7/30

Published on by annaspackman17@gmail.com Category: Blog, Uncategorized

So for once in my life, let me get what I want –

Lord knows, it would be the first time.

 .

Dear Morrissey,

 .

Sometimes there is a thunderstorm in my head and I am buffeted by descending clusters of fuck-you rain and my body twists tragically

 .

into a tangle of helpless and sad, and I am swept like crumpled trash into concrete walls of the city until there is a door

 .

that swings open when I fall sideways through it, and it is a bar in London and not a hip one, just trapped smoke and stale sweat and beer,

 .

and your voice cuts through the grime like hot wax. It curls warmly around me and I sit at the bar and fall into your melancholy,

 .

damp and shivering lustily. You have a combination of charm and self-pity so potently desirable, every musician since is just pretending,

 .

myself included. You make me want to write half-seduction-half-angst poetry on bathroom stalls in lipstick. You make me

 .

want to throw peanuts at your stupid brooding face and laugh. You make me want to sneak into your bed, where we’ll wipe each others’ eyes

.

until we’ve convinced ourselves we have made love. I will laugh about it later. The thought makes me smile. You notice

 .

and try to croon your beautiful eyes to me, and I tell the bartender I am closing out. I would tell you that I hope you get what you want,

.

but, (and here is the difference between us), I think this is it. I sing the chorus ironically on my way out while you watch me leave.

 .

Half sincerely,

Anna

6/30

Published on by annaspackman17@gmail.com Category: Blog, Uncategorized

I am naming the neighborhood cats after my demons.

Compulsive Guilt tracks my path with light green gaze,

refusing to leave its patio post, a steady sentinel.

Don’t Leave Me has a crooked knob of a tail

and a strangled greeting when I stop

to scratch behind its silver ears. I once sat

in the middle of the sidewalk square

with Self-Chosen Melancholy in my lap,

watching the cars disturb the peaceful street

for at least half an hour. They are soft, aloof,

prim. They ask me rhetorical questions before

losing interest. They rub their bellies against

my calves. They do not follow me home.

5/30

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There is a strange synchronicity in the wounds from breakups.

In grieving the absence of your shoulders, I miss his flannel.

I write a song and don’t know who it’s about,

only that it is true.

The emptiness in my belly whispers secrets

to the knot in my throat, its best friend.

Each tiny sadness awakens another,

a chorus of estuaries just under the skin,

flooding in unison.

.

Solitude is a room full of the going and gone.

All music comes from emptiness and resonance.

Tonight there are no names or memories,

just the harmonies of discord.

I lie still and let the wind sing through every hole in me.

4/30

Published on by annaspackman17@gmail.com Category: Blog, Uncategorized

To the Father Who Told Us No, His Daughter Is “A Healthy Kid”

.

I don’t blame you for being scared of us.

I am sorry that Cancer is written on our clothes,

our big purple cart, our ukuleles.

As you speak, I imagine you walking these halls

with your gaze magneted to the carpet,

trying not to see the other families

in rooms like yours.

As if you could carry the images of nose tubes

and round, smooth heads

like bacteria stuck to your sleeve,

back into the room where your daughter breathes.

She has a cast on her arm, black corkscrew curls,

the brightness of a future in her eyes.

We are a reminder of every parent’s nightmare,

the sentinels of the sick and sad.

To you, we do not belong here.

.

I want to tell you it’s ok.

I imagine how the world must have halted

to see her blood burst from her –

so brash, a shock of violent fragility.

How tightly fear must have cocooned your lungs.

.

But to you, our songs,

our smiles, are poisoned –

because we share them every day

with families who live for months, years,

within those seconds that stopped your heart.

I wonder if you realize the power

of your connection to others

who have felt death sitting at their child’s bedside,

the horror of each held-breath moment.

.

I want to tell you,

though (because)

you don’t want to hear,

that these children are iron-hearted. Their parents,

the humblest saints.

I want to tell you

that before all this,

they were healthy kids, too.

3/30

Published on by annaspackman17@gmail.com Category: Blog, Uncategorized

You are not what they told me you’d be.

