another show!!!!

i have been accepted to another juried show! it is in NYC at the The New York Graduate School for Psychoanalysis
and The Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies. a mouthful, i know. the title of the show is "woman!" and will be on display from nov. 1 - dec. 20.

here is my piece to be shown:

A Sense of Place 2008

I have a piece in a show in Augusta, GA this fall. Since my printer is on the fritz, I also can't use the crappy scanner connected to it (?), so I don't have the real card to show. (Image below from the application).



Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art
Augusta, GA
September 19 - October 17, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, September 19, 2008, 6-8 pm
Juror: Amanda Cooper

new short story!!!

Candy Rules
from When Our Love Changed
Rachelmaria Bernardo James


I incited revolution today. I tore the wrapper on my chocolate bar, a known taboo with anyone who has ever eaten chocolate with me, namely my ex, a chocolate addict who tears into bars with extreme haste. I suppose for him the preservation is not important – he’ll finish an entire bar of rich European chocolate in less than a day. I, however, need the wrapper to stay in tact so that I can re-wrap my chocolate after I’ve had my allocated one, maybe two, pieces for the day.

I really do enjoy chocolate, snobbily of course. I eat only dark chocolate, almost always organic, with extraordinarily high cacao content. I ration it to myself. How my rules surfaced, I’m not precisely sure.

***

I’ve lived in Columbus for two years, half of that time in Clintonville – a fairly well to-do community of artsy hippie types. I live only one and a half miles from the post office and the grocery store, yet I’ve managed to be too lazy to ever walk. So, after my ex hangs up on me (shortly after a phone conversation in which I hang up on him), I decided today is the day I will actually walk. Sexually frustrated, with no exercise and little appetite, and a loneliness so crippling that I’ve just tattooed a bird on my arm “to keep me company” and am now wondering what I will name her, I conclude that walking several miles in fresh air to mail one package and purchase a can of diced tomatoes is exactly what I should do. For extra indulgence, I decide to not take my cell phone with me: that’ll show him!!! (Though, we all know, when I ran to my phone the second I returned to my doorstep, there were no missed calls.)

I like to walk briskly. I take my headphones and choose the default philosophical walk album: The Smiths’ Louder than Bombs. After I’ve sent my package and purchased my groceries, I decide to head up even further away from my house (more walking) to the local food co-op. There I will treat myself to a chocolate bar.

After my cashier rang me up, I grabbed the bar, deranged with anger and sadness, and slid my finger between the wrapper to unhinge the glue dots. The glue would not undo itself and I ripped the paper right open. For a split second I was aghast at my behavior—not the fact that I was going to eat the chocolate at the check-out, but that I had torn the wrapper. I had just said “fuck you!!” to my rules. What have I done??? My recklessness took over and I tore into the golden paper beneath the wrapper. I broke off a chunk – how sloppy!! In my fingers were two perforated sections, not one, and it was not a clean perforated chunk. Now, feeling disappointed, but still eager for my fix, I jam it in my mouth, sign my credit card slip, and exit.

Once outside, I eat thoughtfully. I realize it must still be before noon, and I haven’t eaten anything at all. Two more rules, broken. I live by “no candy, cakes, sodas, etc. before noon, and certainly not before a meal!!” The last time I ate candy at breakfast was when I had sixlets at Paul’s house in elementary school. But only a few years later, Paul will kill himself, and I still miss him terribly.

I walk home, letting the chunks I continue to randomly break off, disregarding the perforations, melt in my mouth. I taste coconut and cherries, and that cacao chalkiness that sinks into my bloodstream. When I bite down, the tinny bitterness cuts into my tongue and I smile. I think about calling my ex when I get home and apologizing, and decide against it. I’d rather just say that apologizing is hard—which it is.

With the bar half gone, I ponder my confusion. What is so confusing after all? How is my confusion so much more profound and different than someone else’s? How poetic this must be to walk about feeling miserable, eating chocolate, and pondering existential ideology.

It’s that no decision seems worth making. It’s that I’ve lost the key to how to fix things. I don’t know what to do about any aspect of my life, and I feel much more victimized because of that. If I was only confused about love, that’d be super simple. But I’m not; I’m confused about all of it. It clogs my head like a gas cloud, like the dust that hugs Pigpen, Charlie Brown’s friend.

So what do I do? I guess I break the rules on how I eat chocolate. I guess we all have our different ways of diving off the cliff. However(,) anticlimactic.

I ♥ DBT!

love poem: oops

It’s still cold and I’m still writing love notes.

