Use this taro chip as your viaticum, the priest says.
Where am I?
In a priest driven ambulance, he says.
Good luck, the one in the passenger seat says.
What are you going to do about the primary explosion? the nurse administering my I.V. asks.
Play it as it lays, another says.
No, you did not leave anything on in the kitchen, yet another says.
So I told them: I put on my tight disco pants, and applied plenty of hairspray. I think there were invaders at the gates. I wrote as fast as I could before midnight. Then I turned into a malevolent parsnip with pomegranate tendencies. I didn’t parry her sari because she asked me nicely not to. Remember that. So I repeated it often through the night to myself. I reminded myself to use my inside voice inside my head. I didn’t have to be so loud. And I made a point of not speaking my internal monologues in front of strangers again.
Amen, the priest said.
What I’m Reading:
Fire-fighting plans for the dead flare up in stereo—there’s more than three voices
in the room, there’s several uncandled persons of good worth and seesaw habits.
A savant mushroom with a seedy past in Africa discovers that its worst fears have come true.
An artisanal clutch of gourmands are out to ambush — deracinate, tear and shred. There are ambuscades forming at the usual fringe mush casinos.
The Order of the Medieval Tamarinds of Chivalry, Tamarins and Rookeries are on high alert.
Two chimeras claim their birthright on a magical bluff—advertisers stumble over each other to sign lucrative sponsorship deals.
You rummage through neighborhoods of kipper prints keen to be deposed.
The first-perversion is an introspection — an accusation of a man’s lifetime in exchange for neutrality.
A successful yachtsman is asked to help solve a locked-rosary rush of the stage — nannies and ninnies need not apply. Although Ned had previously applied for the position of Autocue Presenter and was now baffled.
I arrive at a courtyard with glass eels and aubergines — all are nonplussed and embroiled in pedantic sophistries.
My father’s grating voice keeps counterpoint to mother’s grating of ptarmigan (for the ptarmigan parmigiana).
Busybody pollsters allude to les accents aigus and oleander glower, while vicious workmen heeled in sod transcribe “Hotel California” to Morse Code via ASL.
This is an invocation to prove the innocence of a convicted Shiitake.
During the courtroom sidebar the Asterisk Committee undertakes an undercount of footnotes and bibliographical references.
A mutant blancmange eats a buckeye, then an eclair, an English schoolboy, a darkened alcove, and a memorial to brocaded sofas.
A king’s unfounded jerkin destroys his fanfare and kipper rigging. We are disgusted with meritocracy and resort to meretriciousness for a 10¥ note.
We found deterrents in the aphrodisiacs and asphodels in the aphorisms.
Objections overruled — no one says a word.
What I’m Reading:
near 67th avenue, street of neon says jesus saves and I dream each night, about losing you to routine traffic stops where bullets turn off body cams and graffiti makes you landmark
— D’mani Thomas / “for goldfish that remember seaworld”
I want you to root the violence out of the system, but you delay and acquiesce — this is the heavy-o-sity of our case. There are no life preservers to pass out—only anvils and 50 lb. kettlebells—on this sinking ship. No one about to make the problem commensurate with the premise. I predicate all action on entropy and numbness. Dire warnings and sirens go unheeded . . . while a singular burnt, chainsaw segmented, sequoia lies on the blackened forest floor.
Your charge is lobbed. Disorderly conduct on the Junior Prom floor: enervated dates stare at other, at others dancing; others are blind sullen-staring into cellphone flashlights; some couples herd listless at the punch. A punch or two meted out — uncertain if they are in liquid form or at the knuckle end of a fist.
We’re in a fugue — too many discordant notes — a fug of fanciful boredom. Did you drop that dollar bill? Did you drop the tiny purple microdots? The yellow sunshine?
Have you ever felt like a fatherless waif in the presence of your father?
I’m in need of a case of blues, you say, because a mere carton won’t do.
I’m in need of a reset, I say, in need of a pass, in need of a decade’s worth of do-overs, in need of a full-out pardon!
You say: why proselytize for your lost cause?
I got nothing, I say . . . Sonic Youth is broken up, Morrissey’s a fascist now, and Mark E. Smith is dead. I have no desire to be effusive anymore. I’m changing my middle name to Ennui . . .
Furthermore, aren’t we too old to be at a prom?
What I’m Reading:
For years I will dream lucid dreams of flowers growing from my heels, Borage and Helleborus, peeling off and scattering behind me as I walk, sometimes struggle, through the thick underbrush of a forest. I watch silently as the plants grow up my legs, twist and twine round my body, feel them begin to creep up from inside my throat, pour out of my mouth …
Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.
—Edward Said / “Reflections on Exile”
Researchers have discovered a ‘whale graveyard’ at the bottom of a 7,000-metre-deep ocean chasm. Using the submersible vehicle Fendouzhe, the team recovered 476 fossilized bones belonging to a range of beaked whale species — one of which was dated to more than 5 million years ago. Why these bones collected in the canyon is unclear, but it’s by no means a thing of the past. The team also found the carcasses of recently-deceased whales, which are finding new life as food for a host of deep-sea creatures — many of which are thought to be unknown to science.
— Jacob Smith / “Video: whale necropolis under the sea” / Nature Brief
Dream old pay phone ringing in hospital I pick up receiver voice says “The answer is awe.” Still don’t know what to do with it last September right before I was diagnosed and the dream is still irritating I have a checkup Friday
— Alice Notley / “The Answer Is Awe”
There are no secrets, there is no mystery. We make that all up. In fact, it’s all right there in front of you. You have to have enough food to get through winter and spring. That’s what it all comes down to. You have to live in a way that will gather enough food each fall to get through winter.
— Kim Stanley Robinson / Shaman
Truth drives the stars
straight into the dark. I woke to the sun
and thought, with a start, of how
I love the truth and why.
— Susan Stewart / “In the Dark”
Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present. Our sympathies there lie with the left, but that is not a debate we can settle. What is often missing from both sides is a clearly articulated vision of the future and how it differs from the present.
— Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson / Abundance
I’m wearing the same shirt I wore here that year, that year we gave up our standoffs and skirmishes and took up tenderness. Barring some crisis, our clothing will outlive us, none of which we mentioned while holding hands on the dock at duskfall as the darkness bloomed in us, though not like flowers, and daytime shut itself down.
— Margaret Atwood / “Berlin”
What I’m Listening To:
Does it make much sense To build another fence When no one is knockin’ on the door?
My ancestors crossed The Sahara with rats plagued Rich with penury
ii.
My ancestors arrived in Spain in search of an oasis that was a mirage. The oasis would appear one-half-mile ahead beyond them, and at their arrival disappear. In this way they crossed the Sahara with plague rats in their camel sacks.
At the straits they crossed on a ghost ship, the rats now rich with penury. My ancestors joined the conquest and helped build a minaret in Alhambra. There my ancient Moor forefather raped my ancient Spanish foremother in a rheumatic alleyway infested with the ghost ship’s rats that were on an ascension to the throne.
This was my bountiful bequest that arrived across centuries of impalements to the heart. Now I juggle my multitude of children, every third one floats away on a convection of air that carries them back across the Atlantic to begin the cycle once more.
iii.
We’re going to feed two people Paradox slices— I have Infinite feed. Do they need to be full?
What I’m Reading:
The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.
The smoke trees blared their summer green. There was deliberation in her fibrillation. Her heart fluttered like an insensate butterfly—heliotropic, yet abjured to the sun. The world is my pistil, she said—a fluttering cavorting beastie—a moment of proboscis licking nectar drinking. She was forever cofounded by synecdoche and metonymy; and what was metric or metronomic. To the regular clatter of unceasing chatter, the voices in her head crescendoed into a din of metal machine music—and in a mere 23 hours she was home in the northern city again, apparently having brought the southern clime with her. Days of 90-degree weather gerrymandered her senses into discrete ultra-heterodox salamander shapes. Her olfactory was a red eft. Her haptic a hell-bender. No one was offended and no one complained. She would get to the decompression over the coming days. For now there was only exhaustion and an empty psychic tank to refill—and an unstable budgie to contend with.
What I’m Reading:
Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
a strange fortune the ministry where they linger— throttle linking (and also separating) belles from godsons (or ankles?) a lovely novitiate that homely workhouse, that most quotidian of sizzles— the portcullis?
what of grandmother porticoes— postage-standing facade of tendons or is it tom-toms? pasted in plaid upon our donkeys arguments, secular aggressors, our spleens, our spelt, wherever they may be, legations sit with them awhile affecting phrase-estimates and the rondos of chants:
there’s no place like home … there’s no place like home … there’s no place like home …
What I’m Reading:
In the great room of many volatile gods where I keep burning. Hot grass. Absence of trees. In which a world keeps noxiously turning for the survival of what? Gives loss its feral name.
— Muriel Leung / “At the end of the world, you tell me about the bees”
The hibiscus were impartial but patricide was the topic of conversation, not the usual coacktail party banter. A dragonfly drained a pistil daiquiri, while a croo of white ibis pecked at some takeaway boxes, and Lagartija Ron watched silently in blitzkrieg formation from the tree line.
I was on a two week jag to the past—in the shape of Florida—in the key of Spanglish. My ancestral forelocks were trapped in a cowlick, all mortise and tenon-like, as if we were on an all-inclusive at a Bahamas resort — specifically Eleuthera — but full of temperate zone tchotchkes and such.
It was an altogether vertiginous and humid afternoon. The wet bulb temperature was nearly 95° F — deadly, you see — so the impartial hibiscus were decidedly on a manatee fissure / fig banyan, sorta tip — and I was, like, sure! Aha! I second that!
But I really had no conception of where I was or what I was going on about. See, that’s the thing about Florida . . .
Don’t.
It didn’t work out for Ponce de Leon. It definitely went sour for Hernando de Soto. And now … well … just …
Don’t.
What I’m Reading:
I’m going to make a poem out of nothing. You and I will be the protagonists. Our emptiness, our loneliness, the deadly boredom, the daily defeats…
— Luis Alberto de Cuenca / “William of Aquitaine Returns”
thee istsfor manity reader 