In the summer of 2007 I had several dreams about old loves. I wrote 6 poems to chronicle this, but eventually tossed out the first one. After I had written the poems, I knew that they needed to be illustrated and so obliged. I grabbed my neighbors, Matt and Janeen, to model for me. Their photos became my "stock" photography for a series of manipulations. This series was shown at Citywide Open Studios 2007, at the Alternative Space weekend.

Below is a set of links to the pieces on deviantArt:

Dreams Series
#1 - Relief (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)
#2 - The Ordinary, Dreamed
#3 - I Remember That Skin
#4 - An Apology
#5 - A Dance

A short play that twists the Persephone myth into modern times and asks the questions: What if Persephone actually loved Hades?

In honor of Mabon.

Click here to read 8 Pomegranate Seeds.

A short play that explores the conflict between duty and love in the fantasy kingdom of Tura.

Part of a project to try to write a play a week. It hasn't worked out quite that way, but it does have me writing.

Click here to read I'll Guard the Door.

(A sorceress implores a mortal man)

by Rosana Garcia

A yawning desire gapes like a hungry mouth,
it comes from my body and the darkened caves
recessed within me, primal and on the hunt
for the land that promises great bounty.
The map drawn by the earth leads to you.

I want to feel skin on skin, chest on breast,
the little hairs that cover you like grass
on a prairie, and I could ride, as if on horse,
capture you with the weapon that is nature
made, my siren song, the cup you must fill.

I'll tell you how to release me: it only takes
a fingertip drawn from wrist to inner elbow,
lips pressed hard on my spine, a trickle
of touch up my thigh and I'll unravel, I'll let
you come into my spell, make you magical.

(c) 2007 understar productions and Rosana Garcia

by Rosana Garcia

We were drinking in the name of her sadness, her anger,
her broken heart, sharing stories of male faults and failures.

But the song came, familiar, rhythmic, pulsing
in Spanish, a painful bittersweet jolt from the past,
from the island of my birth. The tears well in my
heart: the only thing to do is sweat them in dance.

I took his hand, led him out onto the circle of space
that appeared in this tiny, hip, American martini lounge
decorated with skinny, pretty, slim-jean wearing women
and attractive men, immaculately groomed, on the hunt.

He shouldn't have known how to lead, spin, hold, move.
In my slight fuzziness, my feet remembered everything
I ever learned at my abuela's parties in the mountains,
the hip sway, fancy footwork, and letting him lead.

I lost all my fear, all my worry, in the swirl
of the merengue beat that my hips know like
the taste of guava and mangoes, like the scent
of salt air, the sound of the wind in the palms.

So sweet, the way he stayed inside my fantasy
for awhile, let me, a stranger, pull him into
my homesick dance, my nostalgia moment,
my guilty pleasure, my escape from

Her eyes are bleary, her smile and mind plastered. Later,
she'll go home to her man, they'll kiss, they'll scream,
and she won't remember calling in the middle of the night.

(c) 2007 understar productions and Rosana Garcia

by Rosana Garcia

2 creamers (amaretto, hazelnut, vanilla--whichever one I hate the least today),
a long pour of sugar, coffee to the top, quick stir. This is what I have time for,
these days--no espresso with milk, no fancy baristas foaming the top, no caramel
or mocha. No slow wake up at the kitchen table. Six-thirty am only means I'm
already running late. My journal lies fatally unopened for days. This is how dreams
die: first, falling into coma, then a slow, painful death, but I'm not planning a funeral
or preparing food for a wake. I'm a miracle worker on a schedule, but I've penciled
myself in for raising the dead. The journal will open, the words will flow (20 pages
of crap, 1 page of startling genius, a permanent ratio, a constant for a writer's
equation). My voice is only quiet, on sabbatical, on a journey who's return will be
heralded with the fantastic places we've been, without me. Somewhere in the deep
parts, a world is being built, characters are birthed, like Athena, fully formed, battle
ready, with convictions and opinions. I buy a bottle of water, a Harvest bar, beef
jerky, for the day and only want to return to the kitchen table, to the laptop
that has only seen work, not words, to the part of me that would never cut corners
or convince me that this shitty excuse for coffee will do. None of this will do.

(c) 2007 understar productions and Rosana Garcia

by Rosana Garcia

You unravel me as your eyes undress me.
You whisper and the breath of it blooms
warmth on my neck, my spine, my skin.
I fight, resist, push you away, but I don't
want you to stop. You tempt me skillfully:
a finger traced secretively on my wrist,
a kiss to the cheek lingering a little long
a lustful gaze, slipping up, down, inward,
a promise of something better, more than I
have ever had. You know my weaknesses,
take advantage of ever yone: your words
are bits of poetry in Spanish, that musical
language of my homeland, you lead me
through a slow salsa dance, your eyes burn
with magical power, movements gracefully
suggesting the smoothness of other, more
intimate movements. You unravel me and
one day I will no longer be able to say no.

(c) 2007 understar productions and Rosana Garcia

See my visual poetry piece for this poem here.

This weekend I took all the pieces below, poetry and photos, two large pieces of posterboard, the Sensor(ed) zine and magazines to create a collage during Citywide Open Studios, put on by Artspace in New Haven, CT. The Sensor(ed) zine (that has published some of my work) had a space for the last weekend of a huge art exhibit. It was in the old Hamden Middle School and the place was stuffed with art. Sculpture, photos, screen printing, abstract art, art made from found items, comics, installations, paintings and other stuff that I can't classify in old classrooms, the girls and boys locker rooms, the gym, the volleyball court, the cafeteria, the auditorium, everywhere. It was a fantastic time.

