Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Summer grass aches and whispers.

It wants something; it calls and sings; it pours
out wishes to the overhead stars.

— Carl Sandburg / “Summer Grass”

They know, from the past few years of massively lethal heat waves—there were an estimated seventy thousand heat-related deaths in 2022, forty-eight thousand in 2023, sixty-three thousand in 2024—that global warming has already transformed the temperate European summer into a hotter, more dangerous season. Even so, 2026, which, thus far, has featured five lethal heat waves and a historic spate of destructive wildfires, has triggered alarm across the Continent, and beyond. A habitat, and, with it, a host of cultural traditions—Wimbledon, the Tour de France, strolling down La Rambla on a sunny afternoon—were at risk this year, and will be more so in the years to come.

— Eric Klinenberg / “The End of the European Summer” / The New Yorker 

Once, Dorianne told me
of the moment her mother finally
admitted, apologized even,
for the spotty passage
of her childhood years, how often
they proved a woods rife with wolves
and teeth and trickery enough
to make a girl want to gaze into
the maw of an open oven
and mistake that boundless dark
for a candle.

— Michelle Bitting / “Yet, the Loveliness”

At best I manage a few fitful hours. As soon as I wake, I try to think of how I might pass the day in order to exhaust myself, but nothing works. Combinations of pills and intoxicating substances buy a meager ounce of darkness, but this is not rest, it is oblivion. I crawl out of these sleeps, these murky no-man’s-lands, as out of a grave and feel like a zombie in the daytime, but I will take it. I will take anything. I close my door and descend. A slow fog creeps into my brain, I cannot focus and find it difficult to read, but I cannot remember if I used to feel differently, or what differently used to feel like.

It seems to me I may have always felt and been and thought this way, a timeless nothing.

— Emily LaBarge / Dog Days

I can not feel her voice I am too far away skiing in Austria.
Perhaps I will go to another country disguised as frozen gas
And travel beneath her skirt into the center of the earth.
I have an air bubble in my ear that needs light.
It is yellow as I slip over the lintel to correct the sun.

— Frank Lima / “Submarine”

And it seems that in this I am not alone.

Wilderness is a powerful, ancient concept, which lies at the intersection of landscape, philosophy and ecology. It is a place where the human is brought into confrontation with all that is non-human, and is challenged and changed as a result. For thousands of years people have sought out regions of uncontrolled, unknown or uncharted nature in search of religious epiphany, self-actualisation and an escape from what was to them modern life. Wilderness has been the scene of exploration, both physical and psychological, as well as a site of first contacts, privations, moral catastrophes and heroics.

— Cal Flyn / The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness 

I think Cliff Swallow sounds like the name
of a beige-clad mortgage broker who hangs
out at the bar and doesn’t talk politics, but
it’s a bird I’m reading about to keep my mind
from diving fast into the abyss. If someone asked
what changed me first, I’d say love. Secondly,
I’d say death. Does the order matter?

— Ada Limón / “Dusk After Your Passing”

What I’m Listening To:

Breathe like a crash or just before
I am when you know it’s coming
So try, the sky is on the floor
Safe restraint, I’m on the ceiling
There is no meaning

— Ty Segall / “Hospital”

Curanga Pie Blues

I was conceived in the cold heat
Of the late stage Anthropocene.

My mother’s milk was curanga pie.

I am a born again pleonasm—
Aphasic—ecstatic in static,
Mendicant in white noise.

I am obscenely petulant,
Vaguely touched,
Piqued & hot
With fleas.

Endless
Not.

