paths unfurl about me
roads squelch innumerable
trails pulsate untrammeled
transits reticulate outward
yet i list in the doldrums
adrift in the eye
every direction untrodden
What I’m Reading:
Last week, I started this exercise routine
to calm me, help me
control my blood pressure, weight,
hope for the future. Today,
I’m suing myself for intentional
infliction of emotional distress.
— Ace Boggess / “Are You Worried About a Breakdown?”
The image: a chipped tooth, a bloody mouth, a spray of bloody saliva that fans out onto your date’s white dress shirt. The instant that nervous smile withers on her face. That is my image, my few words for the day. Because I write everyday.
•••
an avant-garde plateful / a dazzled bear armistice / computers full of soybean gas screaming soylentgreen is people / a rubber stamped law / vortex concubines exploring the playtime quartos of lime habits as sculptural embargo
stay at home yogis falter / writing becomes authorless if the author is removed as a potential safety issue / welcome to the unique kitchen of cinematic spasms / shut down freedom and replace it with equivalencies of harsh aleatoric frequencies / lap dissolve / we’re expanding your freedoms to include briar fingertips in runny egg yolks / jump cuts / simmer your moral panic on the back burner / splice here / call me / never
•••
Imagine you’re on the streets of a yellow-down blown downtown. The rat’s nest smell of putrefaction—no one about, but you and the moles. Nothing moves, nothing glitters. There are canyons and spans of unused sound for the taking—for the making. There are mounds of round bodies, gray and oracular, frozen in time. Nothing moves, nothing glitters. There are cracked trees on the outskirts, brittle and bastioned—grasping at air—cragged in time. Monticules of spent cartridges rusted and dull. Nothing moves, nothing glitters. A thickness in the atmosphere—a metallic tang on your tongue. Shards of bones and jawless skulls stretch from here to the pale hills. You stay. You like quiet. Nothing moves, nothing glitters.
What I’m Reading:
Artificial intelligence giant Anthropic filed papers Monday for what could be the biggest initial public offering of stock ever even as its top executive warns that advanced AI could pose an existential threat to humanity.
The filing sets up the San Francisco company for a Wall Street debut next month, potentially eclipsing the SpaceX initial public offering in June that raised a record $86 billion.
— Barbara Ortutay and Bernard Condon / “Anthropic files for potentially the biggest IPO ever even as CEO warns of risk to humanity from AI” / AP News
at the museum of digest feminism
Boccaccio quotes have been stricken thru
the time to digress was then—
sometime in the 14th century wrought
in yersinia pestis yellow and arte della lana blue—
centuries before its gabardine inception
such foul humors seep thru the crack
in Boccaccio’s wall
the identifying placard in the shape
of a carmine-limned lanced buboe
“Meanwhile, we’re drinking our four-dollar lattes and improving our bodies. The capitalist world has sold us all on…”
so much depends on a red
transliteration
glazed with testosterone rage beside
the white klan hood
“Sod it, let’s see what comes out!
¡mierda! postmodern deconstructed construction”
What I’m Reading:
The whole story of it is that I didn’t know the hole was there. I fell in, blinking. The stars made their usual percussion. I discovered Franz in the hole, and to my delight, he was thirsty. He wanted milk. A whole carton of it. Every orifice in my body wanted to give it to him, but I couldn’t. The milk had run away with its glass.
— Yagmur Akyurek / “Classic Tragedy”
It has become difficult to write dystopias, fantasy, or any form of literature without sounding naive
— Debbie Urbanski / “Feed”
The worst outcome of this would be the coming to power of an extreme, right-wing, conspiratorial, anti-immigrant, anti-European, anti-NATO, anti-the-alliance-of-democracy government. We already have something like that in the U.S. That’s a depressing thought.
— Adam Gopnik / “Adam Gopnik on the Protests in France” / The New Yorker Daily
Before you died I dreamed
of cocktail parties in your Harlem
apartment where you’d bring all our dead kin
back to life, for me! I was old enough
to drink with you, to wear a cocktail dress.
Like the best movies, the dream was black
and white, except for my grandmother’s
lipstick, which was red.
— Elizabeth Alexander / “After”
The Armenian capital Yerevan is chock-a-block right now with officials, scientists and environmentalists from all over the world gathering for Cop17. Everyone is here to try to rescue a historic deal to end the destruction of nature.
The pressure is on. Targets set for 2030 are woefully off track, and the nearly 200 countries present need to agree on a plan to speed things up. All this is happening at a time when national budgets are tight and leaders are distracted by conflict, protests and the global energy crisis.
— Rebecca Ratcliffe / “At Cop17, the pressure is on to rescue a deal that could end the destruction of nature” / Down to Earth
One of these mornings we’ll get up and the weather will
be much different and much worse. We will be momentarily
annoyed. We will not for one moment be alarmed. We
understand how the universe works because we think it’s complicated.
— John Godfrey / “On the Elements”
In a small preliminary study, women who received 15 micrograms of the psychedelic drug LSD focused for longer periods and responded faster to a stimulus than did those who were given a placebo. This effect was not observed for male participants.
— Gemma Conroy / “Microdosing LSD shows some cognitive benefits — but only for women” / Nature
“Value, remember,” she continued, “is created in that liminal space between text and reader—the end value being proportional to the amount of readers. By which I mean: the more readers, the more value. I’m not only talking financial value here, though finances are naturally contained in this definition. Let’s include cultural value as well. Historical value. Human value.” She tossed my manuscript into the bin beneath her desk. “I mean, I do like it. I like what you wrote. You’re asking such interesting questions, like: Do we have a responsibility to feel discomfort when the world is ending? But there’s a better way to engage with a question like that, a way that doesn’t require us to be so fucking gloomy.”
— Debbie Urbanski / “The Open Marketplace of the End Times”
What I’m Listening To:
With too many thoughts
She learned to play her tambourine
Really mean
— Mosquitos / “Sometimes She’s Blue”
your office
is blood office
my name is 78
theres too much pressure
last week was as dated
as the previous week
i added a letter
i added an addled letter
i couldnt use greek
cause the hurricanes
r using the alphabet
again
must i provide you with updated blood
temporary crown
blood
as well as a reading heart
and
check my dent
thee latest blood there
yes
please
i dont have one
thee man doesnt have one
insurance doesnt have one
and i aint got no job
unemployed blood
its got to stop
per instructions of your letter is
cover
you have difficulties
kindly let us know
blood
its got to stop it’s got to stop
the past
upon suggestion
is highly inaccurate
i wish to be actively engaged
so challenged
communication
is nearly insuperable
gladly take my blood
as it is now
b it workable
or not
thank you
this year keeps being misinformed
i was misidentified as another
with the same name
its got to stop its got to stop its got to stop
What I’m Reading:
They tell me God exists.
I’m not so sure.
They tell me I exist.
I have my doubts.
— Gregory Fraser / “Miscarriage”
The superintendent of state struggling to meet winter, raising a circle out of oblongs, was struck to the head with future dread. Bread returned to its silent pile, but rarely with as much gravitas as in Dusks of the Illiberal Liberal Empire. This film is disintegrating in its own ancient nitrate content — patiently losing narrative from its spliced frames.
Imagine a leader at an icy seaside brothel testing flumes and ratcheting loose crampons — independent clauses flying this way and that. Imagine his speech — his friable ideas — crumbling in the wake of his hubris.
Insert cracking rivers, dust-storming praries, swamping of coasts here.
His country grieving, begging to check his speeches and seeking penance for his cowardice. Nary a redemptive arc in sight. Insight to nothing. Cataclysmic auguries in situ — the site of postwar torn sock battles, ripped silences and diminished mental acuities. I’ll cite this alone:
We are allergic to palliatives, and the downward spiral that ensues, emblazoned with a flurry of exclamatory sins — this is the bleakest of moments before the fall.
What I’m Reading:
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;
Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.
— Henry David Thoreau / “Smoke”
the southern town confounds her in new ways—
dozens of driverless vehicles driving no one
feral peacocks pecking the fallow ground
autonomous delivery bots clustered
in auto-da-fé cul-de-sacs
king tides slurping away the coastline
the porous limestone giving way underfoot
former immigrants dissing new immigrants
immigrants that fled authoritarian bullyboys
propping up a fascist wattle-raisin
will wonders ever cease?
i’ll kiss the goose girl instead
What I’m Reading:
… the enormous Florida night,
metallic with cicadas, musical
and dangerous as the human heart.
— Lynda Hull / “The Insect Life of Florida”
Because I didn’t want to go, I made my partner cry. I feel poorly today, both physically and now because I made him cry.
I have a predisposition for alienation — and a tendency to make more of sirens than I should. I never just picture a heart attack, car accident victim, or appendicitis; no, I picture terrorist bombings, the start of uncontrolled pandemics, anthrax poisonings, the first wave of nuclear fallout victims, and such.
And such is the way of my addled mind. I am a sick woman. I don’t think anyone would disagree — except the Sacrafect of Mantia who believes that sunfish can tell time better than clocks.
The Sacrafect has been trying to inject bioluminescence into sunfish so he’d be able to tell time at night.
He’s failed miserably.
What I’m Reading:
At its core, end times fascism is a crisis of rampant impunity born of concentrated power and wealth. Far too much money, information technology, and weaponry have been allowed to concentrate into the hands of the few, and that unchecked power has deranged our elites, goading them to take risks that put our societies and countless species in existential peril.
— Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor / End Times Fascism: And The Fight For The Living World
the deus ex machina falls through the trapdoor into the charnel house
the deus dramatic effect lost and centrifugal with a caravaggio thud
see deus roll among the sweet vinegar panhandlers
watch deus finish the hand cream to douse the smell of blood
deus in a goddard film works the chiaoscuro / a tenebrism / petrichor
deus in bombogenesis full of piss and vinegar spews
deus scumbles the rain-doused pines works the blur
deus in a peppery flourish works against the wet season cold
deus caught in the armature of the machina / ex-officio works union scale
deus doused in dim-light garlic butter reduction topped with sea salt
deus!
dreary dubious dulcet dungeonal!
deus escaped mental patient waxing ontological on black stone paths
deus relents / off stage / orders the curtain fall
deus in the jug and the red of the grapes
deus in the wings, taking hits off the fog machine, directs with shakespearean aplomb
deus as the hole in the sole of your quotidian shoes in the gutter beat
deus as the syncopation of your soul in 5/4 time—a blue beat among blue notes
deus as the sun ra arkestra in hyperdrive singing “nuclear war,” it’s a motherfucker, don’t you know
deus as the writing blister on your finger— the sweetest pain you know
deus as stan brakhage bubblegum—you chew chew chew ‘til your teeth go numb
deus as the usher who stepped away from lincoln’s box at ford’s theater
deus as the antediluvian methane seeping out of thawing permafrost
deus as another opportunity missed—exchanging sharp words with the stage manager
deus as your ill-lighted and out of focus photograph
deus snickering at his blackout jape—power cable in hand next to the light board
deus closing up shop and hanging his sign—away on holiday
What I’m Reading:
Geologists say that in ten years, Florida’s coastlines will be underwater.
Oceanfront properties will drown in the wake of global warming,
and still, mansions sprout up, fungus clustered on the dunes.
— Arielle Hebert / “Erosion”
She opened the pigpens—
A physics of badlands
Resembled the scrubby hills
Of Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
A parliament of swine chuff—
Popped and faded paroxysms,
sonnets of oilfield imbalances,
Oilskin flints, & parley figs.
She sang to the pigs:
An imperfect parricide breeds
This parody of oligarchy.
Swim, pigs, swim!
What I’m Reading:
It might seem weird, but I always feel most comfortable spending the night in abandoned buildings. Be it a cold high-rise in Prypyat or an apartment without furniture in Chornobyl-2. I always feel calm in buildings where the roofing tar is covered with moss; where a ferocious May shower turns the roof into a swamp teeming with mosquitoes and tadpoles; where trees grow.
— Markiyan Kamysh / Stalking the Atomic City: Life Among the Decadentband the Depraved of Chernobyl
