THE DUVA DIARIES

Goodbye, Blog

2010-05-13T07:32:00.001-07:00

Dear Reader(s) and Imaginary Friends:

I've finally accepted that I'm not a blogger! Consider this blog a placeholder until I make a web site with pretty galleries and links. Thank you to Jason Behrends for asking the right questions in his Orange Alert interview with me: here is my response on blogs.

"I can't keep up with it. Promoting yourself is such drudgery. I'd rather spend my time rewriting my stories thirteen times, until they sing. I'm too slow for blogs."

Kali pissin' fire

2010-04-07T21:15:00.000-07:00

from CARL SITS SHIVA (in progress)

2009-07-18T08:39:00.000-07:00

Carl’s a musical genius and a survivor of cancer. He doesn’t walk: he floats. He whistles Mozart operas in the bathtub, with splashes for punctuation. He’s hard of hearing and he’s addicted to nasal spray and once you’ve met him, he’s impossible to forget.

...The last time I took Carl to the hospital, the custodian took one look at his stubby grey ponytail and said, “You groovy, man!” Carl told the staff that I was his girlfriend, and that we were to be married the following week. He smooched the nurse, and she wiped her cheek.

As four beefy men had rolled him into the ambulance, he had pointed to a fat cat, orange as a pumpkin, rolling ecstatically in the dirt, and said, “That’s my Leo! He eats squirrels!”

9 a.m.

2009-06-05T20:39:00.000-07:00

Men in hot orange outside my window are blasting their eardrums, scooping rocks out of the earth, making money to feed their pussy, feed their babies. A tiny thumb is being sexily sucked. Kids scream, late to school. Ladies in heels peddling cola and coffee and Wall Street Journals (Has Job Loss Bottomed Out?) to sedentaries with sluggish veins strapped into plastic incest fart air 30,000 miles in the sky, frost webbing the windows while down here someone is sweating with a new mate they met last night, that morning jism so eager to fly in search of new gene puzzles.

A Nature Preserve near Chicago, IL...

2009-05-22T07:05:00.001-07:00

...was having a crane party! Lemonade and cheesecake was available to all. The cranes went into hiding. We spied on three-legged foxes, hopelessly tame raccoons, a visually impaired falcon that dined on a quail leg straight from a kind lesbian's hand - it was all a little sad, nature handicapped, nature lite. There was a sexy, alien-faced barn owl, but she was manic depressive, and she lived in a glorified cage. The highlight of the journey turned out to be a high-end fast food joint on the way to route 94 called Pizza Buona, and the hours of delicious burps we savored after.

Hope is the thing with feathers

2009-05-21T23:00:00.000-07:00

Take a more intimate look - click on the photo.

"Everything in the modern world functions as if death did not exist."

2009-04-15T19:27:00.000-07:00

-Octavio Paz

Staceyann Chin

2009-04-01T21:28:00.000-07:00

Yay, excitement, jump on the bed! If you live in Chicago get yourself to Women and Children First Bookstore on Weds, April 8 at 7:30 pm - Staceyann Chin, one of the finest living performance poets, is presenting her memoir and it's FREEEEEEEE.

The Threshold Between Life and Death

2009-03-17T14:02:00.000-07:00

I am on the threshold between life and death. As a parting wish I ask the Lord to flash me a moment, any moment, from my life. The moment is me, age 19, standing in my kitchen on Gold Street, rolling a lint roller over my tight red pants, listening to Outkast. Dirty lemon-patterned pot mitt, stink of garlic. It is extraordinary.

An Infant Memory of Tires

2009-03-15T19:44:00.000-07:00

I had a flat, and by the time I pulled up to Ortiz Tire I had two – I think the bastards sprinkle screws in the alley to enhance business. More snow fell, innocent and white, each flake a unique possibility, but the pileup around us was so hopelessly soiled with exhaust, who cared. Boo Boo woke with a frown and coughed out a stream of curdled milk. She looked plump and crotchety, and I sat in the back seat with her singing along with the radio, Little Red Corvette! Her frown cracked into an enormous toothless smile. I held her tight to my body in her screaming pink snowsuit with Eskimo trim, and jiggled her in the garage, surrounded by mounds and mounds, coils and coils of tires. She was mystified by the black mountains. When she is 27, she’ll have a dream of infinite, whispering black mountains in twilight, and she’ll interpret it as an ancestral land, when in fact it is an infant memory of tires.

