The Tattooed Poets Project: Stephen Roger Powers

Today's tattooed poet is Stephen Roger Powers, who is sharing this tattoo of an iconic figure from the music industry:

Photo by James Morton

Stephen explains:

I've been a Dolly Parton fan since my family took a road trip to Tennessee in 1987.  We stopped at Dollywood, and I fell in love.  When I was in college I wanted a Dolly tattoo, but I never went through with getting one.  I kept the thought of it in the back of my mind for years, and when I started writing poems about Dolly and my frequent trips to Dollywood to see her perform benefit concerts for the Dollywood Foundation, the idea slowly crept forward again.  Then my book of Dolly poems came out in 2009, and I knew it would soon be time.  One day last year my friend Liz, who has 14 tattoos herself, told me to stop thinking about it, stop talking about it, and just do it.  Sounded reasonable to me.  So Liz drove me to Liberty Tattoo in Atlanta and introduced me to Michael "Shack" Shackelford, the artist who'd done most of hers.  Shack drew up a stylized, cartoonized version of Dolly from the cover of her 1977 album Here You Come Again, taking some creative license by adding pokey nipples, which was fine with me.

Liz kept saying she wasn't going to let me back out of it now that she'd driven me there and gotten pulled over for an illegal u-turn on the way, so Shack sat me down, we got started, and today I have Dolly Parton inked on my forearm.  While the tattoo is based on a full body shot of Dolly and it runs down my entire right forearm from elbow to wrist, the photo here is a close-up of just her face and torso, which I think makes Shack's details easier to see.

Accompanying this Dolly tattoo is Stephen's poem, "Dolly and the Frog Strangler," which appeared originally in Shenadoah and can be found in his book The Follower's Tale (available here):

Dolly and the Frog Strangler

I was writing a song with Dolly when we ran out of gas

near exit 201 going south through a sudden downpour in Indiana.

The first verse was something about how hay bales grow

darker in the rain and the sides of barns turn from red to brown.

We were also hauling a Dolly Parton pinball machine by Bally.

The backglass was in the backseat. The playfield, with rubber

flippers intact, cartoon Dolly barefoot in denim shorts, was too big to go

in the trunk all the way.  It hung over the bumper by bungee cords.  Every bump,

my worn-out shocks groaned and banged like rickety roller coasters.

We waited for a trucker to bring us a gallon.  Hail popped on the roof

like too many warped records playing at the same time.  We were bored,

looking for ways to amuse ourselves.  Dolly tapped her dragon lady nails

on the dashboard.  I used my sleeve to wipe away windshield fog.

After we hummed a middle C we wrote the second verse,

something about long hair between your lips and mountain berry shampoo

scent in your nose when you kiss someone in the wind.

We rolled down the windows to let the storm heat evaporate

some of the air conditioning.  Dolly’s wig got tangled and wet.

The strangest thing was happening: The pinball machine

kept flashing hot pink and lavender.

Maybe lightning hit the cord trailing behind.  Or else something lit it

up from our mind’s eye that saw corn tassels rolling in this gully washer

over the fields as applauding hands of cheering crowds.

