Alana Sveta

I was immaculately conceived in the radiation-blistered landscapes of the New Mexican deserts. Where humans and extra-terrestrials live together in secrecy about their beginnings. Where they pretend to speak the same language, but segregate from each other in enclaves of the indigenous and indignant or foreign and aggressive. My adopted father was a hollow-boned eagle with a crooked beak and stained feathers that sought fortune-tellers to predict the changes in the directions of the wind. One morning I awoke to realize he was no longer there, and I was relieved. My real father was a gray owl, a healer owl. He fixed throats and repaired songbird’s instruments. It was one of many talents, but the one that paid best. Because of his nocturnal schedule, he would only visit my mother after midnight to love her and tell her how beautiful she was. One morning she awoke impregnated by a bird whose face she was unfamiliar. As a child I swam with the dolphins of the Emerald Coast. They were the ones to teach me how to sing. They, to no fault of their own, could not speak my particular strand of English, so it was music that let our friendship bloom. My mother tried befriending the generals and robber barons of the Emerald Coast. However, they forbade her entry to the ranks claiming she did not belong. After several attempts she tried dressing as one of them, in shoulder pads and suffocating fabrics, to fool them and allow her entry, but her delicate voice and romantic curls gave her away as a woman. Then she had no more access to their gold to feed her children. The generals and robber barons banished her to a land they said could give her what she wanted. Upon arriving in California my mother and I competed with dragons and lotus blossoms for the award of Most Beautiful. We were disqualified from the races to be crowned Strongest, Most Intelligent and Most Enduring. Disqualification was based on the angles adjacent our waists and the tightness of our vocal physicality. My mother and I recoiled in bitter surrender for the hopelessness of our world vs. theirs. In California we learned to hate. We learned to blow on our salted wounds. But we also drank tea and ate food to remind us of our good fortune. And the eagles and owls have portraits framed above our bedroom mantels. We drape them in Harry Potter special cloaks and they watch us through the slits carved out for their eyes in the drywall. They hide on the other side of the wall, where they watch us and know what we’re doing, even though we came to California to hide from them to begin with. And at 22, I became a New Orleans crawfish. It wasn’t my choice to return to the Gulf Coast as food for the local vultures, but the succubus’ of the Big Easy noticed my weak soul and I stayed in Louisiana for six months to write and record my most recent album, Birth and The Atomic Bomb...I edited my profile with Thomas Myspace Editor V4.4 (www.strikefile.com/myspace)