Alcoholics by Appointment

Tectonic plates nimbly moving between the two of us — threads separated by upsetting intertitles.  I understood wanting — the fist unfoldings like investigating what I wanted from life.

A propensity for unrelated stretches of boredom respectively interspersed with terror and subterfuge — a disenchanted evening of critical extensions of ourselves.  

We’d escaped the stultifying and mundane confines of the American dream. We marveled at the nothingness in every direction. 

Alcoholics by appointment, short on doorways and long on crashes. What are you doing on the floor, you said.

I’m a new admirer of your ruthless cankles, I said. 

You remind me of that pendejo from the capitol flanks, you said.

I really have grown to dislike your flans, I said. They fill me with buttermilk inertia.

Your voice tips up two octaves, little mermaid-style.

I’ve grown to love your threats of leaving me —  the dynamic prompting an existential jump in my gonads. 

Our lives chatter across that echo divide — the poles galvanized — our fists — threats arising in unison strands, like unspooled dice, and popcorn ceilings estranged.  

Your brasses and my ramen noodles forever spiced with the peppery taste of hickory paste on fire. Here, though, the motifs relate loosely on symbolic resonances of iterative knock-knock logic. 

I’ll forge your signature on my birth certificate, despite your roundabout glares and slight variations of tonal displeasure.

We’ve grown accustomed to get what we deserve.

What I’m Reading:

Love that is dead and buried, yesterday
Out of his grave rose up before my face,
No recognition in his look, no trace
Of memory in his eyes dust-dimmed and grey.

— Christina Rossetti / “Love Lies Bleeding”

What are Fish Gills to Fishers of Men?

At a remove, in a gesture, a part of a thing
Representing the whole.
What are ambivalences of texts?
Polyvalencies in readings?
What flows from this desire
To macerate the pulp of life
Into a sodden discourse—
An echolalia?
The fishers of men as hirsute
Suitors unhinging Penelope’s loom—
What is that? An arrow?
I am arrow proof,
Soothsayer approved,
Trodden by legions of anonymous
Men with angular intent.
Note this now—
I pique in wolf-like rages
Deep into the night.
I aim at precision / incision—
Beware.

What I’m Reading:

The church has never been asked to explain anything, our specialty, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralization of the overly curious mind through faith…

— Jose Saramago / Death with Interruptions

determinism2 (squared)

the lifetime of a sprat
especially a gourmet sprat
in the baltic waters off latvia
what to say?
short? spry? sharp?
a fishy kind of happy life?
don’t ask
don’t know
once netted
how tasty

What I’m Reading:

A group of migrants
sewed their mouths shut

at the border because their voices
fell through a hole
in the sky.

— Brent Ameneyro / “As the Fog Starts Burning Away”

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

It turns out you can kill the earth,
Crack it open like an egg.
It turns out you can murder the sea,
Poison your own children
Without even thinking about it.

— Michael Sims / “Who Will Tell Them?”

Tens of millions of people in Indonesia are now suffering in swathes of thick smoke caused by “slash and burn” agriculture and exacerbated by the hot conditions. In India, ground-level ozone from vehicle fumes and industry has emerged as the key summer threat, while outside its megacities there have been protests in areas affected by toxic coal dust. Across the northern hemisphere this summer, wildfires driven by the climate crisis have spread poor air across continents – already, 1.5 million people globally die every year from the impacts of wildfire smoke.

— Fiona Harvey / “Air pollution affects us all, but it’s not inescapable – there is a way we can breathe easier” / Down to Earth

We waved them off long ago. So why
Do they who are no longer here
Still wave to us? The time to sow
Approaches, and the land awaits seeds
As the wind waits for weeds . . .

— Dimitri Psurtsev / “[We waved them off long ago. So why]”

Half the continent was sand at this point. Deserts all over the world, growing, moving. Nothing you could do about it. But okay, sure, send the intern out to push the sand around. She pushed one way, the sand pushed another, and that is perhaps not so different from most jobs since the beginning of the world.