The name they gave you

fits like a funeral around a sunshower,

a feeble attempt at containment.

Widow is a word with stooped shoulders,

a conch shell spine,

a grey husk of waiting.

 .

You are a million moments of sunlit water

reborn as comets.

Your limbs are rivers.

You grow colors in the backyard

and spill them like secrets in conversation

with stories of a man so bright

I feel his sun on my face.

 .

There is no word for what you are,

and certainly not one that is born from death.

I want to cry when you dance at my shows,

as if I am singing cherry blossoms awake.

 .

When you called me

“one of the beautiful reasons I was left behind”

– only then, I saw a shadow,

a brief glimpse into the canyon

those years carved in you,

savage and slow,

A memory of smallness tucked inside.

.

I wonder

at how gently it holds me.

 

2/30

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Lies (Prompt)

I’m fine. I’m just tired.

Don’t be nervous. You’ll be ok.

You have to be more patient.

Smug smiles of quarters

gleaming beneath my pillow in the morning.

No, you can’t help. Go to bed.

Sunday morning let us pray.

Head back, asking forgiveness from the rafters.

Everything is fine. Don’t worry.

I’m just tired.

There’s nothing to be scared of.

 .

Parents don’t lie

exactly. I have always found

shreds of my beliefs

in the untruths sewn into my neural pathways.

I hear them in my own voice,

even the one I only use

in the nakedness of lovers

or poetry.

 .

It’s fine.

I’m just tired.

No, I’ve got this.

All the ways I have worshipped at temples

in whose gods I never believed.

I believe you.

My mouth wanting you in ways

my heart had fleeting dreams about.

Sometimes, they reversed.

Words like want, forever, trust,

(do I say it?) love.

Don’t be scared.

You’re ok. You’re ok. You’re ok.

 .

Listen – I don’t know what to call

the things I’ve told you.

I do not lie, I do not truth

exactly. I poem exactly.

I touch exactly. I pray exactly.

I will never know which pieces of me

you believe.

 .

It’s fine.

You’ll be ok.

I trust you.

Don’t worry.

.

Forgive me.

1/30

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Eyes shut like garage doors

I imagine very hard what it’s like to be metal

or concrete, hardened,

the water in me

vanished, taking with it

everything soft.

Nothing leaves an impression

when it touches me.

The thinness of skin

is a memory.

Closeness once felt blurry.

The dangerous, yet inviting

intimacy of molecules

unchaining, retangling. Now,

it is friction. A mild irritation

of chalk unbecoming itself

into my roughness.

Each touch becomes a trail

of white dust,

my surface washed clean

with every new rain.

shaking the dust off the poeming hands

Published on by annaspackman17@gmail.com Category: Blog, Uncategorized

What Matters (prompt)

.
Some people. Everyone. No one.

I cannot choose just one without abandoning the rest.

Like when I was seven and prayed every night,

blowing a kiss to every dead person and animal I knew.

A great-uncle I could barely remember. My grandparents’ housekeeper.

A hermit crab. I could not let even one fall into the canyon

of forgetting. Eleven kisses every night,

before I stopped praying in 7th grade.

.

7th grade. My first journal. My letters to nobody,

to you. You, from obsession to long-distance lover

to ex to lover to long-distance lover to ex to nobody.

I cannot count all of the people you have been.

It has been four years of nobody. I am terrified

of when you will have been nobody for longer

than you were anything else. Letters to myself,

myself, present, future. They are in a drawer

in my room in Pennsylvania. Every year

I read one written by the self two years younger.

I haven’t stopped writing your name.

.

Memory, but maybe not. I know these stories change

every time we cast our nets in the oceans within us.

They gasp like fish as we break the surface with them,

their colors fading before our eyes.

It is a futile science, taking those moments

out of their homes within us, scrutinizing them

as they wriggle and change in our desperate hands.

No wonder the ocean paralyzes us with resonance,

as if we are seeing in its depths everyone

we loved enough to name. Memory as a circle,

as I blow your house a kiss when I drive by.

Right now, this matters.