Our chorus was something about how you look out

your rearview mirror and it’s still visible after a mile

passes, maybe two if the countryside is flat, but then it fades

away and is gone, and you can’t remember anymore what mile

marker it was by when you passed it.

 ~~~

Stephen Roger Powers is the author of TheFollower's Tale, available from Salmon Poetry.  His work has appeared in Shenandoah, 32 Poems, Dislocate, and Margie.  He divides his time between Wisconsin, Georgia, and Dollywood.

A sincere thanks to Stephen for sharing his poem, tattoo and his love of Dolly Parton here with us on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2011 Tattoosday. The poem is reprinted here with the permission of the author.

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Martha Serpas

On this, our fourth day of the third annual Tattooed Poets Project, we are honored to have work from Martha Serpas.

Readers may wonder where we find all these tattooed poets. Most come our way by word of mouth, but a small handful, like in Martha's case, agree to participate after we send out e-mail inquiries, without even knowing if a poet is inked or not. Most poets don't even respond, a handful do, but are not tattooed, and once in a blue moon, we find a tattooed poet who is happy to participate.

Anyway, here's one of Martha's tattoos:

Martha explains:

This tattoo is a montage over 20 or so years in the making. First work, Willie [at Willie's Island Tattoos] on Staten Island; Dan [Williams at the Bridgeport Tattoo Shop] in Bridgeport, CT; Bonnie Jean in Yachats, OR at [Tattoo by Design]; and a guy in Houston I never should have let reline it. Bonnie Jean was is old school and taught me that tattooing is like coloring in a book: anybody can do it if the lines are really thick.

The tattoo’s a chronicle of a tumultuous time in my life. The wind/water symbol (my design) traversing the image was first. It felt like a spiritual emblem. The bird represents a goal of peace (brought it in from somewhere). The moliere/Celtic cross  (graphic artist friend, Carla Januska designed) is modeled after the one on the chapel at my divinity school and doubles as a setting sun. It is my graduation ring, of sorts. The feathery flame shapes (Bonnie Jean’s freehand) within the wings and tail came last—my attempt to soften up the image when my life became more tranquil.

I have a small tattoo on my ankle that precedes this one(s); a memorial to my best friend on my thigh; a reverse hurricane symbol on my thumb (post-Katrina); and a symbol of perichoresis (divine revolution) on my forearm. I’ve been told I look like a doodle pad. I get tattooed about every 5 years. If I ever become content with life, I’ll stop trying to achieve the ideal personal emblem. For now, I doodle.

•••••••

Martha also contributed the following poem which, she explained, "was inspired by a photograph on the cover of Tattoo."  One note, Martha adds, is that "Suzanne owned the shop in Ann Arbor where I got my first ankle tattoo: Creative Tattoo by Suzanne. Great T-shirt: Go forth and live as art. I heard she passed away: Her breast piece was amazing."

Tattoo

She knows being chosen means to choose herself

and seals upon her breasts the Sacred Heart—

a thorn-bound garnet against open lilies,

a pink-and-white ink triptych on her chest.

Every shadow, a creed professed by lines

from votive needles to her deepest cells.

Her body gives life to art, reflects the fade

of dying flesh, and honors God’s design.

No second thoughts, she thinks that pain

is easily a choice we make ourselves,

as is admiring her canvas skin

as it ages. Affirmed with words spelled

on a defiant ribbon across her chest,

her blazón: Even the blackest sheep are blessed.

            [Appeared in Côte Blanche (New Issues, 2002)]

•••••••

Martha Serpas’s two collections of poetry are Côte Blanche (New Issues, 2002) and The Dirty Side of the Storm (Norton, 2007). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, and Southwest Review, and in anthologies such as Bearing the Mystery: Twenty Years of Image and the Library of America’s American Religious Poems. A native of Bayou Lafourche in south Louisiana, she is involved in efforts to restore Louisiana’s wetlands. She teaches creative writing at the University of Houston and is a hospital trauma chaplain.

You can learn more about Martha and her writing at her website, http://www.marthaserpas.com/.

A sincere thanks to Martha for sharing her tattoo and poem with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2011 Tattoosday. The poem is reprinted here with the permission of the author.

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

mau amigo| promessas são para cumprir

o que mais fazem os maus amigos é prometer coisas que não virão a cumprir. espero que não seja o caso dos mau amigo, que prometem com esta demo ser uma das bandas portuguesas mais relevantes da década que por agora se começa a montar. já está lá muita coisa, falta aquilo que só o tempo traz. por agora vou esperando pelo álbum de estreia desta banda que nasceu num concelho vizinho, onde nunca esperaria que aparecesse algo desta dimensão e estilo: monção.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Alicia Adams

Alicia Adams is today's tattooed poet. She contacted me back in February and told me she was moving out to Brooklyn from Southern California in March. So, last week we met in a large Union Square flagship bookstore and I snapped a photo of her stunning tattoo:

I'll let Alicia explain the story behind this beautiful piece:

This tattoo was done by an artist named Shay Bredimus at Outer Limits Tattoo and Body Piercing in Long Beach, California, the city where I was raised and educated.  I had always known I wanted a tattoo, but I could never settle on exactly what I wanted.  When I went in to Outer Limits, I still didn’t know.  I decided flowers were pretty and timeless and could mean whatever I wanted them to mean.  I decided on a peony because I had just seen my first one and fallen in love with it.  I didn’t know what peonies symbolized, and I didn’t want to know.  I decided I had a lifetime to figure out what it meant to me. 

I was getting my MFA in fiction writing, and when I met Shay he told me he had his MFA in painting.  For hours we talked about art and literature and grad school and our lives.  It was the best tattooing experience I could have hoped for, and I fell in love with the finished product immediately.  As I was leaving he invited me to his gallery.  I went when he wasn’t there.  His pieces were huge, each one taking up the better part of a wall, and they were exquisite and done in black tattoo ink only.  I wrote him an email telling him how amazing I thought his art was, and he asked me to come back in for touch ups, and that’s when he added the cherry blossoms. 

I buy cherry blossom shampoo now and cherry blossom soap.  It’s a silly thing maybe, but it makes me feel pretty and reminds me that I am part of a work of art.

In addition to this tattoo, Alicia is sharing the following poem, "Red Room," which was originally published in The Mas Tequila Review:

Red Room

By Alicia Adams

You wish you had been born from your father’s head. 

Like Athena.  When you picture Athena in the womb

of Zeus’s skull, you picture her in a hollow red room

with no corners.  You picture her curled in a ball

and growing larger, fully clothed with battle gear, spear

stuck behind her father’s eye, a migraine pulsing.  When you

picture your own father’s head, you picture it crowded. 

But you could have curled around the deep-set grooves

of gray matter, your tiny hands pressed against his frontal

cortex and into his dreams.  And when you were ready,

you could have stood on your shoed feet and pushed

up and hard with rhythmic contractions until your father,

unable to take it any longer, found a way to open

himself and let you out.  You think about this often. 

In the back of your own mind, dark and polluted, you can feel

a tumor growing.  One that will ripen and mutate,

killing you slowly, and with little effort.

