Marisela Norte Poet Los Angeles, CA

Bio

Marisela Norte is considered one of the most important literary voices to come out of East Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Interview, Elle, Option, Venice, The Los Angeles Weekly and in the anthologies Microphone Fiends, Bordered Sexualities: Bodies on the Verge of a Nation, The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place and Rolling Stone’s Women of Rock. Norte lives in East Los Angeles and is currently working on her fourth play, Scenes From The Dinning Room.

That was the early 1980’s
That was the early 1980’s – we were the unoffical Band of Outsiders winding in and out of dark, Chinatown bars, taking those long walks from Philippe’s (the unoffical ASCO Club house, our very own Cub Room if you will) all the way to Clifton’s Cafeteria on 7th and Broadway downtown – taking a long walk in a narrow skirt as I used to like to say.

This was my continuing education or maybe it was just continuation period. Lessons were learned, poems were written, hatchets were buried, more lipstick was applied, lines were drawn, the eyes lids were darkened, "We don’t last that long" he would insist, and the reds got deeper and the Lady and the Ginzu Knife emerged from a half shell on a downtown street with a Nino Rota soundtrack to tie it all together.

Some nights, there was no official ring leader and we all took turns at orchestrating a piece of the evening.

"Marcello! Amo la vita di notte!"

But sadly, he was no Mastroianni and I, I was hardly Anouk Aimee. My head had grown used to doing the 360 degree spin so as not to have to face his endless infidelities; I preferred the role of "You’re the one he really loves, I mean, you’re the one he always comes back to."

The one he always comes back to until I asked him to just stop coming.

My stiff upper lip had finally had enough and I gathered Ginzu knives and cut myself loose.

But together, we will always have the shared experience of movies, of leaving the dark theater, completely devastated, changed forever by a particular scene, a close up, these few lines:

"Sometimes at night, the darkness and silence weighs upon me. Peace frightens me, perhaps I fear it most of all. I feel it is only a façade hiding the face of hell. I think, ‘What is in store for my children tomorrow?’ The world will be wonderful, they say. But from whose viewpoint? If one phone call could announce the end of everything? We need to live in a state of suspended animation, like a work of art, in a state of enchantment. We have to succeed in loving so greatly, that we live outside of time, detachedºdetached."

This was a continuing education in Fellini’s version of femminine wisdom and masculine uncertainty.