On Taking “Chicks With Guitars” More Seriously

Published on by annaspackman17@gmail.com Category: Blog, Uncategorized

I haven’t written much so far about my life as a performing musician, so we’ll depart from the hospital stories for a hot second.

I have never felt comfortable in femininity – that is to say, I have never felt like I can fit myself into what people expect of women. I think very few women do, and many spend a ton of energy trying. I think I probably did too before I thought, ah, fuck it. This awkward disconnect between me and my assigned gender manifests in many different ways (loving mismatched/ill-fitting clothing, taking initiative in romantic/sexual encounters, making poop jokes, etc), but I am beginning to look at how gender affects me as a musician in different settings and noticing some frustrating patterns. And disturbing ones as well, when I see them exemplified in our music culture.

I challenge you right now to name five past/present “household name” female musicians who 1. write their own material, 2. perform their own work, and – wait for it – 3. do not use their sexual desirability to sell their art (I’m so torn about Beyonce because she has one of the only all-female bands in the spotlight right now and that is SO rad – but she still wears four pairs of stockings so that her thighs don’t jiggle when she dances. Sigh.). Right now, thinking about it for a few minutes, I can think of three: Joni Mitchell, and Tracy Chapman (which is a stretching the “household name” qualifier at this point). Maybe you can name more – that’s great. My point is not that there are absolutely no women anywhere who have been publicly recognized for their musical prowess without sexing themselves up for male producers/audiences. My point is that out of all of musical legends we have idolized through history, there are only a handful of women who are truly valued as musicians the way that men are.

So let’s look at what this means for a solo female songwriter/performer entering the music scene. It means male audience members complimenting your appearance more predominantly than the work that went into the creation and performance of your songs (fun fact: I have been repeatedly hit on in the hospital by a male musician volunteer.) It means whenever male musicians, however well-intentioned, ask to collaborate, they expect me to harmonize with them on their material or covers – not on my own material. (I can count on one hand the number of men who have learned a song I wrote and performed it with me.) It means being ignored or talked down to by sound guys who don’t think I know how to mic myself properly. It means a perpetual tone of surprise when I can learn a voice or instrument part, transpose an entire song, improvise, or generally display any sort of musician proficiency. It means having to constantly tell yourself every day that what you do is unique and important and worthwhile, which is what all musicians/artists have to do anyway – the difference is that you are put in the position of having to constantly enforce your membership to others within the community.

I want to take a minute and express my gratitude to the surprising number of people I have found who truly hear me and value what I do. I have met some kickass people who believe in my work and my mission, and I have been propelled by their encouragement thus far. I don’t want to sound ungrateful about being able to play music at all (in traditional Ghanaian culture, women are forbidden from playing the drums at all, as it is believed to bring bad luck). I have loved all the opportunities that have come into my life, and generally feel very blessed.

HOWEVER. I am tired of this. I am tired of biting my tongue when people make assumptions that the men around me know more about music than I do.  I am tired of being used as decoration for an egotistical performer’s songs that I frankly don’t think are as well-crafted as my own. I am tired of being hit on and undervalued at work. I want to find men that can match me in talent and in artistic humility, who see and challenge my songwriting instead of just trying to capture the lilt of my voice to highlight their own songs. I am tired of feeling guilty for asking for the attention and recognition I deserve. I want to help build a culture that values the message, without so much attention to the appearance of its vessel. I want girls to grow up singing as loudly, as low, as soft, as un-pretty as they want. A friend of mine who has taught guitar for over a decade tells me that the teenage girls generally practice more than the teenage boys, but take less credit for their hard work. It isn’t their fault, but it’s our responsibility to make a different world.

Next time you are listening to a female performer, think about what is truly good about her work. More than just her voice being pretty or her songs being pleasant background music. Did her lyrics blow your mind? Do you want to learn to play guitar/piano/bass like her? Are her songs taking risks? Have you seen her live? Go do it, and watch how she carries herself on stage. Do you admire her confidence, her passion, her strength, her radical approach to music? Is she using her body to win your approval, or using her art to reach into you to touch something real?