~~~

Alicia Adams graduated from California State University:  Long Beach’s Fiction MFA program in 2010.  She co-hosted Prose and Cons Radio and is the co-founder of After the Carnival (Literary Events).  Her work has been published in several magazines and anthologies, including most recently How Dirty Girls Get Clean and Beside the City of Angels.  

Thanks so much to Alicia for sharing her tattoo and poem with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

This entry is ©2011 Tattoosday. The poem is reprinted here with the permission of the author.

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Patricia Carragon

Our second tattooed poet this month is Patricia Carragon, a New York City poet who was instrumental in helping send several other poets our way for the Tattooed Poets Project this year.

I was fortunate enough to meet Patricia back in February, where I shot this photo of her ink, at my local Borders store:

Patricia sent along this narrative about her Rose-Tattoo Bracelet:

It was a Saturday afternoon in October, 1997.  I was finally going to get a sexy rose bracelet tattooed above my right ankle.  I’ve already had a referral from my hairdresser to do it at New York Adorned on Second Avenue.  I recalled having a henna design painted on my right wrist by a street artist in SoHo earlier that summer – and loved it.  I was tired of wearing ankle bracelets that would snap off without notice.  Since I didn’t have a picture with me, I searched for possibilities in the tattoo parlor’s books.  Not one rose drawing fit the image engraved in my head.  A tattoo artist would have the honor of fulfilling my request.  Unfortunately, it was Saturday and it was busy.  I knew I would not be home until after eight, and supper would have to be much later.  I had no choice, but to call home.  I wanted to surprise my mother without dealing with her pre-ink drama.  But that was not meant to be. 