Travnik, Bosnia

2009-03-15T19:40:00.000-07:00

from ETERNAL VIRGINS

2009-01-24T21:05:00.001-08:00

Zita and I tried photography together – art shots in our underwear, eating bananas, then lying with the peel, some unexamined idea we had about male impotence. We were horrified to see our creativity developed – shots that probed up our nostrils, and white flashes magnifying goosebumps and rolls of back fat. But the rest of Rome seemed delighted by our appearance. They treated each woman as a fantastic new discovery. Men honked, smiled, made kissies from afar, cried “Ciao, Bella!” or “Oh, hellooo, Beautee!” There were ones who inquired “You like fucky-fucky?” and others, like the bin man, who showed us their penises. Little gypsy girls – knackers, Zita called them – who lived in trailers and ditched school to moan for lira with dirt rubbed on their faces – flocked to us and squeezed our breasts and asked, “Have you ever done it? Did you! Did you make a baby?” We dodged our regular admirers, like Renato, the policeman who loitered on my street, with games and lies. I told him that my name was Nuvola – Cloud. I had no nationality, I explained, as I had been born on a boat in international waters, but I considered my motherland to be Cameroon, where I had studied insect life and mastered traditional dances. He would look at me from under his starched white bureaucratic cap, long oiled hair curling at the base of his neck, eyebrows perked, his lips contorting into a rubbery grin – “you are a fascinating young lady!”

Italy was a wonderful country to grow up in, a safe place to be a slut.

WHAT TO WEAR DURING AN ORANGE ALERT

2009-01-22T20:57:00.000-08:00

Read Kate Duva's RARE interview with Jason Behrends of the colorful arts and culture site What to Wear During an Orange Alert.

Anemic Warrior Awaits a Hemoglobin Test

2009-01-14T13:15:00.000-08:00

Sit closer to the vomit, or closer to the television? That is my dilemma in the waiting room of the Patient Testing Center. Both are toxic. Two saggy cleaning ladies apply special vomit spray to the offense, which is localized on a large slate-and-pine colored column. The television is on CNN - news of the world - which introduced us to an upcoming primetime series in which a long-haired rock star explores relations with bombastically busted bleach blond babes ("yeah, I guess I wouldn't want my own daughters in a show like mine"), and has moved on to the discovery of the skeleton of a sexy three-year-old girl.

Empty cheetos bag, and the place reeks of cheapness and disappointment and fear and hunger and boredom. A child rejects a Tigger board book, a shrouded grandmother sags before a bright saltwater aquarium intended to provide healing vibes. I would call my honey and discuss, in our private language, the midwife's assessment of my reproductive future, but dontcha know, I'm flanked by a cranky couple from the old country, and they wouldn't want to hear where I've been burned black with acid in the hopes of one day healing in a prettier way.

FONTANELLE

2009-01-14T13:13:00.000-08:00

Swimming: a Feminist Thang

2008-09-05T15:33:00.000-07:00

These fantastic mills were photographed in Jajce, Bosnia. If you were there, and you took a sweeping look to the left, you would see the tips of weeping willows dragging in a dreamy green stream, and a fiercely cold freshwater lake where men and children splash and hoot.

Parked on the grass on a Sunday are lots of families, lots of women, many in headscarves or babushkas, many in dimije. (Dimije are similar to those balloon pants we associate with belly dancers, but not sexy – the crotch is positioned down by the knees, leaving room, as my honey says, for you to crap in them for a week).

I was quite the sight to some of those ladies, jumping into the deep in my tie-dye bikini, my breasts swollen with blue veins, my full pregnant belly exposed, somersaulting and twirling in the middle of the lake.

Swimming in Bosnia: it’s a feminist thang. And that’s not just because it shows your body – Bosnia is extremely lax in its dress code compared to the Middle East. On a Saturday night promenade, there are far more Muslim hoochie mamas in silver mini-skirts than Muslim ladies wrapped in scarves. No, swimming is a feminist thang because most people in Bosnia just don’t teach their girls how to swim. It’s not considered a feminine skill. So it feels kind of dangerous, kind of sensual, kind of wild.

I attended Mommy ‘n Me swim class at the Y with my mother before I had a full head of hair and I’ve been swimming ever since, but suddenly, in this cultural climate, this skill I’ve taken for granted makes me a badass.

The real badass, though, was the one mother who refused to be left out of the fun had by her husband and her son. She was cloaked head to toe in somber charcoal gray, but she waded in, wet to her knees, tossing the ball with them. Allah bless her.

Baby Duva and Dad at the Bar

2008-08-13T18:36:00.000-07:00

Your Loving Cowfather

2008-08-12T15:08:00.000-07:00

My father sent me so many packages, sometimes they sat on my table for a whole day before my ungrateful ass opened them. Sometimes they had a 20 dollar bill inside. This note was apparently accompanied by some "cool guy" gift: maybe checkered sunglasses? A book on Man Ray?

"Cowboy" is Dad's legendary father, who partied twice as hard and lived 20 years longer than his son, and died senile in a stinky nursing home. (Grandpa Cowboy, of course, had mild brain damage since his 30s- ever since he won a midget car race upside down.....)

My father ordered seven gray sweatshirts silkscreened with the word "COWBOY" so that the "bruthas and sistahs" who cared for him in the nursing home would remember his nickname every day of the week.

Tornado Alert

2008-08-11T10:31:00.001-07:00

The night after the funeral we went to Betsy’s house. Her suburban neighbors had cooked for us: pork and chives, scalloped potatoes, spinach salad with raspberries. The rain raged, and tornado sirens went off for the first time in a generation. It sounded like war.

“Dad’s angry up there,” someone said.

We piled into the basement, which was nothing but beige carpet and possibility. Someone brought down the baby. He popped right into the swing of things, crawling and blabbing, and the girls did yoga-nastics in princess and monkey pajamas. My father’s best friend picked up Ribby the sexy white cat by her armpits and made her dance around, doo-doo-doo, and lifted her up so her legs swung in circles and her hips swirled, ooh la la!

Rain stopped. Distant wails of emergency vehicles. We drove home through the dripping city around fallen trees. My sisters had been sleeping in the bedroom next to my stepmother every night, and tonight was going to be my night – I even had my toothbrush – but it looked too lonely. I wanted to sleep with my man.

At home only Dad’s blue electric globe glowed, and I sat at my desk and looked at his small and spongy bone, and I kissed it. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, but when you cremate, there are pieces left. I got in the shower with the father of my baby. We knelt and did each other’s legs top to bottom with pink pomegranate shampoo. Rain and thunder raged again, then it stopped, and lightning popped and popped across the silence.

from EULOGY TO TOMMY JOE

2008-08-08T14:34:00.000-07:00

(The author's father died of a massive and unexpected heart attack at one a.m. on Thursday, July 31st, 2008.)

He was a man of many voices. I’m sure a lot of us have some kind of regrets tonight, and one of my regrets was that I didn’t document the hundreds of voicemails he left me over the years. One of my favorites went something like this: “Yo, Reggie. This is Jojo. Listen, I’m in the slammer. Hey – tell Vito – all the cash is in my washing machine.”

You know, Maggie – Tom’s godmother, who was best friends with Edie, his mother – told me that when Tom was a little boy, his mother would put his dinner in those aluminum pie tins. She wouldn’t give him his dinner on a plate because he’d broken so many plates throwing tantrums and throwing ‘em on the floor. So Tommy ate out of a pie tin for the first years of his life.

And then there was one night I’ll never forget – does that sound familiar? I’ll never forget – well – to make a long story short – Dad had a real nice set a pots, cast iron, he said they cost a thousand dollars, and one night when Haley and I didn’t feel like washing our dinner dishes, he put ‘em in the garbage. We had to go out in the alley and look for the pots.

He could piss me off so bad – he could be such a quitter – and he could be sad, too. Now and then I’d come over and this house you all know so well for its parties would be dead silent – you could hear the clocks ticking out of sync with each other, and he’d just be standing there at the bar doing nothing, paralyzed by some feeling he couldn’t name. He had a heart of gold, but it was a closeable heart – it was a collapsible heart – and one thing I always wondered was whether I should try to pry it open. I didn’t challenge him or kick him in the butt, I watched him keep it inside. Maybe there was nothing I could do. But hey, we all thought we had so much more time.

I’m sure you all have thoughts about the next thing you were gonna invite him to, the thing you never got to do together. For me, it was karaoke. I took him once and I always wanted to take him again. We got him to stay up past his bedtime – I think he was out til nine thirty – and the song he chose, and he got up there and sang was – “Everybody loves somebody sometimes….” And then he finished, and then another song kicked up, and a young, overweight man got up to sing next and Tommy clapped his hands and said, “Alright! Big boy!”

I got the call that he was gone in the middle of the night, and about 3:30 in the morning I got in my car – Lincoln Avenue was so still and quiet it looked frozen – and I remembered the giddiness I would feel when my dad woke me up early to set off on some trip. In the summer he’d wake me up at dawn to take our puppy Princess to the beach. Somehow I remember it as a holy thing to do with a man who never really considered himself religious, to wake up when the sky was purple – that raw time of morning when only one little bird is chirping all by itself – and the puppy would be wiggling with excitement, and we’d drive through the silence to North Avenue beach. The beach would look so blank – and then the sun would burst up over the horizon, and tiny waves would ripple at the shore, and night would be over. There’d be traffic on the streets, and we’d get a box of donuts, and and we’d go home.

One Easter he surprised me with this card, a real sappy card with our Lord Jesus on it, the kind of clean blue-eyed Jesus that looks like he brushes his hair a hundred strokes a night – and Jesus is kneeling in a green field surrounded by baby animals. And inside he writes, Katie – someone had to have made all the birds and all the bunnies. Love, Dad. He gave me a ten-dollar bill too! I probably dumped the card. Kept the money.

And we may have our sadnesses and our regrets tonight, but I like to think that he doesn’t have any anymore. I like to remind myself that Tommy O’Rourke now knows something that none of us mortals in here know tonight. He’s out there – in the Mystery. And we can be comforted by the fact that he’s on one wild ride.

Computer Class project, age 13

2008-07-23T14:03:00.000-07:00

Otis (died in Fire)

2008-04-18T22:07:00.000-07:00

Wicked Nursery Rhymes

2008-04-06T19:20:00.000-07:00

Now, in one of my previous incarnations I was a nursery schoolmarm. I relied on the enormous power of rhyme to entertain, hypnotize, and manipulate my tots, but I always wondered what these quaint songs passed to us from ye olde England really meant. At www.rhymes.org.uk, I found out.

Now I know that “Ring Around the Rosy” is about the Bubonic Plague (“ashes, ashes, we all fall down!”). “Jack and Jill” refers to the decapitation of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. (“Jack broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after…”) Even “Rain, Rain, Go Away” is, in essence, a war song.

So while adults still rely on nursery rhymes today to lull their babes, historically they’ve served another purpose: to satisfy the human preoccupation with scandal and gore.

Mon artiste

2008-03-10T21:14:00.000-07:00

Mr. Par-eeeee is artiste!
See zee ers-shattering painting?
Is Mr. Pareee’s!

Mr. Paree eat zee meatballs only,
He send ze spaghetti back –
So hungry is he - for – zee - Essence!

"Enter Ye as a Child to the Kingdom of Heaven" -Jesus

2008-03-10T21:05:00.000-07:00

and:

"Our very life depends on everything
recurring
'til we answer
from within"
(Robert Frost)

From "Why God Sent Guillermo" (alt. "Señor Pelvis")

2008-03-02T17:58:00.000-08:00

“Me encanta the way you dance,” Guillermo told me the night Lisa introduced us at that dart bar that played heartland rock and pseudoflamenco. “Enchanting!” For you monolinguals, “Ghee-Yermo” is how he said it - but in Guillermo’s night life, everyone called him Señor Pelvis. His lithe hips writhed toward me in faded jeans and an antique steer belt buckle. His shirt was short-sleeved, a faint, restrained plaid, open deep enough to reveal the gold manatee and a small slew of other charms nesting in his thatch of black chest hair.

Unlike many of my North American female counterparts, I am drawn to gold chains. I even married a man who wears one. Something earnest and exotic shines from a good man in a gold chain, especially when the talisman is right.

HEAR MORE stories on Saturday, March 8 (3-8-08!)
The Book Cellar
(Merchants of fine literature, beer and wines!)
4736 N. Lincoln, Chicago at 7 pm
A fiction fest with Elizabeth Crane (author of three books including "When the Messenger is Hot") and Spencer Dew (author of "Songs of Insurgency," new from Vagabond Books).

!

NANA SHINEFLUG KISSED MY HEART

2008-03-02T17:42:00.001-08:00

(Guru Elizabeth "Nana" Shineflug)

I love you Nana!

STRANGER DADDY (coming soon)

2008-02-01T19:37:00.000-08:00

(Glue stick, crayon wax, and magazines, Albuquerque, 2002). Made when the author reached the end of a line, in the extraplanetary desert.

radiatin'

2008-01-10T19:30:00.000-08:00

Collared Shirts and the Death of Christ: SHOCKING connections to be revealed!

2008-01-04T15:54:00.000-08:00

THE PECULIAR INCIDENCE OF THE INTERSEX CHINCHILLA

2007-12-22T19:15:00.000-08:00

"Summer can be a slothful and sinful season....."

Thus begins THE PECULIAR INCIDENCE OF THE INTERSEX CHINCHILLA, the tale of a Victorian family and their unwitting participation in the creation of a mutant race.

Hear Ms. Duva read it on Mystery radio! Check back soon for broadcast.

from POSTWAR

2007-12-05T16:30:00.000-08:00

A woman would come. Our boy was in no hurry. He hadn’t lived that story yet. He was living on the land, providing for his family. He was a boy and a man.

There were women who would have him. His boss invited him to fix a leak, and answered her door in a nightie, illustrating time and gravity underneath. That leak was sealed with religious attention, and our boy begged no hunger, no thirst: I’m in a hurry! There was the nurse who kneaded his thigh, making way for the bullet that would be his for life. But she was in a hurry, and the whites of the freedom fighter’s eyes still burned into our man’s mind, and rage is no aphrodisiac for a nice guy.

He was a nice guy. He clapped, even hooted a bit when the ice-cream girl called him into her truck and danced down to her bra, but he didn’t touch. He returned to work and pumped the swimming pool clean. He mowed fields around the bombed-out stadium so guys could forget all playing ball. He oversprayed hate graffiti with black blobs...

from STUPID WOMEN'S CLUB

2007-11-20T19:52:00.000-08:00

They were not considered stupid women by the public (see: chess; sestinas; sacred geometry; research on primate behavior; and dazzling double-spaced analyses pulled out of their respective asses whilst pinned under purring cats, verbally abusing each other, and listening to a mix of Kraftwerk and Afrobeat). But they were prone to tantrums and hysterics, and flamboyant blood stains, and hallucinatory confessions to Worldly men who began love writing puppy dog poems and ended love throwing the telephone into the ceiling fan.

STAR PUPIL ............ The Lobotomization of American Education

2007-10-20T13:37:00.000-07:00

When you keep a six-year-old in chairs for six hours straight,
with no recess,
with no exercise,

You are psychologically straitjacketing that kid.

