Folkcal Fraim 8
First Class Transportation Dressing Room / Florence, Italy / TSE / 2019
All of the mannequins in the department store window displays were holding cell phones. There were five windows in all, each containing three motionless, human impersonators, and each featuring a theme of the apparatus and practice of photography. In two of the windows, the mannequins were posed in positions as if photographing each other, a skyline of tripods on wallpaper behind them. In two of the remaining three windows, the mannequins pointed their phones toward the onlookers on the street––many of whom, also, stood frozen holding their cellphones in the same manner as the mannequins so that, in this regard, it was hard to tell who was impersonating who, what, or why; but in the window display that I found most meta-ironic, the middle window, the mannequins mimicked the gestures of taking photographs of themselves, self-thems, selfies, each posed (by a human window dresser) to capture the likenesses of their selfless selves. It was in this window that they seemed nearly alive, less like mannequins, between worlds, windows of the world, and more like us.
Facing away from one of the side-windows, shoppers and passers-by, with their backs to the glass, took selfies and made videos in front of the mannequins that were pretending to take photos of them, creating a double layer of visual meaning, a repetition of the act of image-making, life, non-life, hidden in the middle-brow guise of commercial art transfashionism. If phone-photographed properly (because the window was a few feet above ground level) and from the proper angle (below looking up), the mannequins might look like pale, bald, anatomically anorexic giants: the Nephilim of Neiman Marcus, the Goliaths of Garfinkel’s, a fashionable trinity of Macy’s cyclops, supersized and holding a devil of a device capable of controlling the behavior of the imitative inhabitants in the world on the other side of the large glass screen. I had a camera with me but declined participation in the mocking irony of Holiday Consumer Theater, the new religion of disciple deception. A few energetic phone-holders photo-bombed the pictures of strangers. A couple in matching camouflage bombers with fur collars bombed the hardest while two women posed in a self-conscious kiss as the glass-caged Watchers, lifelessly, pretended to immortalize them. I counted fifteen mannequins. Mannequin, mannequin, mannequin. Say it enough times, rapidly, and it sounds like man-ne-kin; with the last syllable: kin (suggestive of family) bringing up the word-rear; and say it again: man-ne-kin, man-ne-king, man-king’d and it rises to the level of royalty before shrinking to mankind.
In many ways (unlike Elementary School, which was something of a brick and walled-in bible), the department store was my first (away from home) public dictionary. It was where appliances became syllables, and an old elevator was operated by a man in a uniform who stood behind a sliding gate and rode up and down the shaft within the paragraphs of things to purchase. We were told not to play on the escalator where we had a full view of every sentence of living room––couches, recliners, love seats, tables, pillows, rugs, draperies and television sets, all being slowly diagrammed in a black marble notebook by whoever was responsible for managing the floor. Once I discovered the slanted perspective of the world from an escalator, the metal lines and steps that magically and mechanically lifted and lowered like a conveyor belt on the back of a reptile, I retired from sliding down our boring, silver, stationary neighborhood sliding board. I saw my first non-instamatic camera hanging from the neck of a man moving through revolving doors, round and round like there were two or three of him, a copy in pursuit of the original before they eventually changed places in the cologne and perfume atmosphere of department reality. I was a quiet kid with a head full of traffic jams and enjambed laws about everything, including the compound-complex collision of the right words versus the wrong sounds. I thought Woodward & Lothrop, where my mother took us to see the annual Christmas window displays of fake snow, mini reindeer, and elves was connected to Woodward and Bernstein, Watergate’s dynamic duo of investigative insiders. I understood the concept of “Layaway,” but I was totally baffled by “Will Call” and wondered if it was some form of control over free will, or a coded label for our inability to resist spending? Such conundrums made me a word transformer, a game I played when I wanted to make the meanings of words travel, or give them a creative evolution, an act very different from robbing the graves of their etymologies. It was my way (on rainy days) of putting a camera––a camera I couldn’t yet afford––between the worlds that were words long before cellphones were available. Word selfies, the selves of the word as it flies from one form of itself to another freer form of itself, visually and phonetically rearranged, not as a direct compliment, but as the connective tissue of reference, a new loose beginning eating its own loose new ending, around and around in meaning. Here, for those unafraid to liberate the linearity of logical linguistic invention, is a mild mental reenactment that will, at first, seem baffling. Close your eyes. Open your eyes, one at a time. Now look: the selfie of Water Closet is Will Call and the selfie of Will Call is Mayan Calendar and the selfie of Mayan Calendar is Harpeth Hills Memory Garden Cemetery.