What I’m Reading:

War is its own peace. The sea its own shore.
These temporary reassurances
Beneath the moon, deciphering old code
Re-sent from satellites smearing deep space:

The night, the night, the night, the night, the night.
There are those things never done nor begun,
But glimpsed by the poem of experience

— Rowan Ricardo Phillips / “MMXXVI”

in the unlikely event

there is something louder than your heart
it supersedes the asperity of your bones

a wind forced through an aperture moans
it sounds like a death rattle, an agonal breath

this which your mind fastens upon
will always remain impermanent
even the sun is a transient thing
it will engulf half its own planets
in 5 billion years
what is your worry now?

there is something stranger than knowledge
there is ritual and belief

a dry voice remains a dry voice
a hollow head remains a hollow head

this matters not
find solace where you can get it

What I’m Reading:

There will be paved roads at night, the skeletons of power-line towers, and abandoned villages, fairy-tale-like in the nocturnal fog. During the day, a scorching-hot reverie reaches its heights there; at night, a damp mist settles on the ground and wraps everything in a web of gray shadows. Nothing disperses the mist, nothing disturbs it: only the light of headlamps, a streak of the Milky Way, and an infinite, star-filled glow. 

— Markiyan Kamysh / Stalking the Atomic City

My darkest numbness

is indelibly embodied in the soft-voiced teenaged longing brilliantly off-key and abstemious.

We imbibed nothing. We believed in nothing but being straight-edge.

You wrought fascinating rants on anti-fascism — bombs of resolute intelligence both — a reward and a self-indulgent millstone.

Now the altered state is 24/7 — stultifying like an overdone spray tan and a wiry combover. You are the apostle of remedial reading and slow-bullshit remedies of finite infinitude — attitudinally in a languorous longitude.

You’re a remarkable engine of fester — fallacious and misunderstood. The misapprehension unfamiliar but visceral.

Sleep it off until the next millennium.

What I’m Reading:

It’s a rigormortis
two-step sway.
It’s the moon
which transfigures
me beyond
recognition—
crater-pull.
Even the water
within me.
I zombie
and the music
don’t stop.

— Kameryn Alexa Carter / “Kef D Minor”

The Queenie Meets Whit Frictions

The Queenie declaims that feculence has nothing to do in this affair. She says:

“I was bequeathed a third rate hand me down in consignment and inquisitiveness—a loan from dog. I’ve got the scrabble tiles blues—a compulsion to put handfuls of tiles in my mouth, and store them there until we stop clear cutting the world’s forests. There’s a depth to the sky that terrifies me—there’s something biding its time behind that quaint cerulean facade. So keep calm, but get ready for love, because the blackness of space is manifest in our every gesture.”

She tilts her head up from her privy papers, sniffs at the air, flares a nostril, continues:

“I’ve got stockyard pictographs of trestle beam investitures. Get all of these words out of my head, Doctor Ambassador—my thoughts no longer serve me but trip me up at difficult moments. Platitudes will get you everywhere—speak in riddles and baffles. If you, my subjects, dig trenches in cement—it’s hard work—I’ll extract the juice of yet grown fruit from the air. But don’t ask me to be clear for clarity’s sake, it doesn’t become me.”

Fanfare. Gentle applause. Fanfare.

In strides Whit Frictions, fresh from America. He bullhorns, apropos of nothing, without invitation:

“What dribble! Talk about disjunction and linearity. I want my plastic rat, and I want to put an end to Sunday morning pleasantness. It’s all sound and drury until someone gets hurt. It’s dribble in the middle of each waking hour—and let’s take it outside because the making of treaties is provincial. You, your excellence, at the top of the great chain of being, think it’s too quaint for a bully type like me? Why are you asking for a ride? You think this is Lennon-McCartney territory, sister? Well, sis, it’s not. This is it, this is mythical shit. I pray twice hourly for the day of eagles and hegemony. You, there, singing your Deep Purple refrain from “Hush”— sweet jeez, do I hate that song! For the time being take thy ferrules and place them round your pinky fingers, and chop off the slag ends. Stay calm. As you were, and all that. I am lord of the swill bucket!”

•••

One could say there was much rejoicing—but why lie? Decrees, treaties, agreements and promises were broken. Rationalizations were stoked, and everyone walked away to their corners promising to tend their gardens. Naked and afraid.

What I’m Reading:

Insomnia turns one into a haggler and then a beggar: the unreason of lying awake in the dark; the unlogic that visits.

— Emily LaBarge / Dog Days 

The fallen illusion

is really three collusions with a dash of disbelief in life’s recursive farrago. This is the greatest scrounger adaptation of workroom tankards — thanks to kidney chars and sharp assemblies — it’s all dark entries.

A crude map that threshes and deepens King Psychobabble’s reign — a thief of bicycle and gun. The fist-handkerchief advisor but a whiff of keening perfume — all treacle and malt. The wind on our cheeks that are pustuled and sloughed.

This is most unsatisfying. What does this mean?

There’s a thread here, though it’s frayed. Allay my fear of all that does not make sense.

Reform and wrapper of cyclone pompadours blown about by jet exhaust. The moribund dictator traces a line in the air visible only to him. A diplomat drowns his sorrow in pickle lemonade — her electrolytes askew — she’s in the early stage of acute renal failure. The moss fires roil unchecked in the distance.

You have hubbub willpower, my phone has 5% power, and here the bench-seating is plush. There’s a dangerous strain about and you are too aloof at this hour. So I’ll bid my heathen adieu and chew on this brittle molybdenum cotton candy dipped in lye and hardened by your lies.

I’m numb to your iguana cadences. I’m hearing a disembodied voice with bad intent.

There is no meaning, just human savagery barely contained. Make way!

What I’m Reading:

A new study has found that bicycle lanes, especially those with physical or visual barriers, can have a calming effect on traffic.
According to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), crashes involving motor vehicles are a leading cause of death in the United States among individuals younger than 55 years old.
The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) reported in 2022 that bicycle lanes could reduce crashes on local roads by between 30% and 49%.

— Herman Eloff / “Bicycle Lanes Have a Calming Effect on Traffic – Study” / discerningcyclist.com

excessive levity

markets are drafted
into stock fists on actual horseback

see ya in alaska now that 90 degree days
are common + we float away on glacier melt

wildfire smoke flood tornado broad
applications of anthropogenic love for ma earth

physical comedy with the grim
red of precariousness of starvation + unemployment

higher than ever prices + fewer than ever benefits
die of neglect if u aint got ur own private rockets

voodoo economics without the gipper
frippery + witchery + cheap 19th century tactics

put the jacksonian back in treachery
bark loudly + carry a brownshirt in a backpocket

gimme dat ol time derision + white supremacy
look at da world weve made / look ma we made it

peacelove+happiness
aint we da sweetest animaloids going

goose stepping like a paradoxical network of birds
nesting in dat frayed nest on ya head

aint good for nuthin else anyway
never was

the future aint as good as it used to be
bittersweet + bowdlerized as it is

wartime astonishment / genuflection in da genocide
weve exploited ourselves for cheap

or for reasons of excessive levity

What I’m Reading:

The world’s oceans are on the brink of setting an all-time heat record, reaching temperatures that could roil marine ecosystems and sap the ocean’s ability to take up carbon dioxide from the air. Sea surface temperatures have already broken records for the past two months — boosted by human-induced climate change and a powerful El Niño event growing in the Pacific Ocean. The average surface temperature is now hovering just a few hundredths of a degree below the current recordfrom March 2024. “It just spells trouble for the planet,” says climate scientist Kristina Dahl.

— Jacob Smith / “Sea temperatures could hit all-time high” / Nature Briefing

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

This is what it comes down to:
Me on a park bench, always writing,
This is what it comes down to.

— Ada Limón / “Little Day”

Where to begin? Perhaps with a good tip: never put ninety pounds’ worth of stuff in your backpack. Don’t go on thirty-day hikes or lug around enormous inflatable boats on top of forty cans of food. I keep repeating this mantra to myself over and over again, but I’m a masochist.

— Markiyan Kamysh / Stalking the Atomic City

. . . You belong to the world. The hands that put a peach tree into the earth exactly where the last one died in the freeze belong to the world and will someday feed it again, differently, your body will become food again for something . . . 

