"Did you ever play watermelon sugar for your Gramma?"

Hi all,

I was going to leave for Albuquerque to film a music video Thursday night, when I found out my Gramma had passed. It was a car crash, but beyond that I’ll spare you the details. Elaine Rita LeDonne Henke was my favorite intuitive cook, my North Star during the darkest days of early pandemic life, apparently everyone’s best friend at the retirement community (they had to put out extra condolence cards to sign, which they’ve never done!) the reason I have such big chatty energy, a woman who loved to dance, who told her parents she would never get married, then met my Grampa and four months later was walking down the aisle.

She was still so energetic at 89, cooking and sewing for all her neighbors. After my Grampa passed I would go visit her at her little cottage, and she would cook hot Italian sausage for me, tell me the names of the flowers lining the backyard (forsythias) and ask me to help her carry a watermelon over to the counter so she could chop it in half with a knife as big as her head, because she was too tiny to carry it herself. I ended up flying to Albuquerque Friday morning, after 1 hour of sleep, and filmed a music video over the past 48 hours. I am so tired. But! All weekend I was looking for watermelon to eat because it was her favorite, even though obviously it is not in season, and during shooting I found out the mountains out here are called Sandias because they turn pink at sunset. I didn’t know that Sandia means watermelon. Here was the sunset from last night, walking to the Smith’s for pistachio ice cream after we wrapped, when our cinematographer Jordan explained that to me.

The weird thing is that we were always planning to make Nun’s spaghetti sauce (Gram’s mom) for the video: the idea was Strega Nona (children’s book with a witch and her pasta cauldron) meets spaghetti western (60s Italian Western films often starring Clint Eastwood) meets Giallo films (think Dario Argento’s Suspiria.) The name of the album I am using this single to raise money for was already going to be The Secret Ingredient is More Meat after asking Gramma what was in Nun’s sauce, and waiting while she listed off 5 or 6 different types of meat. (Also, neckbones??) Weirdly I feel lucky to have been in New Mexico during the first days after Gramma’s death. There was a lot of weeping on the plane here, a lot of weeping in the mornings over coffee with Ewan, weeping to Frank Sinatra and imagining my grandparents dancing to Grampa’s favorite music. But there was also so much triumph in this weekend. So much laughter surprising ourselves with choreography and facial expressions and spaghetti gags and camera angles that made us feel like this video is something really special. (I watched some of the footage back and can confirm, it is very special!!!) When I walked into Ewan’s house, they had spent the past few weeks setting up a kitchen scene to look similar to Strega Nona’s, and I saw that they had printed Gramma’s picture and framed it for the (fake) kitchen counter. They left out poems for me about grief to read in the morning, and took me on a walk in the Bosque so I could see the Rio Grande. They let me DJ in the car and play Mambo Italiano and Pennies from Heaven. And I got to spend time with Devin again, who made me eggs at their Air Bnb because Ewan doesn’t do eggs (love you Ewan) who did my fake eyelashes seven times for the shoot, who gave me their hat when we were filming in the desert in 30 degree weather and all I was wearing was a summer dress. Here is that picture of Gram and her mom as part of the altar on our set this past weekend. Also pictured is one of her and Grampa, with their feet up. And a zucchero jar designed by my love Alex Bruce, with a bay leaf taped to the side, a superstition my Gram taught me.

I’m not going to lie that the beginning of the semester has been really hard. I have had a ton of health issues, (SI joint sprain that laid me out for days, IUD complications) and a lot of what grad school requires of me has been catching up to me. Finding out Gram passed was (and still is) an incredible shock. There are numerous bills passing in Tennessee that will mean more violence towards Trans people. I found out this morning that Tennessee is set to be the first state that bans drag, the language of which would also allow for policing Trans people for looking Trans. I found this out while I was in drag for the music video, with a wrinkle of spaghetti as my eyebrows. I felt nauseous while we were shooting and had to take a couple hours to just sit and stare at the wall. Last week I went to a rally about a DIFFERENT anti-Trans bill, and a woman from East Tennessee spoke and said, nobody can make her run from her home. She said that our existence itself is resistance. I cried so much at that rally. I am so scared, friends.

I am trying to remember that doing something like this, then, is particularly sacred. I hope this small little world of the four of us queer people who shot this music video and how we brought each other snacks and did squats to get the right framing on camera, that those things count for something. Here are some BTS shots, though trust me, there is more to come.

What else this month? I’ve been cooking from recipes instead of intuitive cooking — most notably from Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat, and Alex just got me Maangchi’s book on the essentials of Korean cooking for Valentine’s Day. I opened for Tenci at the Pilot Light (the best live show I have seen in so long was their music, oh my GOD!) and got a couple really exciting literary journal acceptances. Here are a couple pieces from The Offing that were just released today! CW: abortion & top surgery. I got the acceptance email from my actual favorite writer, K-Ming Chang, in the first days of January 2023, and it just felt like a promising sign that this year could be really exciting for work!!! I have another show coming up at the Pilot Light opening for this NYC band Scout Gillett on March 11th, and I’m back with a new arrangement of a full band AND new songs, including this single, “Morricone.” In addition to the music video, I am collaborating with my friend Lindsey who is making a spaghetti western themed sculpture to raffle off and raise money for recording my album. My friend Sarah Moore (the artist known as @spagslag) is designing spaghetti t-shirts. Josh, my guitarist turned drummer had an idea to make a lyric video. There’s a lot in the works!!

On top of all that, I think I figured out the title of my thesis! My debut full-length poetry collection!! In one of my poems, I have an epigraph quoting Leonora Carrington’s short stories. The book’s connective tissue is a series of what I call Exquisite Corpse poems, which I’ve explained here before, but what you need to know is that an Exquisite Corpse was a game the Surrealists played in order to make collaborative art. You can only see the line drawn or written by the person immediately before you, so the whole of it is surprising and often nonsensical. Anyways, the line from Leonora’s story was “Some claim that the corpse was carried off by bees, & that they have preserved it to this day in the transparent honey of the flowers of Venus. Others say that the painted coffin did not contain the princess at all but the corpse of a crane with the face of a woman.” I think, because herons are the birds that have followed me for a long time and I like the rhyme with woman, my book is called The Corpse of a Heron with the Face of a Woman. I am doing a manuscript conference with Tupelo Press this weekend, which UTK got for us because there is so much going on with our thesis committees. But more on that later…

Woof! A long one! I am tired, sitting on this floor in the Dallas airport. I hope your week is kind to you. Give your people a hug today. I’m on my way to hug Alex Bruce right now!

With love,

Sara Mae