Like the light of early evening in a lens, going downtown was an event. The numbered streets crossed the streets that were named after letters of the alphabet, and both were arranged in the order that we were taught in school, numerical and alphabetical: ABC, 123. If you were able to count and read (just a little) you could find your way away from home and back––no looking glass required, no liquid capsule all-up-in the magnetic needle’s ear about missing bread crumbs, no learning tree magic, just a view of the infamous obelisk, Washington’s stone finger, casting and pointing its accusatorial, sundial shadow of national time. Once I learned to read the dial, I was never caught off guard by a faulty light meter or nightfall again. Counting pillars and the stone canopies above them was fun, their temperatures easy to take with my lens, certain that both Samson and Hercules had lived, battled, and died here. In my neighborhood, I felt angular––like what we used to call “print,” the equivalent of street…but downtown I felt cursive, full of slant, like the most adventurous avenue on the map, a legend. The selfie of slang is survival gauge, but when double-exposed it becomes angle of language. From our church-built hood High Rise it only took seven blocks to reach downtown and another six (or so) to reach the National Mall where all of the rituals disguised as celebrations and political marches were held. The names of people, places, and things stimulated me as did the ways people from other parts of the country and the world talked. The selfie of village is voice. The selfie of accent is oxygen entrance. Named after families, mostly German, many department stores had their names chiseled in stone above the main entrance just like our schools and other government buildings, so when we changed neighborhoods and I had to transfer from one school to another, I asked the principal, Mr. Birchete, “How do I get a department store?” He laughed and my mother blushed one of those the opposite of blushing, brown blushes. After all, we lived in a ten-story apartment building, but at that age the architectural gap between apartment and department was beyond even eye- and ear-eager me. Store, storage, the Age of Storing. The selfie of Saks Fifth Avenue is Saxe Coburg-Gotha. The size of things can teach you so much about civilization, but there was one thing that the smaller stores like F.W. Woolworths and S.S. Kresge’s (famously called Five and Dimes) had that I never saw in any of the titanic department stores that sometimes took up a whole corner or most of the city block: The Photo Booth. With its curtain and mini-Oz wizard control-room-vibe, it was my favorite place to hide especially when it was time to leave or time to dream of traveling. It was an even greater place to imagine being an adult and pretend to vote. Being a so-called citizen of Washington, D.C., I couldn’t wait to grow up and participate in a Presidential Election. Hiding from mom’s public shopping voice, I’d close the curtain, adjust the height of the round, turning stool, so that my eye-level was vertically centered in the screen, close my eyes, and imagine the future: “Would I go to college, who would I marry, would I become a writer, and how much do cameras cost?” These were the mental worries that were slowly, too slowly, developing in my mind as I put my money in the slot and made a regular face, flash, a funny face, flash, a face as if I was thinking (like an author’s photo), flash, and (finally) a mean “mug” (slang for face), flash. Even at this age, with all of life in a series of photos ahead of me, the booth (being only a few blocks from Ford’s Theater) seemed like a good place to accidentally die.
