Notes: Andrea: These are strange ones.

Again again
I know perhaps that the line "sugar in that meatpie of hair" may not make sense but it makes sense to me. Mark asked me what this poem was about and I couldn't tell him. But now that I think of it for me, it's more about period in-between waking up and dreaming, that half disoriented state overfull of regrets and the volatile subconscious than anything.

Cyclone Cellar came about quite oddly. I was equally fascinated by silverfish and cyclone cellars. I mean who wouldn't want to be secured in a storm cellar?

Just the words themselves go so well together - cyclone and cellar. You hardly ever hear that word cyclone anymore (well, except on Coney Island) and as an additional boon it conjures up The Wizard of Oz.

Then there is the silverfish imagery. They're a nasty looking bug.

I mentioned that bug to Mark and friends having coffee and everyone squirmed. They are the last thing, you want to see stepping into the shower, right?

What is fascinating about silverfish is what they feast on - glue, book bindings, paper, photos, sugar, hair, and dandruff. Their feeding can actually damage photographs and I always think of photographs as memory so it wasn’t too much of a leap to go from feasting on skin to the skin’s memory.

Although, photographs as memory isn't truly right. (But very few of my poems are exact). I guess photographs to me are more of an external proof of memory although you can make up any story you like behind a photograph. But people take photographs as evidence, evidence of you knowing certain people, being certain places, of friendships you had but the conundrum is that the photograph doesn't prove it or it can all be so different than displayed or you may have felt. So if silverfish eat away the physical record of your memory than what is left? And perhaps all of our unique memories serve to isolate us from each other.

But silverfish have no real effect on human health beyond people being spooked by them, because you always find them in the most vulnerable place – the bathroom where they commonly graze on cellulose. I always thought they looked like ghosts’ embryos.

I also liked the idea of the silverfish being sexually immature, that phrase resonated. I'm not sure how the satyrs came into it, perhaps because they are somewhat of an image of sexual ferocity? I don't know it just sounded right. But then again, I use that excuse all the time.