OPEN SESAME, by Gabrielle Pflugradt

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Sometimes for whatever reason, the body closes off. The cells, stunned by loss, illness, newness, coldness, sadness, dividedness, harshness etc, refuse to take on stimuli. Refuse to feel air, arm, hope, neighbor, light. OPEN SESAME is a procession of tiny moments which mark the slow reacceptance of the world around me, the special sequence of words which broke open the cage of being and allowed me to return to self, breath, touch, vision, dream, and love. The poems are expressions of learning again how to carve out the present as survival, experience the happening, accept the newfound meanings of a lover, interact richly with sex, ocean, and body, and be a good friend. It is the written record for the future, for the next slip, a confirmation that everything is all part of the experience, opening and closing, returning and returning, again and again, to body and therefore to life. Gabrielle Pflugradt is a singer and body artist living between Brooklyn and San Francisco. After studying performance art and poetry at NYU, Gabrielle developed a heavy focus on the spontaneity and instantaneousness of embodied experiences which leads her to craft open-ended worlds where experiences are always intersubjective, always rooted in risk, and always sensual. This work is dedicated to her dog Rudy.