I fantasize that
Instead of being here at my desk
With notes cluttering my space
Instead of being here at my desk
With no space to work or think
With a brain that expands outside of my body
With a destination unknown
Going mad in stillness

That I am in your movies. That
I am in my movies
In the perfect room with
The perfect lines to say:

I’d rather you were here; I’d rather
you were always in my way of something.
But I’m supposed to appear
strong as if nothing ever happened,
As if I could actually live on my own.

Validation

(07-17-08)
it’s raining and I thought it would
be nice to meditate and listen,
except the rain is too light to hear now.
I only hear the water shooting
out from my neighbor’s gutter—
it must be clogged. because it’s not trickling
out the bottom end,
but descending from the roof, splattering
into the yard that no longer has grass,
only mud with a dent in the middle
where the water hits.

a dog—it must be two blocks away—
barks in triplets
the hollow echo bark of distance.

and here I am,
not sitting tall like I should be with a Pilates neutral spine
but with the slump of defeat
on my lumbar
alone.

no amount of my calling, my willing,
can lift your busy eyes over to the blinking light,
negate your call screening instinct,
and wiggle your thumb in between
to spring pop open your phone.

and into the mouth piece
—like a fix—
I’ll hear your voice breathe—Raaach…..hey.
and every cell in my body will descend from anxiety
and back into _____________________.


honey, just pick up the phone.

you made me smile

I like it
When you tell me personal things
Because then I know that
You trust me and
You like me.

love poems & masochistic confessions, pt. 202

Repeatedly
I embarrass myself to you
Over-reaction
And perhaps I cling too tightly.
Or perhaps it’s just a tighter cling than you’ve felt before.

But all I’m desiring is your patience;
Your faith that I won’t always be like this.
That I’ll be better.
I promise you.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

You have no idea how much my heart loves you
& how frequently that makes me the fool
& how frequently I’m embarrassed by that.

You breathe eloquence/ And I pour out perverse anxiety.

(but i don't want to)

I want to say I love you, but I don’t think I know what it means.
I just want it to be said.
I just want to feel the normalcy that comes with contentment.
I want to feel comfortable and OK.















You will never love me
Like I want you to love me.
There is nothing I can do
To make you love me
Like I want you to love me.
That is no secret. It never was.
But it still hurts. And I still keep pretending.

is there ever too much counseling?

it's feeling like i'm drowning.

it's feeling like i'm stuck. no matter where i live, i'll be miserable.

it's not location. it's now how i always tried to blame. it's me.

the first step is supposed to be that i understand i'm powerless over others. but instead i'll change that to be i'm powerless over myself right now. my life has "become unmanageable."

so i'm trying not to drown. i still feel like i'm drowning. but i'm at least doing the doggy paddle.

i wanted to tell you everything
but now i'm too scared.


















(photo by zuzana's computer)

i am like wet socks:

bothersome, hard to take off, and something else, but i forgot the last adjective.













































Sometimes I get confident and think it’s ok to just be me.
That it could be like in the movies where the neat boy
Likes the crazy girl
And gives her the peace of mind she deserves.

But other times I think I should control myself
So I can keep you near.

work

clearly, you have no idea
just how hard it is to concentrate.

and just how much i want you to love me back.

letting you in

You should know why I hate silence so much. Why I fear it. Why it can’t happen.












At any time you could leave me, just like all the rest.
Was it something I did?
I won’t do it again; I didn’t know.
Just give me the chance I deserve. The chance I need.
(And it's not because I don't trust you; it's because I don't trust me.)

this keeps weighing on my mind

i'm giving you all that i can
because i want your love.

poem

1. love me for speaking
2. fix me dinner
3. tell me what to do
4. don’t think it’s just you
5. make a new mix tape
6. photograph in black and white
7. make little sense
8. join the art community (how do i member myself? i probably should get some sort of vintage outfit)
9. you already inspired me
10. job? mop floors
11. sing a song; i’ve been told i prefer male musicians, and that that is not feminist
12. drama
13. i’d prefer to be craft-sy
14. and name my children hoakey italian names like giuseppe
15. i don’t know why everybody hates that name so much; i quite prefer it
16. open up that cookbook, rachel
17. for god’s sake, do something
18. living on impulse sounds too hard,
19. apparently i’m a good actress
20. i really do prefer wearing skirts
21. tell me a story
22. pretty please
23. l’incontro fortuito
24. i wish school would start so i could talk to my counselor who is also italian
25. make me live in your ideals.

i can promise you i was there

I wake every morning, and think of you.
Which makes me smile, until I remember:
I’m the last thing on your mind.

If I tell you this, you will run away.
But I can’t not tell you and I can’t not have you:

_______________.












































please stay.
and don't leave.

BPD

new work, in the midst of being diagnosed with a psychological disorder.

realizing what i've done with my past and how my future will change.