School Ethnography

I am opening back up to writing. Moist, rainy, new life in the autumn like my winter garden.

A small excerpt of pages of field notes:

Today I told my student to have compassion and not defend herself as if she were in trouble but simply to apologize.

"She wouldn’t look me in the eyes and when I asked her to, and our eyes locked, something seemed to break inside her. Something like crying into gray, something uncomfortable and hard. I invited her to sit on the concrete with me and I put my arm around her. She cried and I stared into the wet field, the telephone wires, the cloudy sky. I am the teacher, I cannot cry. I told her she is strong and that it is strong to be vulnerable. Like mothers. Strong to feel. Strong to care. I asked her if she wanted to sit alone or with me. She said with me. The gray sky and her under my arm. Her sleek hair and her taught face. Her tears and the rain. Her tears and the rain."

My love

You think you a lucky boy son?
Just know when you sitting at my breakfast table having fun
Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, or Alice Walker
Would certainly be a better talker.

The last line of a long poem I recently wrote.

I've been slowly but surely making my way through Zora Neale Hurston's short stories. I bought this book in a local book store in San Francisco this past winter.

Hurston is a witch with language. 

"The hours went by on their rusty ankles." 

"God took pattern after a pine tree and built you noble."

"The sun, the hero of every day, the impersonal old man that beams as brightly on death as on birth, came up every morning and raced across the blue dome and dipped into the sea of fire every evening. Water ran down hill and birds nested."

I went to take photo booths with my little sister and get ice cream. Years of tradition. Years of love. Happy to be home.

http://kayariart.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/flag_machette.jpg
Farewell to US Military industrial complex


Mexico is magical


http://instagram.com/p/NxMJ7KzaQZ/


this was one area the Spanish didn't fully destroy.


what is up with greedy and power hungry people?


http://instagram.com/p/NxUA1nTaVb/


I wrote a poem about coming here and wrote about cobble stone streets and canella (cinnamon). The first day I was here I was walking around Coyoacan (land of the coyotes) - un barrio de La Ciudad de Mexico - and realized I was on cobblestone streets drinking coffee flavored with cinnamon.
I also made a collage
 http://instagr.am/p/NIFvIGTaV5/
the other day. It has Teotihucan pyramid of the Sun in it. I didn't fully realize how magical it is that I made that and am now going tomorrow. Grateful to be alive and blessed.


http://instagr.am/p/NxJYePTaea/
Women are sexy and powerful. And I'm happy to be one.

Between the World and Me
By Richard Wright


And one morning while in the woods I stumbled
    suddenly upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly
    oaks and elms
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting
    themselves between the world and me. . . .


There was a design of white bones slumbering forgottenly
    upon a cushion of ashes.
There was a charred stump of a sapling pointing a blunt
    finger accusingly at the sky.
There were torn tree limbs, tiny veins of burnt leaves, and
    a scorched coil of greasy hemp;
A vacant shoe, an empty tie, a ripped shirt, a lonely hat,
    and a pair of trousers stiff with black blood.
And upon the trampled grass were buttons, dead matches,
    butt-ends of cigars and cigarettes, peanut shells, a
    drained gin-flask, and a whore's lipstick;
Scattered traces of tar, restless arrays of feathers, and the
    lingering smell of gasoline.
And through the morning air the sun poured yellow
    surprise into the eye sockets of the stony skull. . . .


And while I stood my mind was frozen within cold pity
    for the life that was gone.
The ground gripped my feet and my heart was circled by
    icy walls of fear—
The sun died in the sky; a night wind muttered in the
    grass and fumbled the leaves in the trees; the woods
    poured forth the hungry yelping of hounds; the
    darkness screamed with thirsty voices; and the witnesses rose and lived:
The dry bones stirred, rattled, lifted, melting themselves
    into my bones.
The grey ashes formed flesh firm and black, entering into
    my flesh.


The gin-flask passed from mouth to mouth, cigars and
    cigarettes glowed, the whore smeared lipstick red
    upon her lips,
And a thousand faces swirled around me, clamoring that
    my life be burned. . . .


And then they had me, stripped me, battering my teeth
    into my throat till I swallowed my own blood.
My voice was drowned in the roar of their voices, and my
    black wet body slipped and rolled in their hands as
    they bound me to the sapling.
And my skin clung to the bubbling hot tar, falling from
    me in limp patches.
And the down and quills of the white feathers sank into
    my raw flesh, and I moaned in my agony.
Then my blood was cooled mercifully, cooled by a
    baptism of gasoline.
And in a blaze of red I leaped to the sky as pain rose like water, boiling my limbs
Panting, begging I clutched childlike, clutched to the hot
    sides of death.
Now I am dry bones and my face a stony skull staring in
    yellow surprise at the sun. . . .


Reprinted from ChickenBones: A Journal
for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes

 Shoot with Vanessa <3

Vanessa Cabrales in her belly dancing outfit with Ana Reign Designs necklace and ring (Ana Reign jewelry has been worn by and photographed on Fergie, Alica Keys, Shakira, Lauren Hill, India Ari, &more)

4th of July

Ms. Marilyn