Those of us who love to sit, mantra-less, in photo booths (not stand in phone booths) waiting for the divine spark of a blinding bulb with the hopes of experiencing every direction of history, learned our craft, the craft of costume rejection, the shedding of trendy skins, in the dressing rooms and general waiting areas of pre-online department stores. The more established the store, the more modern the dressing room––curtain, mirror, a black ash mid-century modern slat bench, extending from each side of the wall to offset the brown paneling, wood hangers, and sturdy, steel hooks from which to hang the garments, a dish of mints and artfully wrapped chocolates––the more mature the experience than any travelling carnival or amusement park. And the more technicolor the dressing room, the more appealing it was as a doorway (or a tool of magnetism) to the future and the past. Once, in the late 1970s, I stumbled upon a photo shoot in the general waiting area outside of the dressing rooms of the Hecht Company where the models were using the dressing rooms (the way actors also use on-location trailers) to change into styles from different eras. I was surprised to discover that the drawings and illustrations that I’d seen in “catalogs” (a word in which I’ve always heard an echo of cattle) had actually walked off the pages, arriving in this realm as real men and women, models, human modems––long, slender, capable of standing absolutely still for long periods of time, the stationary herd. I also noticed that they didn’t walk like anyone I knew. Ranked by the strategical kindness of mark-downs and clearance racks, the department store had a useful secret and I had discovered it: the dressing rooms were photo booth relocation chambers (part photographer’s lab and part magician’s box of tricks) and, depending on the quality of its overall presentation and comforting hypnosis, not to mention the museum-like showcasing of merchandise by banker-merchants hiding behind ad men, knights of fashion and housewives, and a good department store of departments had the same effect on the senses, I suspect, as a slice of any number of the World’s Fairs. It was like a gypsy’s travelling wardrobe of silks, shiny movie lot stages and spaces that did not match the world outside or my world at home all cloaked in brand-name luxury. To escape, I learned very early in life that I could enter a photo booth in, say, a bus station in Providence, Rhode Island, and exit another photo booth in Berlin, Germany, with a layover in London where I had just enough time to discover that the selfie of photo booth is British Petroleum. All I had to do was close my eyes, cross the barrier between concentration and prayer, and hold my camera with two hands, one palm over the lens, the other curved in a light supportive caress against its back. Akin to the way I read books, my body would stay in the booth, but my mind––having avoided the hassle of passports and planes––was absolute otherwhere. To this beg end ing: a single word could become a vacation, and every gravity-less graph of a photo––a variation of rude Icarus’s hard-headed album of wings, which does not exclude the seemingly selfless selfies (and advice) of Daddy Daedalus. The selfie of wings is ribcage whisper. The selfie of remembering your ex is forgiveness melt. I was a trip, neither too high nor too low. Instead of f-stops like rival realms, instead of shutter speeds like synaptic raptures, the mayhem aim of poetry is philosophy minus the philosopher, and the aim of the philosopher (minus photographic reasoning) is the golden ratio of intellectual archeology. Naked rose, sore eros. Lazy ass Mona Lisa is the selfie of Lensa.
Yes, there’s a selfish elf in selfie, one “r” away from setting its own face on fire. Headshot, a match head, dormant in a small booklet. Though free, there’s a fee to see it, burn it, this flim-flam and foe-tow of flames. There’s so much for sell in a selfie; and all of its filters and feelings originate in the electric light orchestra of the Elohim, a title not a name. On one side of the page the swords of Muhammad, and on the other side of the page the swords of Christ. And running between them, bordered by sprockets, are the words of Buddha and, like the ancient, angel science of an outstretched arm, all of the words and swords match, no translation of Thoughtography needed. No one dare diss the company of the corpse. A ship of words finds a shore and becomes worship. One slip of the self and the flesh begins the cycle of feeding the shelf, cloth food, books again, this time older meals made of seeds containing the signal that (as an event) eventually outsources speech, a mental governance from beyond the reign and standard time of the brain. Follow the suffocating cave lantern––past activism––where the selfie of cell is Atlas, then further into the idea-artfulness of Arabic till you can almost lick its introverted selfie, Latin. If you are right-handed and cannot sleep with a camera in your right hand, the book in the drawer in the small dresser by the bed in the hotel room says he “knew” his wife. It does not mention their sex selfies, the milky way.
