Hannah Miet Guest Blogs, or, Hoes Before Prose

It's a Hitch List first: A GUEST BLOG. (**Ooohs and Ahhhhs.**) Hannah Miet, of My Soul is a Butterfly, is below. I am on Hannah's blog, slinging prose.

Explanation: I am a literary nymphomaniac, untreatable and unashamed. My toes curl in paper shops. My bookshelves are promiscuity on display. I shirk social responsibilities to sequester in and read. Sometimes a passage goes by that plunges two fingers into my brain, making me squirm with jealous delight while releasing audible moans of approval. I will read almost anything. (Except artistic statements which use the word "dystopian" in the opening...sorry, just can't.)  

Poetry is no exception. In fact it's more inception, some seed planted in my subconscious years ago which has since grown into a verbose piece of virulent foliage, one that needs to be watered regularly or it will whither and turn grey. Not just any verse will do...I need a powerful image. Word combinations which speak monologues. Narratives that lead me to a gingerbread house where the edible doorknob's laced with dopamine and cyanide. Shit that isn't ABAB rhyme scheme.

I've been lucky enough to meet with some poets and writers whose work is so good it simultaneously thrills me and makes me feel I should return to that Hooters in New Jersey and give up this attempt at writing altogether. Hannah Miet, of My Soul Is a Butterfly, is one of those people. Hannah creates vibrant verbal mandalas with the crumbing sand of memories, then does us the solid of preserving them on the internet rather than destroying them as monks do. She's also a fucking badass. 

So a recent exchange about guest blogging for one another put us at a crossroads. The Hitch List is mostly prose, an archive of occasionally vapid and debauched experiences punctuated with general relationship musings and the occasional nervous breakdown. Hannah's blog shanks you in the ribs with a screwdriver, then hands you a poem to read during recovery. Guest blogging for one another would mean attempting to work in the other's medium, which terrified...uh, both of us.

So, instead: She's built a narrative poem tailor made for a space more familiar with paragraph-long sentences and strip club jokes. I've passed on a piece of fictional prose to her space in return and hope it doesn't collapse on its self. The piece she wrote it fantastic and I'm happy to have it here.

But, less ramble, more read. Hannah Miet's words:

Whiskey and Waldorf Salad, by Hannah Miet 

My mother met my father through a personal ad

in The Village Voice.

It said, “I like jazz and Indian food.

I would like to start a family.”

They were both in their 40s and my mother says

they instantly became best friends.

My father says that it was love at first sight

without all the bullshit “romance.”

3 months before the wedding they fornicated on an island

off the coast of the former Yugoslavia.

My mother made the announcement of my birth

at the reception in a Chinese Restaurant in the West 70s

that is now a wine bar. She was wearing a blue dress and looked thin

but not skinny, 

mostly, she looked happy.

My mother called me yesterday while I was forking

through a puddle of vegetables in mayonnaise

surrounded by two grapes and two walnuts.

I told her that the Waldorf isn’t all it’s cracked up to be

though it’s good for people watching

and you have to people watch very carefully

when you’re scanning the crowds of suits and tourists

for your date, who never shows, most likely due to work

or marital strife

or something equally

boring.

I tell her that if I had a personal

in the Voice, it would only say

“Please use correct grammar in text messages”

because that’s all I knew about wanting

or being wanted

and my mother said that I’ve always been too picky about the wrong things

and not picky enough about the right things and that my problem is that

I’m uninterested

in the calm after the storm.

I wanted to remind her that she ran away to France for six years

and lived on a hippie commune in San Francisco where clothes were forbidden 

and communicated through letters across borders, sealed with kisses and written

in full sentences with correct punctuation, no ebonics or emoticons, or lols

but my mouth was full of Waldorf salad and my date was calling on the other line

with a proper plea for mercy so I held my tongue and washed it down with the burn

that never hurts.

I won't say what I love about this piece because people should chew things uninfluenced, but yeah, she is very good. So good, in fact, she's got a book coming out. Miet's met the Kickstarter base goal needed to get one of her debut projects off the ground and into book form, and I encourage all to pass even a $1 to the cause. The book may be funded already...but just a few extra dollars could be the difference between something nice and something so fucking epic you have to hike it across Middle Earth and drop it in the fires of Mordor just to destroy it, that's how badass it is. THE FIRES OF FUCKING MORDOR PEOPLE.

Book burning was taken particularly seriously at Mordor State University.

See? That's SERIOUS. So please. Support Hannah by going to her blog and reading EVERYTHING, then click here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/Hannahmiet/hello-absurd-world-a-book-of-5-minute-poems/comments

Many thanks to Hannah for sharing her world in this humble blog.