“Oh… a rose-tattoo bracelet?  Can lasers remove it?”

“Yes, Mom, but I’m not going to do that.  I’ll be home in a few hours.  Bye…"

My time arrived.  I had coffee sweetened with sugar about an hour ago. Although I was warned that my body needed solid food and sugar to prevent passing out during the procedure, I still didn’t want to overeat because of supper.  My artist drew on paper the bracelet that would be outlined above my ankle.  I adored the rose-chain stencil on my body.  I was ready for baptism by ink – peachy pink for the roses and yellow-green for the leaves. 

Once propped up on the cot, the needle pierced my skin and began its journey along the artist’s outline.  Surprisingly, I didn’t feel any pain.  As minutes passed, the needle worked along the design’s path.  About halfway through, the needle must have sent some negative signals to my brain.  A sudden feeling of dizziness overcame me.  The needle immediately stopped.  My slender tattooist and his colleague, who resembled a burly motorcyclist, carried me to another room where I was fed Halloween candy.  An ice pack was placed in back of my head.  I rested for approximately twenty minutes.  I recovered and was ready for the needle and my rose bracelet’s completion.  I apologized for what had happened, knowing that, with low blood pressure, I should have been more careful.  The heavy-set tattooist told me not to feel bad.  Even the toughest-looking customers pass out under the needle. 

Feeling better, I sat up on the cot and watched the needle complete the outline.  Then came the application of the colors.  My roses became part of my skin and self-expression. 

Wrapped in Bacitracin and Saran Wrap, I got dressed.  It was worth charging this bracelet on one of my plastic cards.  I wish that I had saved the receipt.  I think it probably cost me one-hundred-eighty dollars.

Later that night, Mom made a comment when I undid the Saran Wrap.

“Oh… you got a large tattoo.  I thought you were going for one rose?  Can lasers still remove it?”

“Yes, Mom, but I’m not going to do that.  I spent money on this tattoo and I’m keeping it for life.”

What was a novelty back in the late ’90s is now the norm today.  The roses above my right ankle, sadly, look faded after fourteen years.  I wish I had the money to bring back their color.  At least Mom stopped giving me prickly advice about getting laser treatment.

Patricia Carragon  February 2011

Patricia also sent along the following prose piece. And, although it is not a poem, this is the Tattooed Poets Project, not the Tattooed Poems Project:

Cupcake Chronicles #9- Friday evening before midnight, February 13, 2009

It was the end of the world.  All the cupcakes disappeared overnight.  All the bakeshops stopped making them.  All the recipes became blank pages in cookbooks.  All pictures, photographs, ceramics and artifacts depicting cupcakes vanished.  All memories died, except for mine.  I cried all night until I fell asleep.

In the morning, I felt bloated as I rose from my bed.  I passed the mirror and noticed how voluptuous my boobs looked.  I headed for the fridge and invaded the pickle and peanut butter jars.  I decided to add garlic and paprika on a scoop of vanilla ice cream.  My appetite craved unusual combinations.  My period was a month and a half late.  It was time to call my gyn.

The sonogram showed multiple fetuses.  They had arms and legs, hands and feet, but the rest of the picture was too bizarre for the doctor to describe.

She was quiet for a few seconds before getting up the courage to say, “Congratulations, you’re having a baker’s dozen.”

Patricia Carragon's publications include Big City Lit, Clockwise Cat, Danse Macabre, MÖBIUS, The Poetry Magazine, Mad Hatters’ Review, The Toronto Quarterly, and more. She is the author of Journey to the Center of My Mind (Rogue Scholars Press)and Urban Haiku and More (Fierce Grace Press). She curates the Brooklyn-based Brownstone Poets and is the editor of the annual anthology.

Thanks to Patricia for sharing her rose-bracelet tattoo, the story behind it, as well as a sample of her writing. I am grateful, not only for her participation, but for her sending out the clarion call for more tattooed poets this year!

This entry is ©2011 Tattoosday.

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.