Forbidding 15 minutes a day
of fresh air and a little space
is a crime akin to forbidding a child to go to the bathroom.

They complain about children going ballistic
As if it is the children's fault!

I know guests, I'm losing my cool, I tend to pretend to have been dead for 500 years, but this is the year 2007, and I am pissed!

We wonder why our kids don't become scientists and engineers, when everything we learn needs to fit on a piece of paper,
and our tests are on paper,
and we've got to follow the Book.

The military gets all that fat
federal wealth
straight from the source

But for YOUR education you'll have to depend on how much homes "go
for" ($$$)
in your area

Leaving the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free

in the piddly educations

of their tax caste.

take back the SWASTIKA

2007-09-20T07:55:00.000-07:00

Swastika is a Sanskrit word which means "well-being."

An ancient symbol used by Buddhists, Hindus, Native Americans, Celts, and many other cultures across the globe.

Energy specialists suggest it represents the flow of life force.

Carl Sagan suggested it represents a comet that veered close to the earth many millenia ago.

Take back the swastika!

from WINGS OF A BOY

2007-09-13T20:41:00.000-07:00

He makes mother’s milk:
the black-eyed dove has flown.

He mashes nut, apple and soy
strains it through my paisley scarf
pours the spew in a syringe
shakes it to make it warm
pecks my cheek
puts the wilted babies in my palm.

Jelly heads, tiny tapered rumps, and spindly proto-wings want to bloom.
They suck and strive. A black eye bud opens one crack, drunk on a sliver of light.
Their crops balloon, they turn purple and plop, yawning out needle tongues.

.

Rise and Shine

2007-08-22T09:29:00.000-07:00

Female Suicide Bomber

2007-08-05T21:38:00.000-07:00

Naomi Des Moines
as the Female Suicide Bomber:
"Do I HAVE to
take the twelve virgins?"

George Washington Prays in the Ladies' Room of Lincoln Lanes Bowling

2007-07-07T22:07:00.000-07:00

from HOW WE GENTRIFIED LINCOLN PARK

2007-07-07T21:51:00.000-07:00

Dad got a vein tied off so they could conceive me. The white population grew by one.

In the privacy of his home Dad liked to talk like he was black. “Look at dem bruthas and sistahs!” he said to my pregnant mother as a group of children swarmed to our window.

“D’jou find your names?” he’d ask the kids, opening the door. “Oh, good!.... no? What’s your name? Precious?! I like that! Okay, honey, I’ll make sure you’re on the list next year.”

In our storefront window – a window that once displayed boxes of rice and beans and detergent – stood a life-size Santa Claus, old white man with the bushy eyebrows. Santa wore spectacles and held a quill pen, and when he was plugged in his hand swept slowly up and down his list of neighborhood children, as if considering.

“You better be good. Santa’s still got time to change his mind.” Our mottled sidewalk was host to all kinds of motherly warnings.

Dad took the list downtown to a calligrapher every December to add the new kids’ names, and watched the list evolve from DeVontes, Josés and Preciouses to Kaitlins, Matthews and Scotts

Backbone and Bowlbone

2007-06-07T21:08:00.000-07:00

from WINGS OF A BOY

2007-05-31T14:19:00.000-07:00

1991 and my legs are fabulously scabbed

I'm wearing some tropical-colored garment that bowls over the bees.

Saddam, you butthole!

My school mates laugh. I run into a pole.

His bunkmates kick him in the teeth.

1991 and he’s never had a woman

But the hands of men have been

inside

his thigh

Baby Grandma

2007-05-31T14:17:00.000-07:00

Grandma married the postmaster of Dubuque, Iowa at the age of sixteen. They went their separate ways when she gave birth to another man's baby. There would be five more husbands to come.

Her kids would come home from school to ambulances - "My heart! My heart!"

Every time you upset Grandma she'd clutch her chest and say, "My heart!"

But when they sat by her hospital bed watching her organs fail one by one, it was her heart that wouldn't stop. Long after she'd passed out, her turtle heart kept beating.

She said she'd find us parking spaces from beyond the grave, and she really does.

from BLOOD HEAT

2007-04-13T19:57:00.000-07:00

It’s a hot, nasty Chicago afternoon. I watch Mom enter the yard through the alley. Crab apples are rotting. Worms are ecstatic. She’s dialoguing with a breeze and she’s clearly pissed at the sun. She’s drunk.

“Oh, honey.” She’s come from a smoky, black-windowed kafana where she learned the barmaid’s son was born with his bladder outside his body, and rushed to America on an emergency visa, where the doctors fixed his bladder but left him with a stub of a penis.

“The kid is fourteen, and he has a girlfriend. All he wants is a penis, God bless him! We’re gonna raise the money. Whaddayou say? We’ll put on a grand gala.”

Ku Klux Klan meets State Trooper

2007-04-05T21:11:00.000-07:00

wow

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS AN ELEVEN YEAR OLD

2007-04-05T21:00:00.000-07:00

Hot damn. In fifth grade and already channeling the spirit of Oscar Wilde. The boots were Payless. Jeans: from her mecca, GapKids. Cirque du Soleil was her obsession, and she danced daily to the soundtrack, a shamanic - and very 80s - electrodance odyssey.

Recently the artist did a frenzied West African - style tribute to one of the more percussive numbers of "Nouvelle Experience" in her kitchen, with a baby blanket on her head. The audience was stupefied.

from INTO THE FOG

2007-04-03T15:41:00.000-07:00

He proposed under the covers, with a euphoric grin on his face. The engagement lasted two weeks. We had no time to waste. I wore an electric blue minidress to the ceremony, and when we walked out of town hall, gypsies with babies on their hips flung their palms at us, whining, “please! a little something for luck on your big day!” Our honeymoon was spent driving up the coast, sleeping in a tent or borrowing the bedrooms of his teenage cousins, making love amidst plastic fashion dolls and plush monkeys.

AMOR

2007-03-31T19:12:00.000-07:00

from MOTHER TONGUE (3,004 words)

2007-03-17T01:57:00.000-07:00

My latest fantasy is to take over the army. We’ll flood it with women and pacifists, bleedin’ heart fruits, singers and teachers and dancers. Why abolish that wretched institution when we can just take it over and make it cool? You always have to approach from the angle of doing, not undoing. Physical strength, camaraderie, hypnosis techniques, money and resources up the ass, dedication and discipline. Why shouldn’t we appropriate a few of their resources, and fight for our dreams?

Discipline is the foundation.

As I sat in bed sucking on my pen and contemplating my army, I heard several rifle shots and a machine gun megablast down the road.

from SCHAUMBURG, ILLINOIS: A Traveler's Tale

2007-03-12T19:41:00.000-07:00

I drink in the hush of colors – not the colors themselves so much as how they blend, bleed, shade and grain together on a single fish.

“Why bother making all this erotic, ridiculous beauty?” I asked God.

A lionfish appeared, a tough-looking motherfucker with a poisonous spine and brown stripes and 24 fins in all directions, each as flittery and light as skin on cooked milk.

I discovered an eel, your standard sick green moray. It slithered from behind a rock, beady eyed and needle teethed, opening and closing its jaws in slow, cruel rhythm, its neck wrinkling and puffing like a rotten apple.

“Exquisite!”

I stooped down and I imitated the eel, who looked like he was putting on a performance, his ugliness so frivolous and radiant and bombastic I couldn’t stand it.

from COWBOY AND BOBO

2007-03-06T18:38:00.001-08:00

Rosy Cowboy descended into the decaying autumn earth in his mahogany box, but I didn't see it. I was home, sitcoms blaring laugh tracks, waiting with Bobo for the vet to come. I held my cat while she died, a rubber band tied around her leg, belly patched with pee. I watched her corneas crinkle and felt her turn to matter.

*****************************************************

SPHINX

2007-02-24T05:50:00.000-08:00

These humans are my parents.
This is a Christmas photo from 1985.
"I'd sooner fly to the moon than live with your father again!" my mother has told me.
"I don't know what has compelled me to mate with these strange men, except to bring you girls into existence."

*********************

Proposhko Yezero

2007-02-23T21:55:00.000-08:00

Tambura took off for the high hills with a plastic bag stuffed in his pocket, promising to return with blueberries. I walked lazily home, staring at the dirt road. I found a little black sheep leg lying in the lane, with its hard hoof, bloody at the top. In another lane, I discovered something that resembled a trachea. I watched a woman with a ruddy face, a face that may never have known makeup, wind a ball of fresh yarn.

These people spend most of their day providing directly for their personal survival. They walk with their sheep, shear them, milk them, kill them, make cheese and make bread by the light of oil lamps. They build their own houses and grow their own vegetables. They make medicine from plants. They boil their bathwater. They blow my mind.

Back in the cabin, I murdered a monstrous bumblebee with a splint of firewood. This made me feel somewhat rugged. But I felt empty too. I wanted to leave. “I like toilet paper,” I murmured to myself. “I like toilets.”

I thought of the world order, of the people from Mexico who pick my fruit, the workers in China who make the cheap clothes I depend on, and the maids who clean the public buildings I use. I thought of all those people who shrink-wrap food and deliver it to the store, who hammer and wire and weld and dig up oil from deep under the sea, who climb up poles to fix my telephone, who whisk away my garbage. My standard of living depends on how many people are working for me. Whose work makes your life easier? Whose life is easier because of your work? Could you be rich if no one were poor

???????????????????????????????????

The Computer is Your Friend

2007-02-21T18:33:00.000-08:00

Waller High School, the dog days of September.

Late twentieth century.

A load of freshmen enter the library for their library resources orientation.

I am no musicologist but I can place their musical tastes roughly in the vein of:
Puff Daddy / Snoop Doggy Dogg / Bone Thugs and Harmony with a sprinkling of Nirvana and Sevendust lovers.