— Deb Olin Unferth / Earth 7

My God, what is that shrieking? The man doesn’t work here,
he says. Reconcile yourself to wait in the darkness.
What did I think spiritual desert meant? Surely not that

lump of nothing I was an hour ago on the couch, wielding
the remote, spooning mango sorbet out of a container.
It should feel, I explain to the self-checkout screen

(how did I get here?), punching in my customer number,
more important.

— Donna Masini / “Midnight in the Pain-Relief Aisle of CVS Thinking About “The Cloud of Unknowing”

You may not have felt it, but the earth beneath our feet is getting twitchier, and global heating is to blame. As temperatures surge and climate breakdown accelerates, interactions between climate and geology are becoming ever more apparent – as marked by the recent horrific events in Nepal and Tibet. We still have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to the idea that a changing climate can impact what scientists call the geosphere, but the evidence has long been incontestable.

— Bill McGuire / “THE NEPAL AND TIBET FLOOD IS A WARNING: Melting snow and ice will bring more disasters around the world” / Cool Earth, on Substack

Here, we’re bodily in pause mode,
sluggish Louisiana mud.

The wage floor’s—$7.25
folks grind all day, yet barely thrive.

We’re even told Russia’s to blame
if you can believe that (we don’t).

— Rodrigo Toscano / “Poets of Shenzhen”

What I’m Listening To:

I can’t keep googling
To prove that’s not going to happen
Who tore my skin and planted these seeds
I pick and pull but all I see are weeds, weeds, weeds
I’m a liar

— Mhaol / “Scam Manifesto”

Asperity & Impermancence

Excited sheep burning at the horizon line.

We lord over the flame thrower, and we’re looking forward to seeing you!

All wetness faraway. 

A fine life lies ahead of you — so sign up for those knife throwing and axe building courses — the apocalypse will soon be post-.

Mere chagrin for thee Ashes. After a sunrise filled with explosions, expansions, asbestos pullovers, and human cookeries (where custom allows). 

We’re in the thick of the crypto cash-flow. At the precipice of being quashed by rogue AI agency. What ambitious proto-programmers are we.

We’re on the countdown clock to post-post oblivion, so rack (those faraway eyes) out of focus, yawn, and take a nap.

Contrition is an unknown meme in the home of the brave — asperity and impermanence is upon us.

Our knives are dulled. Our chosen hucksters and clowns lead us to perdition. Fear rules the day. We’re easy pickings for synthetic intelligence.

We have created and welcomed our executioner. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer, more deserving, animal (as we).

In retrospect, the sheep were lucky.

What I’m Reading:

Cyclists in Boston, Massachusetts reported 2,136 vehicles parked in bike lanes during August alone.

The figure comes from Bike Bureau, a free app that lets riders document a blocked lane by pointing a phone camera at the vehicle. It captures the photo, reads the license plate and files the location in about three seconds, blurring faces and the plates of non-offending cars before anything uploads.

The count started at 54 reports on August 2 and reached 2,136 by the 31st, covering Boston and neighboring Cambridge, Somerville and Brookline. Bike Bureau published the month as an animated map, with every reported vehicle appearing where it was logged until the map all but disappears under parked cars.

— BikePush / Facebook post

A Savage Republic

A negative feedback loop. Petroglyphs and door flips. Petrichor — a savage feedback loop — a savage republic. Put out the fire.

Frying in its own fat. Permafrost melting. The warming leading to fire. Fire and friars with intention — without compunction — never knowing regret. 

All portent from here. The dark briars thick with illness.

Without agency — a magnificent disaster — falling and implicated. Smothering never staying. Praying without saying a thing. Prattling.

Sneak a chunk up your pant leg — white hot and abrupt. A life of impunity ends abruptly on a moonless dirt road. This country is vast and vacuous.

What I’m Reading:

I set out in the blue American
night, this stupid sparkler
raised in my fist. Electroshocked
dandelion. Smoke columns
over the sock factory giving the moon
that Inness blur. No we’re not
falling. Things are just floating back
where they belong.

— