Revolutionary Picture Book, issue #1, "Dynamite and Pigeons" on sale now!

My first, independently produced, hand bound book, "Revolutionary Picture Book," issue #1, "Dynamite and Pigeons" is on sale now!!! You can find a link to my store on Etsy on the side bar of this blog. Here is a description of it:

Dear Customer,

Welcome to the Cupcake World! Journey inside a mourner’s mythology! Witness her transcend grief and suffering through color, surrealism, image and line, all while indulging a bittersweet tooth. Are you mourning, too? Before you enter, drop all of your illusions but hold onto your Masks!!! "Dynamite and Pigeons" is your word and image collage initiation into an atmospheric carnival world full of performers, mourners, lovers, revelers, and holy rollers - in celebration of the spirit of tragedy and loss with humor, bacchanal and revolution.

Come catch a glimpse of the enigmatic and resilient Mama Noire, laugh at the sorrows of Clown Soldiers, hesitate then genuflect quickly before the Bishop of Sorrow and Pink, then shake your head at the audacity, acquired over ages of suffering, of an immortal Little Bad A** - and more, beginning with this first issue!

This first issue of "Revolutionary Picture Book" is a raw, original, hand bound, gorgeous and concise DIY introduction containing poetry, prose and images, hand drawn with pastels, inks and colored pencils, scanned then printed in full color and black and white onto 16 pages, 8 sheets, including slightly thicker vellum covers. Dimensions are approximately 8 and 1/2 by 11 and 1/4.

Looks fetching (especially if protected in its plastic sleeve, which is included with each purchase) on coffee tables, private altars, or displayed (cover outward) on bookshelves amid plants, eulogies, lit candles and ancient books with thicker spines.

***Please avoid browsing through this or any subsequent issue of "Revolutionary Picture Book" while driving or operating heavy machinery. Conjure its colors up at funerals, however, or dance in full costume and mask, alone, or with a lover while clutching it, and, of course, sleep and dream of a peaceful world with it sparkling beneath your pillow.

Love and Carnival,

Tiffany Osedra Miller

Headdress and Crown for the Daughter of a Dead Immigrant

Headdress and Crown for the Daughter of a Dead Immigrant.

Concerning the daughter of a dead immigrant
Whose mother lives alone, now, in some hut in some jungle
found on a map that is difficult to locate
If you still walk or crawl the world.
Her mother is alive in a Technicolor sense.
She lives without her body but within her daughter.
She whittles figurines of this daughter
Out of fantastic wood and debris from broken glass found on floors
of Countries with Carnivals.
The hut is supported by a statue of her daughter
Wearing the headdress of Three Mary’s:
Maria and Magdalene and Marriage,
Her wood-skin tinged with red,
And sodden with rum
The Mother costumes her in wedding dress and crown
In celebration of having joined the wisdom of spirit to this living young woman
Made in her mother’s likeness.
The walls of the hut also stand wooden with her daughter
And the ceiling shows the moving cinema
of her daughter’s dramatic face
The Mother will not whittle her offspring weeping
She will not whittle for her a single tear
She settles for whittling inside her child-friend, heart-fruit,
a heart so open that it can only be an un-forbidden door
for the universe to enter
and recline in the pulp of its chambers
until the call to carnival and revel
places upon the universes’ illusions about itself
every hanging, menacing and magnificent mask –
with which all shadows in this heart space must genuflect.
The mother declares her daughter’s heart to be a cathedral
And though the mother is without her body,
she is resurrected in the carnival dance of her daughter
she congregates within her brown daughter
calling on her to demand of the world
that her majesty be seen and heard.
It is all her mother can do without a body
because she is now free to travel other gardens of Goddesses and Gods
with a gilded posse
of revelers, brown birds, butterflies, immigrants
and dimming memories
of being once hopeful and human
her belly bulging, burgeoning and blossoming her brilliant brown baby
born with every right to be regal.

"What Happened to Charlie Christ?"

from "The Violent Beauty of Urda Louise"



THE VIOLENT BEAUTY OF URDA LOUISE
(What Happened to Charlie Christ?)

“Listen to those cats in heat, Urda, they sound like they’re in mourning.” Charlie had said this to me three times already. When I reminded him of this, he flinched and called the repetition calculated, then wondered aloud if my dumb ass ever read poetry. Charlie was a poet, alright.

We were smoking weed on his mattress celebrating his return. I was happy to see him but I didn’t want him to know. I got up, stretched in a way I almost never did, then sat on the floor. Charlie liked my stretch so much that he loosened up, sat beside me, and put his hand on my knee.

“I am changing,” he said. “I threw my computer away. All I need and want, now, is you.” Charlie had been trying to hit it since we both met in the sixth grade at a school in the Bronx, a school with good- natured nuns and a broken window in the girl’s bathroom that the boys all knew about. I didn’t remind Charlie that he had hit it already – and on more than one occasion – and that before we parted ways that night, I’d let him hit it again.

His weed was bad quality. He told me that he grew it in containers inside his bathroom. He said that the light was good in there. Exceptional. Although every time I visited him, instead of finding containers filled with cannabis, I found white candles burning on the floor of his tub. He told me he had placed them there because the light fixture didn’t work. He insisted that candlelight was the best way to grow marijuana. He didn’t mention, however, that his Grandmother had fallen and hit her head on the faucet and died there while he was away. She hadn’t wanted him to go. Bad marijuana had nothing to do with the deterioration of Charlie’s memory.

The sound of the cats outside built to a crescendo. We couldn’t even hear the traffic. Their cat-blues – a mix of horn, jaguar, and tenor sax. We both stood up and ran to the window to see if a band was playing in the streets. It was too dark to see anything and by the time we got to the window, Charlie had forgotten why. For a moment, I too had forgotten when I saw his grandmother’s face floating in his eyes like a cataract.