The librarian, an obese diabetic with a peg leg and the bewildered face of an elderly kitten, says, "Do you know the James Taylor song 'You've Got a Friend'?"

The youngsters stare blankly.

"Well, the computer is your friend."

***************************************************************************

THE BIG RUMBLE

2007-02-09T06:22:00.000-08:00

On the day when strange, unforeseen forces of global warming pop the crust of the earth free, we will have to retaliate by stomping the earth. That's right! All 8 billion of us are gonna dance - some in sun, some in shadow - to save the world.

"The one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing" -James Brown

ETERNITY WHERE?

2007-02-05T09:39:00.000-08:00

This photo was taken in Albuquerque, a.k.a. “the end of the line.” This slow, dusty, spirit-town is where you go when you yearn to get into trouble, bang yourself up a bit, and become better acquainted with your shadow. I journeyed to the end of the line, and I have the scratch marks on my chest to prove it, but I was a resilient young maiden and I bounced back out.

The Albuquerque buses were good places to hear jagged, lonely ballads. My lady left me… I served my time… Heck a lotta dunbops and then you gon’ get whooped!... Don’t bend over in the showers at County… and of course, A young lady like you shouldn’t ride the bus all by yourself!

Buses were the province of men, bangin’ it to Metallica or strumming tuneless, abused guitars. But I remember one woman-rider who was as brash and scratchy as the men. She had the word BITCH tattooed on her moonhead.

The photograph in this collage is from one morning when I saw Bitch all alone. It was early and she was walking up a desolate main street. Her legs were bare. Just some patterned drawers. And she wore this sandwich board, ETERNITY WHERE?

WORLD TRAVELERS

2007-02-02T22:38:00.000-08:00

My life-mate is watching a riveting drama, slick and high budgeted, about a great money heist.

Famous anuses thespitize. They are men driven for cash in copious amounts, tumbling and roping and machinegunning their way to a Better Life.

I believe that Dennis Frantz just made a 15-second community service announcement in which he informed sensitive viewers that cash is cool, but not even a billion bucks could save you from being hit by an asteroid and “expiring.”

The predominant colors in this film are gray and black. The color of technoempires, hollow, hygienic authority, and ash.

Our era is a medieval time, a Dark Age of Individuality, Personal Gain, and Home Entertainment Systems.

My life-mate farts. I dive for cover in a stunt worthy of the telethespians. I smell mountains of expired eggs, burning in hell. I scamper to the can claiming an urgent need to clip my toenails, but the smell assaults me even from there. Your farts aspire to be world travellers! I scream.

2007-01-29T21:36:00.000-08:00

"An inert object is more difficult to propel than an object heading in the wrong direction is to turn around" - from a poem by Nikki Giovanni

from ODE TO A DEAD FRIEND

2007-01-29T21:26:00.000-08:00

When my dead friend and I were young and ripe, we double dated some twin blowholes, who we serendipitously dumped on the same night. I took her joyriding around the forest preserves, jiving from my pelvis up to Saturday night techno. She wore a faux silk kimono and no shoes, and she sprawled in the backseat of Mama Hondissima, feet black as coal, chugging a can of diet cola and giggling uncontrollably.

Mummified Infant

2007-01-29T21:24:00.000-08:00

from LIFE ON THE FRONTIER

2007-01-29T20:29:00.000-08:00

Jimmy's an Unknown. He's a tiny man who scrunches his sweatpants up to his knees, revealing milky white bird legs above his blue cowboy boots. When I first tried to shake his hand, Jimmy’s mouth churned like he was savoring some cud, and a noxious, painful sound rose. He was grinding his teeth. I watched him place his hands on imaginary handlebars and rev up. Standing in place, he rode a motorcycle, bobbing up and down. I could almost see the wind in his hair. Suddenly, he cackled like a cartoon witch, slapped his own ass, and rocketed to his room as if the slap provided the impetus. He trotted right back out, licking his fingers to flip the pages of a ragged catalog. It was a classifieds for motorcycles, crammed with tiny black and white photos.

“Ah-duh-duh-duh-dah! Ditta-dah-dah-dah-dah!” Jimmy’s speech was indecipherable; he sounded like a stump-tongued, apocalyptic Elmer Fudd. He flopped to his belly on the carpet. While gazing at his catalog, he swiveled his hips slowly, side to side, in the same fashion I used to make love to my stuffed animals as a child.

from LIFE ON THE FRONTIER

2007-01-29T10:16:00.000-08:00

Herbalists. Head shops. Gun shops. Taxidermists. This is the frontier. Home of the atomic bomb, top secret military operations, and an annual hot air balloon fiesta. I have neighbors who slap their girlfriends and call them Bitch; I have neighbors who worship feathers and bury crystals in the earth under each full moon. I meet mothers who fill their children with soy milk and tofu turkey, and mothers who send their tiny sons to the rodeo in helmets and sequined chaps, to be thrown off bucking sheep in the opening rounds.

from 9 THINGS YOU DON’T KNOW, DON’T WANNA KNOW, OR HAVE FORGOTTEN ABOUT WOMEN

2007-01-29T09:45:00.000-08:00

Inspired by the venerable ESQUIRE MAGAZINE

1. We’re just as nasty as you are. But we used to get burned at the stake for it, so we’ve been on our best behavior for the past four hundred years.

2. As a rule, we smile at each other in the ladies’ room. Usually we’re sneering inside. We’ve been conditioned to secretly scorn each other… and worship you.

3. As little girls we humped our stuffed animals, or we screwed down pillows and worried we’d give birth to goose babies.

4. What’s worse than the man who can’t find our clitoris? The man who’s so proud he can, he strums away like every stroke will bring him a million bucks.

5. We labored for Mohammed, nursed the baby Jesus, and taught Moses right from wrong. Abraham tugged at our skirts; And we whooped baby Adolf senseless.

6. Crying sheds multiple toxins and burns a lot of calories. It’s also fun! It is a major factor in our longer lifespans.

7. We wish you’d teach us more about tools. They’re awesome!

8. You may think our premenstrual chocolate cravings trivial, but the flavonoids in those bags of chocolate chips have been medically proven to help break the dam.

9. “Hee hee, shopping???”

“Huh huh, football! Fishing! War!”

It’s a tradeoff, boys.

We’re still gatherers and hunters deep in our blood.

*Kate Duva is not appearing in any upcoming miniseries.

MED ( honey )

2007-01-17T23:33:00.000-08:00

Ms. Duva is born

2007-01-17T22:50:00.000-08:00

Wandering in our Volkswagen through sleepy hills, my man comes upon a tiny village bearing his family name. He jumps out for a few words with the shepherd, who booms, "Oh ho ho! You're my cousin!"

Inside the shepherd's house, soup is bubbling, and we sit around a book of family trees. They're man trees: the descendomaster, his sons, and their sons. They don't bother to document the women.

But women have no names.

We shed family names as easily as we gain them, traveling incognito through the generations, leaving anonymous legacies.

On the road home, I decided to make my own name.

What's a self-made woman without a self-made name?

Ms. Duva is born.

*

women in the mosque

2007-01-13T21:35:00.000-08:00

2007-01-13T21:34:00.000-08:00

2007-01-13T21:33:00.000-08:00

Early performance by K. Duva

2007-01-13T20:59:00.000-08:00

Self-portrait

2007-01-01T21:34:00.000-08:00

THE DUVA DIARIES

Goodbye, Blog

Kali pissin' fire

from CARL SITS SHIVA (in progress)

9 a.m.

A Nature Preserve near Chicago, IL...

Hope is the thing with feathers

"Everything in the modern world functions as if death did not exist."

Staceyann Chin

The Threshold Between Life and Death

An Infant Memory of Tires

Travnik, Bosnia

from ETERNAL VIRGINS

WHAT TO WEAR DURING AN ORANGE ALERT

Anemic Warrior Awaits a Hemoglobin Test

FONTANELLE

Swimming: a Feminist Thang

Baby Duva and Dad at the Bar

Your Loving Cowfather

Tornado Alert

from EULOGY TO TOMMY JOE

Computer Class project, age 13

Otis (died in Fire)

Wicked Nursery Rhymes

Mon artiste

"Enter Ye as a Child to the Kingdom of Heaven" -Jesus

From "Why God Sent Guillermo" (alt. "Señor Pelvis")

NANA SHINEFLUG KISSED MY HEART

STRANGER DADDY (coming soon)

radiatin'

Collared Shirts and the Death of Christ: SHOCKING connections to be revealed!

THE PECULIAR INCIDENCE OF THE INTERSEX CHINCHILLA

from POSTWAR

from STUPID WOMEN'S CLUB

STAR PUPIL ............ The Lobotomization of American Education

take back the SWASTIKA

from WINGS OF A BOY

Rise and Shine

Female Suicide Bomber

George Washington Prays in the Ladies' Room of Lincoln Lanes Bowling

from HOW WE GENTRIFIED LINCOLN PARK

Backbone and Bowlbone

from WINGS OF A BOY

Baby Grandma

from BLOOD HEAT

Ku Klux Klan meets State Trooper

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS AN ELEVEN YEAR OLD

from INTO THE FOG

AMOR

from MOTHER TONGUE (3,004 words)

from SCHAUMBURG, ILLINOIS: A Traveler's Tale

from COWBOY AND BOBO

SPHINX

Proposhko Yezero

The Computer is Your Friend

THE BIG RUMBLE

ETERNITY WHERE?

WORLD TRAVELERS

from ODE TO A DEAD FRIEND

Mummified Infant

from LIFE ON THE FRONTIER

from LIFE ON THE FRONTIER

from 9 THINGS YOU DON’T KNOW, DON’T WANNA KNOW, OR HAVE FORGOTTEN ABOUT WOMEN

MED ( *honey* )

Ms. Duva is born

women in the mosque

Early performance by K. Duva

Self-portrait

MED ( honey )