Poems
Homesick (Puerto Rican Man)
Mabon
Looking for Safety
Oxycontin
Saxophone into the Almost Summer
Sorceress
Water Dreams
More (for Lenny)

Self Portraits
All edited in Photoshop and originally photographed by myself
Hosted on DeviantArt
Sarcastic Halo
Painted Blue
Third Eye Burn
Someone Drew
Woods Grain
Smudged in the Forest
Xeroxed Me

by Rosana Garcia

Water dreams of its journeys, its dirty secrets,
its mystical creatures no one believes exist.
Water rises in the heat and maybe it’s the beauty
of the stars it sees that far up that makes it fall,
tear-like, from God’s face. Or maybe it just misses
its riverbeds and salty oceans. I dream in water,
suspended in a clarity that no one but mermaids
have the breath to bear. Sex is a water dream,
as is birth and death. I want to be put out to sea
when I die, to float outward and upward into
a crystalline vision of the next life I will live.

(c) 2006 understar productions and Rosana Garcia

by Rosana Garcia

He’s blowing a saxophone and telling me I got to soft,
a breeze that snakes as gray plumes into skies unbroken,
loves unstolen. Now it’s me moving into mellow Coltrane,
melting under the Lady’s voice, swimming upwards as air
climbs with my mind into sunsets that sink into my skin.
It’s bodies to music, passion to pianos lifted from smoky bars
of cool beer and spinning fans. Twirl of lemon on sweat,
cause it’s summer, baby, and we sneaking alone into
heavens made of stone, into castles of flowers tinkling
bells for morning tea. Buttercups we be honeyed into amber
sap, into waters that travel our bodies like rivers. It’s evening
and moons are rising over hills that don’t matter. Pale
oxygen hangs to breathe. The records play old melodies
from a time of war, when love was hard and sex was hidden.
I travel these days with his voice and I wish for porch steps,
a pack of cigarettes and a night sky. He’s blowing a saxophone
and I’m leaning back, swallowing stars and eating dreams.

(c) 2006 understar productions and Rosana Garcia

by Rosana Garcia

I let you hide in mystery. I’m not seeking you out or making you
cross my way. I can’t let the sizzle-pop of my skin when I saw you
shirtless through my tequila haze determine everything. I kissed you eagerly,
hiding in the stainless steel of the kitchen. I knew you’d hit the liquor.
I don’t know if you remember any of this, but I stopped, pulled back
and went home. I said, “I had a picture of how this would happen and this
isn’t that picture.” You stand in the posture of tough, the strength apparent
in the way you hold your shoulders, the firmness of your arms, the curl
of your fist. You dance and touch and flirt with all the girls, know that you
can break hearts and do it anyway, your voice reaches and hooks in deep,
but there must be something besides all that. I’ll slip my hand under your shirt,
run fingers from your chin to your lips and into your mouth to be at the source
of your words, to find the meaning and stand in it. I trust that there is beauty.
Perhaps it’s easier for me to think you’re the vulnerable little boy that will want
my protection when I’m the one looking for safety in this small darkness.

November 2002

(c) 2006 understar productions and Rosana Garcia

by Rosana Garcia

The door is locked, the tools laid out.
Suck the coating off, it costs you time.
Crush with heavy object, into powder.
Line it up with a credit card or ID.
Roll up a dollar bill or use a straw.
Breathe in and in and in. Wait.

It’ll blur and drip like cough medicine
in the back of your throat. It’ll make
you: forget, float, tune out, glaze over,
paralyzed, gone, imcomprehensible, hurt
in the morning. It doesn’t erase tears,
only saves them for when the day has come.

He taught me how and when he said,
“It’s over,” he gave me 30 milligrams.
Then I sat and let the pain exit, go.
It always returns, but this moment
I cannot handle. I will put it off,
until tomorrow, when the day has come.

(c) 2006 understar productions and Rosana Garcia

by Rosana Garcia

Demeter weeps, for the week will bring her daughter’s
annual abduction. Persephone shaves her legs and gets
her hair done. She’s returning to her husband next
Thursday and all must be in place. She no longer wishes
for her mother underground with her, no longer cries
as Mabon approaches, no longer shakes in fear, thinking
of her husband in her bed, no longer treasures chastity.
She wants his skin beneath her, wants him inside her.
He has sent messages to her through the worms
and snails, speaking of binding her in play reminiscent
of their first night, centuries past. Every woman
tried to make her scared of a man’s aggression, but
they simply did not know how to handle theirs.

(c) 2006 understar productions and Rosana Garcia

by Rosana Garcia

His skin is the color of the dirt in the mountains where I grew up.
He wears a guayabera and a Panama hat in the steaming heat.
He dances to the old ballads on the radio in my abuela's house.
He dances salsa with a firm hand on my waist, footsteps graceful.
His Spanish is smooth like the cigars he smokes, the rum he drinks.
He watches every woman walk down the street, following her curves.
He plays dominoes with nimble fingers, boastful chatter and other men.
He whispers in my ear like I am the only woman on the island.
He trails fingers across my back like a warm current in the seas.
He asks me to get him a beer in a way that I cannot refuse.
He drinks Medalla while turning the spit with the roasting pork.
His eyes are dark, coffee without milk, brown like morcillas.
He speaks lies like they are the truth, convincing me easily.
He is the patron of cane fields, coffee crops, tobacco plants.
His grandmother was from Africa, his grandfather from Spain.
He promises he would be slow and good and like no other man.
His body is warm against me, like sun-baked rocks on the beach.
He knows her, this island, as I do, as motherland, home, seduction.
Between his arms, I feel her touch and am unable to let go.
She calls to me from his lips, beckons me into her tropic spell.
He goes home to his wife, his sons, his dinner of rice and beans.
He smells of all these things, a cologne of memory, a temptation
of the past, an island I miss, the scent of homesickness.

(c) 2006 understar productions and Rosana Garcia