Sky full of souls, odes to domes, unidentified sonic holes, organisms of the sacred simile hidden in plasma foam, a self between selves unable to roam or be harmed by the cosmic horticulture of comet gossip like what, like Disclosure, nah, like the fallen cell voltage that gives weight to all scheduled payments and the instant ram of merciless snap chats, multiplied by a creativity less than blind rocket blast, like a stye, on the greater eyelid of the last glyph pic on a wet bathroom wall. This is the scope of lens-maze that sense must pass through on its way to the harbor of new self, and yet no mention of the rigid posture of posing next to cracked liberty. The moon is a reflection of itself as reflected on the face of a much larger earth, ear thunder earned. The selfie of habit is horizon bite. Jupiter’s selfie is Peter and Peter’s selfie is Pisces. Astrology as cartography, both injected into the story by birth, another booth. The sky is so very convincing (as sky) but it falls apart under the scrutiny of rods (with phones attached) all trying to open the same door. However, once the self becomes a file, it’s the ground (not the screen on-high) that comes the closest to closest to distributing truth… so hold the cellphone lower (near the Phonetic Ankle Bone Region of Phoenician Ankhs) where the selfie of grimoire is grammar and American bloodlines go back further than the vagrants of the Court of Miracles, the grand secretary of the Great Secret. Be a lens-listener, envious of Kenny Dorham’s “Dorian” not Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray. This booth with the Victorian curtain and non-sticky floor is just dandy, capsules of Tri-Iodine for hand-held picture balance. The selfie of Medici is icy medicinal cinema. Meditation, the Mediterranean: brown-haired, brown-eyed, no Black, no White, tropical all over. Solar Alembic. Geo gallery engineering. The selfie of Hell is Winter, the cold that causes the “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Immunization Card Literature, dead, all dead, another catalog of alliterative logic. The Lord of the Flies is a selfie for The Way of All Flesh, and the selfie of Three Trapped Tigers is Stand Still Like a Hummingbird. Such reflections are not reserved for transforming an individual into a series of mnemonic stem cells, odorless and organic, yet used to soften the discovery of techie sites like Aztec and Texas, the steering through the ether via social meddling where anyone can post an unprofessional fire or a file of the self, profile, why, because Sol Invictus is the satellite not the selfie of Victim Strut, because Mecca is the selfie of Academic Camelot. Self-portrait, paranormal, some selfies are no more than a picture of a pair of parrots, the same parrot, punctured on both sides of the nose, parroting being in a picture. Like the one sentence the universe used to be, the sun was once an open lens in a vibrant camera, the source of all revelation, but it began reproducing (too quickly) like Cancer. Thus, those who believe that Atlantis is beneath the Atlantic Ocean are not completely wrong but, when remotely viewed, they all suffer from the building redating of non-local perception, the kidney in the cornerstone, a solidifying gas. Only a moor from Lemuria (not America), an Aseer, can help with such an ailment…as it is the result of standing in a single file line in two different timelines: the personal and the collective also known as the Hero with a Thousand Faces Envy, a Janus Syndrome, an affliction caused by avid selfie give and take, spill and spiel. Note: anagrams are simply alphabetical flip phones, permanent wrist phasers set to stun, scramblers of the human chromo-code. Intentional (and shallow) as what Narcissus discovered, a selfie is a stiff arm (a stiffie) away from the barbaric yawp of earthly wellness, the Biology Watcher parts, that are, as Czeslaw Milosz put it, “unattainable.” Telepathy, telephoto, the path of the telephone and telescopic extension of Lord Saturn whose rings of WiFi are still under construction. Holograms of the royal ego, trapped and cold chillin’ in the morgue of X and Y gender determination, the new domination. How to know how to properly and perpetually hold a selfie stick and know (for sure) where you are in the real history of the endless cycles of news and endless cycles of views, each one leading to slavery, the selfie of the selfie of all selfies. No archons, no supplements just the healthy benefits of only eating oranges for five months, Florida oranges, golden apples…then and only then can the body travel via one mode of transportation while, at the same time, the mind travels. A full experience of the dimming of dimension, what the Phoenicians taught the Hebrew Israelites and the Greeks and the Greeks taught the Romans and the Romans taught the French and the English. Of note is the fact that there was already a tribe known as the Picts, thus, the ancient celts did not believe in staring up into their palms for photographs, expertly framed by the anatomical extension of Jpeg leg elbow. The selfie of pirate is privateer, an elite listener. The selfie of privateer is private eye, a vital seer. The selfie of private eye is Ye of Vatican privilege, the Yale beneath the village. In Renaissance portraiture, all hidden hands hold a cellphone, a wearable with an optical display, Joseph Byron’s coat of arms, the coming of an embrace or a mere double offering, an optional portal of repopulation photography, a historical place maker of place making? No way to hide it, the selfie of the history is everywhere.
In Florence, Italy, I exited the photo booth that I entered in Berlin two years earlier, only to find (after a short walk) the energy surrounding the exterior of the Duomo buzzing like an infestation of sects, human insects, no different than a scene from one of Kurosawa’s adaptations of Shakespeare, perhaps Throne of Blood (MacBeth) or Ran (King Lear). The tourists were all gathered like horseback soldiers in an armor that made them look and sound like beetles and cicadas, their helmets, flags, and weapons extended into the lower atmosphere like free energy devices, the antennae of religious belief. I can only recall one previous time having to move through a crowd the way I moved through this one; and that was when I attended a Silent Disco in The Hague. Let me try to take selfies of these two occurrences side-by-side, superimposed, as if they are ghost events from different memory cards, but like negatives occupying the same file space in a tight, plastic sleeve. In Florence, I was outdoors and it was daytime. In The Hague, it was night and I was indoors. Outside Duomo, I felt like a single strand of hair or stalk of straw in Ben Shahn’s drawing “TV Antennae” as I walked through the streets of the Hague. It seemed that every person riding a bicycle was hunting me, just me, no other photographer, no other poet, no other bandleader, just me. It was like being trapped three times at once (each me, each time) in a lane in the slowest shutter speed on the dial while everything that moved was making streaks of light and sound around me. I was grainy. I was gray matter in the de facto capitol of the Netherlands. I was the Vitruvian Man inside an atom, lassoed by speeding flesh, chrome, and rubber. I was an intruder with two anchors, metal cameras. I could see the horns of the bull that handlebars were forced to be and wondered who they obeyed. Where were the rodeo clowns of late rush hour when I and I and I needed them? In less than an hour, I was almost hit (at least five times) spinning then stretched across the back plate of whatever building or tree I could find like a human roll of color film, Ektar 100, quickly rewinding myself to regain my balance. Miraculously, I recovered like a fly between swats. In The Hague, the reflection of me was John Berger’s About Looking but the selfie of me was Aimé Cesaire’s Lost Body. In Florence, I did not have a reflection, religion or a body. I had a mission, one that guided my timing toward the oddest occurrences and interactions between people in old world places. I was indivisibly invisible. It was a feeling that I hadn’t felt since once stepping into a photo booth in the Palomino Pool Hall in Gainesville, Florida, and exiting in Mexico City to the sound of a Harmonipan Man hiding from my camera, a monkey doll sitting on his instrument and obscuring his face, which made me take the photo anyway. Damn monkey. If there is a selfie for this kind of instinctive serendipity, then surely it was captured by faith. In Florence, I saw the kinds of things that only lovers and killers should see, but outside of the Duomo everyone let their castle guards down and surrendered to the all-seeing hive of mechanical eyes as selfie sticks sprouted from sacred ground, the entire area a field of light saber-like lightning rods, astonished visitors, pole-swords, and blind, amateur phone-photographers all lifting and pointing their camera canes in the direction of an agreed upon energy center.
Night covered The Hague in the same manner that a century once turned its back to the hag of esotericism, accusing it of heresy. Booth travel is not an exact science; it scrambles the memory, and the sites of the selfies blur as the digital dates, like quickie dares, evaporate. A few years earlier Berlin had exhausted me, the walking, the Wall, the weight. With nearly identical black M cameras, digital and film, I tried to be a spy in the former “city of spies,” but only managed to be a bandleader, but barely. Both Leicas felt different, more determined, in Germany the glass of the lens clearer than in Missoula, Iowa City, Boston, Cleveland, Tucson, Boise, Santa Fe, El Paso, New Orleans, San Francisco, and all of the others places my poems had dragged me and I had, in turn, reluctantly dragged poetry. While the Duomo was an obstacle course of upward fishing poles dodging architectural prayer, the Berlin Wall was a magnetic strip of concrete memory, a divided traumatic lesson covered in the graffiti skin of creative and combative speech, and just like celluloid (or a negative), there were two sides to it, and both were controlled by the same powerful hauntings. The selfie of regime is gimme the game of resistance. Regrets, yes, I wasn’t allowed to make a portrait of the man who stamped my passport booklet at Berlin Tegel Airport. I wouldn’t had taken another photograph ever again or wrote another word (ever) had I been allowed to roll across the tin drum behind his face. I wanted to tell him a joke, but I was advised by a mental fellow traveler to play it straight ahead––no tunes, no metaphors, no solos. Did he know that we were both in a photo booth behind a curtain and not in an airport? Because the selfie of flight time is forever, the currency did not change but the light did, so when I exited the phone booth in the Netherlands (same trip, different booth) it felt like morning (again) although it was the same time in both booths. There is no selfie for time, but the selfie of sick and tired is agreement. And because I was tired, the silent part of “Silent Disco” appealed to me, or else I would have been perfectly satisfied with walking the streets––me, my camera, a few rolls of film, lens cloths and wipes, memory cards, and a head full of lackadaisical what ifs. I wasn’t alone. I was with “the band,” and we were recognizable as the band. Upon entering, we were given headphones. Well, everyone except me. The selfie of lament is mental landscape. No more phones to the dome for me. I declined. I saw it as drinking, drinking sound, and thought at least one of us should be sober. Extreme, I know. The club was dark, but not A Journal of the Plague Year dark, not 1665. It chic and modern, certainly not a Discotheque; someone with a sense of hammers had successfully hidden the tech from the Disco, silencing it (but wasn’t that the point) and I could see, feel, and hear it. Crowded not packed, and there were places, nice couches off to the side, in the window where one could look out and see the entire street, and the entire street could look in and see the dancers, their noiseless moves, the mime trance, amphibians (again) swimming in silence.
This time I was on the other side of the department store window, moving between moving human mannequins, where the selfie of Renaissance is Reminisce, and the selfie of freestyle is the Great Fire. Everyone was burning down the house with quiet flames, including the band, including my ex, including my camera, the same song pulsing through their lens-phones, the headphones and cellphones. I had dreamt this dream before, somewhere, sitting in a classroom, in front of a screen observing the history of silent cinema, Sunrises and Golems, under the passionate guidance of Vlada Petric. The DJ was as in control of the room as a projectionist, and the sound of the feet of the people dancing popped and clicked like the loop that film makes above the gate of the projector. Steve Livernash used to say, “A healthy loop makes for a smooth screening.” Selfies on the silent dancefloor, selfie in the lit corridor by the bathroom door, selfies at the bar. When the DJ scratched, the selfies became a musical rash in the air attached to flying limbs. It was hard not to be hit by the swingers, and even harder not to piss off some partygoer set-free (ha ha) by the pounding four-on-the-four drone of disguised, assembly-line pleasure. When I raised my camera to my face, I was either elbowed in the ribs, had my toes marched on, or was butt-bumped into another butt that was mostly bone. Joining the ritual––at least physically––I found myself saying, “Excuse me” to people who could not hear me. Where were they, where were they really? Without the headphones, and holding my camera, I danced with the Netherland night and with my ex; it was just another stage. I could make out the tempo of the songs from the movement of the strangers, and substituted their names and voices, the stories of their lives, with my perception (soon to be a picture) of their rhythms. In this mute jungle, though forced by imagination, many were mates. In the rhythm jungle, many are mates. Since the selfie of Leica is Lucifer, I danced well when I danced near those who could dance, and I danced terribly when I danced near those who could not dance. Mimicry, the fallen state of music as Kronos (Cronus) uses our bodies to keep, create and trap us in time. The selfie of Silent Disco, of any Disco, will always be LaDonna Adrian Gaines, the first selfie of Donna Summer, the Queen of Disco. It was trippy. I thought, “I wonder which drug this is like?” Had I known, I would have packed two very fast rolls of black and white film, 3200, and enjoyed the freedom and devil-may-care attitude of making grainy exposures of the ghosts on the dancefloor. No more than two hours earlier, I was onstage explaining the need for free energy and imagining, for a crowd of onlookers, the whole world as a poem and warning the listeners of the coming final vinyl state of mental spin. Donna Summer died in Naples, Florida, on Thursday, May 17, 2012, almost a Friday. The selfie of Naples is Lower Neck Love, and the selfie of Florida is Pre-Adamite Floral Air Raid. The official cause was lung cancer, but for years she insisted that she was sick from inhaling toxic fumes and dust from the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City. She was in her apartment near Ground Zero when the towers were turned to dust. The selfie of lung cancer is longevity spinach and the selfie of Ground Zero is Sound Healing. People make reproductions of themselves in order to discover if there is any God (or which God or aspect of God) that exists in them. All at once, all etymology is the selfie of mythology. And now here I was, moving between the worlds that all bodies are and trying to capture, the moving lights of a disco ball as it journeyed from the faces of the people outside looking into the glass window to faces of the people inside in this rather wild experiment of togetherness. The selfie of volume is luminous love, but you have to decide which way to turn the knob. The selfie of the fear of flying is informed field but the next day, while my body could not sleep during the flight to Gdansk, my mind had no problem finding a photo booth with a hypnotic, spinning stool in it. I closed my eyes, sat and I was already in Poland before I landed.
Poet, photographer, professor and bandleader Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room and Skin, Inc. He co-founded The Dark Room Collective and The Dark Room Reading Series in 1989 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has taught in various Universities and published, both poems and photographs, in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2015). In 2015, he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a literary free Jazz band of artists who were awarded the American Book Award for Oral Literature in 2018. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry. His latest book Crank Shaped Notes was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2021. TSE was recently named the first Photo Laureate of St. Petersburg, Florida.