— Carrie Fountain / “You Belong to the World”

I went into the wilderness then, and at other times, because I wanted to live my life more intensely. I have found that in trading day-to-day concerns for more fundamental questions of safety, survival, navigation and supplies I could tap into a rawer, more authentic, more capable, part of myself. In cutting down my routine to its most simplistic, and my belongings to their most minimal – two nested pots, a roll mat, tent, Sleeping bag, map – I have luxuriated in the basic elements of life and my capacity to use them. In setting my own fire, chopping my own wood, making my home on the mountainside or in the forest, learning to keep myself warm and dry in all weathers — sometimes extreme — I have found a calmness and a clarity often missing from the rest of my life. In scaling high ridges or narrow precipices, in sharing a habitat with wild and sometimes dangerous animals, I have found a new flavour of fear and how to live with it. By seeking out situations in which there is no easy escape route, I have learned, sometimes with difficulty, how to cope without one.

— Cal Flyn / The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness 

I told you
When you buy monkeys
You have to take the ones that are very lively and who almost scare you
And never pick a sweet sleepy monkey that snuggles up in your arms
Because these monkeys are drugged and will be ferocious the next day
That’s what just happened to a young girl who was bitten on the nose

— Blaise Cendrars / “I Told You So”

People did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old man?

— Lydia Davis / “What She Knew”

This darkness is not the scary one,
it’s the one before the sun comes up,
the one you can still breathe in.

— Ada Limón / “This Darkness”

What I’m Listening To:

And so we crumble
A ten ton head, made of wet sand
This dread circumference
You gotta be kidding me
The grass grows over me

— Radiohead / “Decks Dark”

Overheard After Obsequies

Yes, I was lonely. But now I think things will improve…

I woke up with eyes on my hands—double vision in continuous lap dissolve. I’m looking at the eyes on my hands as they look back at the eyes on my face. Like an endless looping funhouse mirror…

It was a long catalog of pre-wired defectiveness, like a hot wired Sisyphus with 33 carbuncles on his back…

She was beautiful—a weekend odalisque—a scratch wax lemon madonna. Man, am I pissed…

She had her mother’s eyes. I kept on thinking about Village of the Damned. The last thing she said to me was something about her hair being a blood red corona on fire…

-So are you still taking amphetamines?
-No, I can’t get them anymore. But I found you can crush a package of Vivarin, boil it to a concentrate in instant coffee and get a modicum of the Kerouac kick…

Was she still painting? I loved that series of arsenic light / fugue state nudes she was working on five years ago. I bought the one she titled “semen and pus suppuration iii. …”

It was an interesting service, as far as services like this go. Did you hear she’s being buried head first into the ground, sans coffin? Yeah, some green-earth first thing…

Her brain! Her head was a sealed window. She had this white knuckle death-grip. She thought she could order the air and extract the spirits from wind currents. What a gas!

That hot honeysuckle perfume—she was sunset spectacular. She was a Big Dipper moon with a German pitchfork—the ocean, the wind, and those stars under her bed. Third eye mythical…

Thank you. Thank you for coming. Enjoy the rest of your day.

What I’m Reading:

Words are contaminated
by every one of us.
They drink, distinct in each of us, our blood.
They grow pregnant from our lived lives,
our specific destinies.
Now raised to abstractions,
earlier they interned in the pith
of our own flesh.

— Astrid Cabral / “Spotlight on the Word”

dust-up at the sewers

a jack-in-the-box of new perspectives
ready and able to spew prose capes and clang
the punchbowl pronouns
we prefer bamboo soloists
to instant hobble confederates

call the department of vital fractures
send for the ensign of contested stunts
we got an election to settle

don’t vote for the tinker of dimwits!

What I’m Reading:

For when we talk about wilderness we are really talking about our tortured relationship with the natural world as a whole: our antagonism to it, fear of it, and — yes — our love for it too. 

— Cal Flyn / The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness