The Missing Girls: Working Notes
Barbara Mor
I lived in Tucson two-and-half years, including 13 months homeless in the downtown area. Hot there of course, 114 degree typical summer noon reading digitally broadcast from top levels of one tall building. Hot and dry, the desert trance is a continuous sweat of film on your bare skin, the only interface you carry around between your unhoused nakedness and a very hard world. And of course continuous stories, brutal rumors (facts) of things happening to street people all around you: prostitutes beaten, homeless found dead, drug overdoses. All of my book The Blue Rental, and certainly something like my poem, “The Missing Girls”, was born out of this immersion in the heat and shimmering convergence of daily events and ancient dream along our southwest border. To convey such experience, I needed every linguistic tool in my kit: prose, poetry, polemic, newspaper data, historic reference, on verbal sensory input barely translatable in any way but bending, distorting and amputation of the usual syntax into something more . . . primal, that can scream, and bleed. Utter the unutterable (whose sound is always there, except we make a lot of noise to drown it out. The writer must turn up its volume, because it stuns and hurts. That’s the point).
a building constructed by white sand,the deserts warehouse
Men go in &out,lugwrenches hammers a cement floor where
oil &water stain their boots as if blood &they are surgeons
of machinery. Noise muted,a radio of wind,everything is too
hot, sweat beads&mixes with black dust. a location far from
highways,there is a rusted sign somewhere& dirt road.Who
comes &goes has no name,a static business without any
advertisement on a 360 degree horizon
Men who work appear& disappear from the air,dressed in
blue overalls,tshirts, organic or mineral skin
what do they perform: aBeast chained to a rock like a dog
guarding a poison that drips from the sun
there are other buildings
Wheel depot, wall yard, home factory etc. Visceral metal
disconnected tubes pipes dismantled bathroom fixtures old
refrigerators frontdoors recharged batteries of empty rooms
somehow these bldgs are connected to the missing girls.
dont ask why
storm rain lightning mirage all very far away. Phenomena
bleached by distance.Weather occurs in a mind, not here,day
&night a lightbulb burns in a cage in a skull of a job manager
without shadow.This decides storm lightning heat mirage
what is done here: Coagulum of space/time
the monster licks this
jewel slowly until the animal is so sick it can eat its own
death. & be full
I admire Kathy Acker’s life and work; in both she refused to be enclosed or defined within one “voice” or genre. In her range from deadly or lonely seriousness to her parodic plagiarisms, Acker refused steadfastly to be pinned down, either by literary convention or market demands. I have a lot of voices in my head (desert delirium?!). No, women are many voices, and no single genre, like no conventional linear/narrative sentence can capture the multidimensional context and pain and possibility of the world today (it never could). We are poets, we are polemicists, we are prose essayists, news reporters, theorists, cosmologists, historic witnesses. All this is what it takes for women writers to rewrite the world. Each of us has to work out a way to get it All in: including the kitchen sink, the garbage disposal, the local dumpsters, the great human trash mounds of the world now become human habitat for so many.
Speculations: as (mirage) dwellings of cardboard, packing
crates plastic tarp barrels old tires, Factory trash piled &
angled among rocks&brush as if inhabited, animals or insect
colonies live there no running water windows doors, one
room they hang blankets to make walls,8 rooms many
animals or bugs hovelled together, to be human to eat
sleep mate beyond this .or school, or a job,a movie,dance
or romance as seen,las revistas a screw thru a bottlecap
makes a bolt,aFemale 12-16 makes a family worker,the
extension cords,crazy wires strung everywhere live wires
among shacks along ground,over dirt roads a lightbulb,an
iron, radio,tv some current runs like nerve spasm or fire
thru a common body,or electrocution .theExperiment of
rodents of heat& saguaro,a skeleton of fire at night to be
human,who lives here exists,by dream tumbleweed in
manufactured wind,each rises to become,4am or midnight
walks alone,a bus or desert terrain,arrives 7am 2am, 24/7
factories of towering gates,security booths, parking lots,
green lawns &vegetation,as if water ran in the river,or air
was not stench, & here they may aspire to be,toilets &
showers,cafeteria food,hot&cold faucets,discipline&wages,
the anonymous receive a nametag,w/a human name
The desert also teaches us about silence...the things that cannot and will not be voiced (without risk of Benetton-ad exploitation, tabloid sensationalism, offense to sensibilities, risk of death, etc.), and the writer must figure out how to voice them anyway. Words, like water in the desert, don’t flow easily; they must be dug for, with grim effort, from a deep difficult place. Literary glibness, in the desert, has too many haunted overtones of that sardonic smile on a skeleton’s face.
certain gods decide what is valuable what isnt. Human
pain,it is like killingEarth,raping Life eating theHeart of
Things,a big thrill they are expendable,10,100,1000,1
million die so what? there are always more we know
where they come from,sd theMachine .& we know what
is happening to them & we understand.The awfulness is
eternal but necessary sd the god &all my begotten things
designed as sacrificial matter the idea is fulfilled when
each is opened up & emptied of whatever her name was
did she ponder did she dream no only of this moment
she is made for
When I got off the Arizona streets and into some settled shelter back in New Mexico, with no great access to books or means to buy them, Lise Weil and Harriet Ellenberger made available to me Trivia back issues in print. I had decades of women’s writing, domestic and global, to catch up to, and Trivia (along with Clayton and Caryl Eshleman’s Sulfur) was my mentor, challenge and inspiration. Trivia Voices online was the sole outlet for my specifically feminist writing, and now the ASU/New College desert bloom of this magnificent Amazonian cactus appears anew. Ink is blood; digital circuitry is all our nerves entangled. A prickly and enduring Trivia should draw ink, blood and nerve from you to stain these brilliant screens with visions and power.
sometimes,they sd, when you cross a shipment of drugs to
the US, crack the border,vate,adrenaline is so high you
want to celebrate by killing women
hot & heavy on the desert is redundant but these are cold
hearted bastards these are pricks of ice
this is how he says,I only do it to bitches who deserve it
like God he decides who deserves it.this is how God was
manufactured in the black sweating place between the
scrotum & the brain the crease of grease & hair he says
the difference between God & nothing
is theFear running up her spine freezing in her
eyes the shivering of small things at mercy of power they
enjoy briefly but never long it must repeat again &again
punctured &gulped down on the desert a mouse into
a snake open a cold beer after,yr
tongue explodes
Given this desert, this challenge of writing, the Juarez murders of so many women – most of them very young, and all related, via work in the burgeoning maquiladoras or any female life within the challenges and dangers of a US/Mexico border “freetrade” zone that is of course “free” to no one – this zone of “femicide” of course pulled on me as on so many others (writers, activists, video documentarians, journalists Teresa Rodriguez, Sam Quinones, Tucson’s Charles Bowden, brilliant many-voiced feminists like Eve Ensler, the great Roberto Bolano) . . . The murders pull as some deep deepest earth core, magnetic to the mind and soul. They pull on the tongue, like the Mayan tongue pulled to be ritually pierced by a thorn to draw blood to reconnect the mind/spirit to its sources as body, earth, real and luminous experience of this pain of this earth, here and now. In 2226, his fictional/actual Juarez novel, Roberto Bolano wrote of the murders: “No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.” It’s hidden in us, this ritual of sacrifice of us, as women. The tongues, the darkest deepest energies of women writers must be magnetically pulled by this huge weight, this magnetic core of what women’s life is now on this planet and what this means to the future life of our species, all living things, the earth itself. Bolano again, of Ciudad Juarez: It is “our mirror and our curse.”
often air tastes like motor oil, or bread or speech
tastes like drilled oil. Or flesh tastes like gasoline or
all things become fire or yr eyes iridesce in rain
clings to fatal intersections
we are not lost here, it is the rest of Life fades a person,
a history, a mirage as terrible blood of the Sun drips
out& spreads, is disappeared into the surrounding
stain, as night
the Imagination cannot escape the desert it is the final
place
* * * * * * *
To read Barbara Mor’s text “the missing girls” in its entirety, visit: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=600
To order Mor’s book, The Blue Rental, which includes “the missing girls” visit: http://www.oliveropenpress.com/Oliver.011.rental.html
I lived in Tucson two-and-half years, including 13 months homeless in the downtown area. Hot there of course, 114 degree typical summer noon reading digitally broadcast from top levels of one tall building. Hot and dry, the desert trance is a continuous sweat of film on your bare skin, the only interface you carry around between your unhoused nakedness and a very hard world. And of course continuous stories, brutal rumors (facts) of things happening to street people all around you: prostitutes beaten, homeless found dead, drug overdoses. All of my book The Blue Rental, and certainly something like my poem, “The Missing Girls”, was born out of this immersion in the heat and shimmering convergence of daily events and ancient dream along our southwest border. To convey such experience, I needed every linguistic tool in my kit: prose, poetry, polemic, newspaper data, historic reference, on verbal sensory input barely translatable in any way but bending, distorting and amputation of the usual syntax into something more . . . primal, that can scream, and bleed. Utter the unutterable (whose sound is always there, except we make a lot of noise to drown it out. The writer must turn up its volume, because it stuns and hurts. That’s the point).
a building constructed by white sand,the deserts warehouse
Men go in &out,lugwrenches hammers a cement floor where
oil &water stain their boots as if blood &they are surgeons
of machinery. Noise muted,a radio of wind,everything is too
hot, sweat beads&mixes with black dust. a location far from
highways,there is a rusted sign somewhere& dirt road.Who
comes &goes has no name,a static business without any
advertisement on a 360 degree horizon
Men who work appear& disappear from the air,dressed in
blue overalls,tshirts, organic or mineral skin
what do they perform: aBeast chained to a rock like a dog
guarding a poison that drips from the sun
there are other buildings
Wheel depot, wall yard, home factory etc. Visceral metal
disconnected tubes pipes dismantled bathroom fixtures old
refrigerators frontdoors recharged batteries of empty rooms
somehow these bldgs are connected to the missing girls.
dont ask why
storm rain lightning mirage all very far away. Phenomena
bleached by distance.Weather occurs in a mind, not here,day
&night a lightbulb burns in a cage in a skull of a job manager
without shadow.This decides storm lightning heat mirage
what is done here: Coagulum of space/time
the monster licks this
jewel slowly until the animal is so sick it can eat its own
death. & be full
I admire Kathy Acker’s life and work; in both she refused to be enclosed or defined within one “voice” or genre. In her range from deadly or lonely seriousness to her parodic plagiarisms, Acker refused steadfastly to be pinned down, either by literary convention or market demands. I have a lot of voices in my head (desert delirium?!). No, women are many voices, and no single genre, like no conventional linear/narrative sentence can capture the multidimensional context and pain and possibility of the world today (it never could). We are poets, we are polemicists, we are prose essayists, news reporters, theorists, cosmologists, historic witnesses. All this is what it takes for women writers to rewrite the world. Each of us has to work out a way to get it All in: including the kitchen sink, the garbage disposal, the local dumpsters, the great human trash mounds of the world now become human habitat for so many.
Speculations: as (mirage) dwellings of cardboard, packing
crates plastic tarp barrels old tires, Factory trash piled &
angled among rocks&brush as if inhabited, animals or insect
colonies live there no running water windows doors, one
room they hang blankets to make walls,8 rooms many
animals or bugs hovelled together, to be human to eat
sleep mate beyond this .or school, or a job,a movie,dance
or romance as seen,las revistas a screw thru a bottlecap
makes a bolt,aFemale 12-16 makes a family worker,the
extension cords,crazy wires strung everywhere live wires
among shacks along ground,over dirt roads a lightbulb,an
iron, radio,tv some current runs like nerve spasm or fire
thru a common body,or electrocution .theExperiment of
rodents of heat& saguaro,a skeleton of fire at night to be
human,who lives here exists,by dream tumbleweed in
manufactured wind,each rises to become,4am or midnight
walks alone,a bus or desert terrain,arrives 7am 2am, 24/7
factories of towering gates,security booths, parking lots,
green lawns &vegetation,as if water ran in the river,or air
was not stench, & here they may aspire to be,toilets &
showers,cafeteria food,hot&cold faucets,discipline&wages,
the anonymous receive a nametag,w/a human name
The desert also teaches us about silence...the things that cannot and will not be voiced (without risk of Benetton-ad exploitation, tabloid sensationalism, offense to sensibilities, risk of death, etc.), and the writer must figure out how to voice them anyway. Words, like water in the desert, don’t flow easily; they must be dug for, with grim effort, from a deep difficult place. Literary glibness, in the desert, has too many haunted overtones of that sardonic smile on a skeleton’s face.
certain gods decide what is valuable what isnt. Human
pain,it is like killingEarth,raping Life eating theHeart of
Things,a big thrill they are expendable,10,100,1000,1
million die so what? there are always more we know
where they come from,sd theMachine .& we know what
is happening to them & we understand.The awfulness is
eternal but necessary sd the god &all my begotten things
designed as sacrificial matter the idea is fulfilled when
each is opened up & emptied of whatever her name was
did she ponder did she dream no only of this moment
she is made for
When I got off the Arizona streets and into some settled shelter back in New Mexico, with no great access to books or means to buy them, Lise Weil and Harriet Ellenberger made available to me Trivia back issues in print. I had decades of women’s writing, domestic and global, to catch up to, and Trivia (along with Clayton and Caryl Eshleman’s Sulfur) was my mentor, challenge and inspiration. Trivia Voices online was the sole outlet for my specifically feminist writing, and now the ASU/New College desert bloom of this magnificent Amazonian cactus appears anew. Ink is blood; digital circuitry is all our nerves entangled. A prickly and enduring Trivia should draw ink, blood and nerve from you to stain these brilliant screens with visions and power.
sometimes,they sd, when you cross a shipment of drugs to
the US, crack the border,vate,adrenaline is so high you
want to celebrate by killing women
hot & heavy on the desert is redundant but these are cold
hearted bastards these are pricks of ice
this is how he says,I only do it to bitches who deserve it
like God he decides who deserves it.this is how God was
manufactured in the black sweating place between the
scrotum & the brain the crease of grease & hair he says
the difference between God & nothing
is theFear running up her spine freezing in her
eyes the shivering of small things at mercy of power they
enjoy briefly but never long it must repeat again &again
punctured &gulped down on the desert a mouse into
a snake open a cold beer after,yr
tongue explodes
Given this desert, this challenge of writing, the Juarez murders of so many women – most of them very young, and all related, via work in the burgeoning maquiladoras or any female life within the challenges and dangers of a US/Mexico border “freetrade” zone that is of course “free” to no one – this zone of “femicide” of course pulled on me as on so many others (writers, activists, video documentarians, journalists Teresa Rodriguez, Sam Quinones, Tucson’s Charles Bowden, brilliant many-voiced feminists like Eve Ensler, the great Roberto Bolano) . . . The murders pull as some deep deepest earth core, magnetic to the mind and soul. They pull on the tongue, like the Mayan tongue pulled to be ritually pierced by a thorn to draw blood to reconnect the mind/spirit to its sources as body, earth, real and luminous experience of this pain of this earth, here and now. In 2226, his fictional/actual Juarez novel, Roberto Bolano wrote of the murders: “No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.” It’s hidden in us, this ritual of sacrifice of us, as women. The tongues, the darkest deepest energies of women writers must be magnetically pulled by this huge weight, this magnetic core of what women’s life is now on this planet and what this means to the future life of our species, all living things, the earth itself. Bolano again, of Ciudad Juarez: It is “our mirror and our curse.”
often air tastes like motor oil, or bread or speech
tastes like drilled oil. Or flesh tastes like gasoline or
all things become fire or yr eyes iridesce in rain
clings to fatal intersections
we are not lost here, it is the rest of Life fades a person,
a history, a mirage as terrible blood of the Sun drips
out& spreads, is disappeared into the surrounding
stain, as night
the Imagination cannot escape the desert it is the final
place
* * * * * * *
To read Barbara Mor’s text “the missing girls” in its entirety, visit: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=600
To order Mor’s book, The Blue Rental, which includes “the missing girls” visit: http://www.oliveropenpress.com/Oliver.011.rental.html
About the author
Barbara Mor is a lifelong resident of southwest border states – California (southern), New Mexico and Arizona. Her recent book, The Blue Rental (Oliver Open Press, 2011) consists of 10 texts (including “the missing girls”), which she says emerged from “that desert & its cultures into my pagan feminist brain.” She was around San Diego State College’s campus when the first American Women’s Studies Department was established. In addition to giving women’s history talks in the college’s new program and participating in its cultural events, she edited what was believed (hoped!) to be the first international women’s poetry anthology, RainbowSnake (1970). (It was very hand-crafted on quite sub-legal hand-made offset print machineries, with stunning art work by Kristin MacDonald -- and sold out 2000 copies in 2-4 weeks.) Since then, she’s had poetry and non-fiction in various American and British print journals, including Ms., Trivia, Sulfur, Mesachabe, BullsHead, Orpheus Grid, Spectacular Diseases, Ecorche & Intimacy, CTheory, and online Dissident Voices. She says her book, The First God (“my non-NewAgey 1985-6 ms. Title”), was less-polemically and against her objections published as The Great Cosmic Mother (Harper&Row 1987; HarperCollins 1991). She has three adult children, who have survived all this, needless to say, as cosmically smart and multi-talented people.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.