Just Don't Look At Your Hands

by Dina Mutar

long distance phone calls to foreign boys whilst sitting in a diseased japanese maple tree, listening to bob dylan's lady of the lowlands on repeat for hours, riding bikes in the darkness down steep hills screaming, "i can feel the wind blowing my leg hairs! weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"  laughing so hard you cry, crying so hard you laugh.  sleeping underneath a grand piano with eyes open- staring up at the stars, this is what friends are for.  realizing that eating carrots or granola on shrooms is not a good idea, realizing that swimming on shrooms is scary and nauseating.  opening throat chakras, opening the top of my head where worms are coming out, crows following me from block to block, telephone wire to telephone wire, they're after the worms!  bike riders off into the sky, huge fat guys in miniature convertibles, watching family birthday celebrations through windows from the curb.  talking to slugs, talking to flowers, talking to myself, "did i say that out loud?"  embodying past lives, fleeting emotions of deep love and intense disgust.  understanding everything, loving everything, hating everything. 

coked-out peruvian hostel workers, even more coked-out ex-israeli soldiers travelling in large, obnoxious groups all wearing headbands, listening to techno music and smoking spliffs.  one is clipping weed from a giant branch of marijuana.  they make me hold a cigarette vertically between my knees then balance the another one horizontally on top of the other with my two index fingers, now they tell me to start moving my feet up and down, "fast, faster faster!"  i feel like a chump.  "haahaahaaa, you are an elephant on a bicycle... ha haaa! get it?"  he pulls out a photo album and proudly shows off photos of at least 60 people around the world doing the same thing, "what the FUCK?"  it's a conspiracy.  i'm paranoid, i don't trust them.  "you guys are sick."  the shrooms are kicking in and mixing with the spliff, the coke is wearing off from earlier.  good thing we didn't drink the "floripondio" tonight that would really fuck shit up.  i see jesus, he is before me, christ lives!  incan designs stamped on the wall and bedspread, then knocking, the fucking israelis- are knocking on all the doors, running up and down the halls singing and chanting in hebrew.  they're packing their bags.  "but i thought they weren't leaving until monday" i'm in my head again in a mist of paranoia... "they're going to kill us- we've got to get out of here" my heart is racing.  we leave the hostel but we couldn't find the room key so we leave it open.  we catch a taxi to a hotel across town.  we stay for a while until i smell smoke, "something is burning, we are getting smoked out, the place is on fire!"  we get in another taxi and go to the house of a gay prostitute who lives in a shanty town in southern lima, we sleep on a bed with lice.  we return to the hostel in the morning when the shrooms have worn off, a picture of me is missing from my things at the hostel and i've misplaced my passport along the way.  i've got to get out of this place.

grandmother tree will save us all,  she is a pokey bitch.  possessing superhuman powers, climbing to the highest branch.  cows are holy, we should give thanks before eating them.  an uprooted tree requires emergency 911 care, "quick!  buckets of water, NOW"  water is life, this one is saved.   walking, walking, walking, walking, walking.  a missing puppy from the litter, did the coyotes get him?  "bella- take care of your fucking kids and be mother for once!  oh, here he is."  squishy sunsets and quicksand,  a train goes by- it's the strangest thing.  70's record covers.  needing to slow down, needing to just be, needing to be a plant.  we are one, god is one, god is love, we are god.  god i love shrooms!  "please don't get lost in the mirror and whatever you do, just don't look at your hands."  

Dina Mutar's favorite word in the english language is hemoglobin and her least favorite word is tether.  She can be found navigating the earth's surface in many different capacities.  In her free time she likes to vacuum, drink iced tea, grow etibles and eat etibles.  She's thinking about getting another tattoo.

 

Dirty Laundry

by Dina Mutar

My Love,
I miss you, now that you are so far away. You always used to make me feel exactly the way a real woman should feel in the presence of a real man. You made me want to spread my legs wide open. The connection we had was ancestral, from the time of the Pharaohs and your reign. Without me, you never would have kept your position at the top. I was your favorite to fuck and I still am, thousands of years later. I loved the way you would mark me, because I was yours, we were together through infinity, and every one bore witness to it. Our love, My Love, was a love that transcended the vortex of time and space. I remember how we used to sleep on top of the "Castel" out on the ledge over looking the Atlantic- it was our "special spot" even though plenty of squatters used it for sleeping too. When the sun was high, the stench of boiling piss lingered... we were worlds away from mine.


How I miss "our house," the tent. The humid, stagnant, moldy, love that enveloped us and protected us and kept us warm like the red, glow of the sun coming through the trees. I can still hear the waves rolling up to shore, the chickadees, the call to prayer and children playing. You were romantic in everything that you did. You fed me with your hands, brushed my hair, and looked at my with hungry eyes. I felt like a princess when you would sneak me into the mosque between prayer sessions. You would climb over the wall so you could open the door from the inside. You would stand outside and guard the door so could take a shower or take a shit. Back in those days we were still in love and you would do anything for me, we were obsessed with each other. We didn't even know each other very well when you blurted out that you wanted me to be the mother of your children when we were having loud sex again. And now that I am (the mother of your child), you don't see me anymore, not with the same hungry eyes. You don't grope and grab at me with your desperate hands.


I miss how you would run errands to the boutique; to buy our breakfast and coffee for the morning, cigarettes and mints for later, rolling papers, and laundry detergent; the essentials. I couldn't stand your absence even for a few minutes. You were content to do anything for me, in fact, you didn't let me do things because it was so hot and there was lots of sand, you wanted to keep me safe. You were paranoid that others that might try to take me from you. Oh my God and how we used to make love in the mornings. We used to smoke joints and devour each other in a combustion of ecstasy. It didn't feel dirty, it felt holy. I said I would have you for breakfast, lunch and dinner, with hot sauce on the side. I wanted you to live inside of me. I wanted to walk around with your dick inside me forever. Later, we would take "bucket showers", smoke more joints, make passionate love to one another, drink juice and sleep. Finally we would need sustenance and we'd have to stop and search out food. These were the simple pleasures of our existence.


We sang hymns to Allah praising His greatness. We sat on our roof and watched airplanes over head while listening to our crappy, Chinese radio mumble news of worldwide wars. I knew it was fucked up out there, and even though I was worried about the state of things... I felt so sure of us. I thought we were perfection, a model of divinity... I thought our love was glorious and pure. I thought it was too good to be true. So many times I had thanked God for this blessing, finally, I thought I had gotten what I had been searching for, and I believed that I deserved it this time. I had hoped that maybe I was receiving my karmic retribution for all the other assholes I had loved and tried to help but that always screwed me over in the end. I thought we were the luckiest people to have ever walked this Earth.


My Love, I don't call you "My Love" anymore. We don't wash our clothes by hand and hang them out to dry anymore. We don't ride the ferry to that island off the coast, we don't sit under the baobab and eat fish and rice with our hands, we don't talk about God anymore. I miss you, now that you are so near to me... I can't stand who you've become. Now, it's all about the rat race: tits and ass, money, money, money... institutionalized slavery, mental slavery, physical annihilation... I can't take the beatings that leave us scarred and bruised, and scared. My puffy eyes are sore, my soul is a weight too heavy for my body to encapsulate, my voice is tired of talking in circles with you, trying to be one step ahead of you. I have given you my hand too many times. My Love, you were my Lion King, you were everything I thought was good and right. I wanted to learn how to cook for you. I wanted to impress you with my finesse and beauty in everything I did. I believed you were a modern day prophet, I believed that you were a disciple of Truth. I believed that you loved me and that you wanted me. I became lost in you and the false Paradise we created. My Love, I hate you. I hate what you've put me through. I hate that you tricked me, I hate that you've wasted my time. I hate you for pretending to love me because you were heartbroken and it was convenient. The truth is you're just a pretty, pathological, ghetto child with stars in his eyes and I'm too good for you. So please go back to where you came from, we are going to kill each other here, slowly suffocating each others' life force until we shrivel into darkness. I hate you for making me love you.

-Me

Dina Mutar is a world traveler and pacifist except for when she passes her fist into your jaw or shoulder or chest, never the nose, however. She is from here and there, she is an emotional psychic and loves kids. She is proud that she finally got the balls to finish and submit a piece, even if it's a piece of work.