, from The Decent of Alette

Note by Anne Truitt, April 1965

our learning is from the news
a nurtured condition

⁄ it is eclipse season
shadows are light  ⁄

our call is to imagine, to conceive
defend against performance-enhancing speculations

visionary blight
= fragmentations

our hands worn from self-caress
please see management

it takes a lot of energy to kill a god
Δ long division

tautology, as a fault of style

| ginger k. hintz

“with the evolution of awareness came the possibility that existence could be more than survival, or that survival could be more than a response to fear, and could include the encompassing of joy” — Jeremy Wolff, excerpt from the essay Thots on Pot

April 2018

Northern Plains’ cottonwoods spread their seeds this time of year.
Thick as snow, their white progeny coats lawns and 4×4 pickup trucks.
A soft blizzard similar to the way Saharan dust reached Texas this week.

Both are dramatic—all that settling.

When adoration and permissions share the same open mouth of devotion
it is recommended that you consult your prophesies to justify blanket explanations.
Only then should you transpose your unknowing into thoughts and prayers.

A crash disrupts into eventual silence.

rosemary

| ginger k. hintz

“But your pleasure understands mine.”
— Clarice Lispector, The Sharing Of Loaves

Betsy Eby (American, b. 1967), Rise, 2017. Encaustic on canvas over panel, 35 x 48 in.

At 39,000 feet, clouds rose like mountains
fading to dark as the blushing sun set
to black as the thinnest winter ice.
Ice we learned to turn our wheels into,
and when done correctly, such surrendering
was proactive evidence of a survivor’s effort.

In spring, we plant rosemary to remember
our deepest buried beliefs. We harvest
and revise our most shadowed secrets like wanting nothing
but distant empty horizons and bodies that do not betray.

We sculpt these altered thoughts and declare them working dreams.
In trust, our shared wishes for a braver future were coming true.

smash and grab

| ginger k. hintz

Tell me, what’s the joy of giving if you’re never pleased?
— Blood Orange, Champagne Coast

Georgia O’Keeffe, Blue-03, 1916, watercolor on paper

the sun rises at eastern edges
yellowing twilight blues

when there is nothing
rest

if there were Christmas stockings
we always had an orange

such persistence can feel joyful
when there is no other choice

stacked seasons

| ginger k. hintz

“There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time.
Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?”
— Don Delillo, Cosmopolis

artist unknown

The light, not yet warm, opens our days.
We commit to memory that hope is best performed as a cognitive process
and remember: stars align themselves through proximity and gravitational pull.

Collapsing distance to violent midwinter visions
questions seep: how did I not know I was in danger?
Violations stacked delicate  //  soft brushes with unwanted space.

This tail of the past curls comfortably around itself.
Scared animals return home, even if home is unsafe.
Time sinks into litanies simple as joy is serious.

This narrative clearly has a beginning, middle, and no end
because our holy bodies are sites of quantum consciousness.
We swagger in possibility and pull intuitive threads to unravel.

a whole orange, floating

| 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, life is easy.

What is beneath the surface begs.
It howls.
Remaining grounded has a sinister side,
a backlash by way of prophetic referent.

public feelings

| ginger k. hintz

[such a sky and such a sun
i never knew and neither did you
and everybody never breathed
quite so many kinds of yes]

— E.E. Cummings

found @stacyontherocks
found @stacyontherocks

We’ve come undone, cumulatively, in the same way that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring warns. Ruled by misunderstandings, which is to say we are ruled by no one in particular, norms are large-scale projects of self-consciousness. It’s public infrastructure.

The ocean goes nowhere except to meet itself.
A private sensation, a mix of urging and friction.

Days bleed into opinion. It is not enough to simply be.
All this pressure to perform as heaven’s rewards remain on layaway.
I want to be inside that pejorative energy. Transposed survival.

Cut. Then paste. Seasons as witness to predictions that light seeks light.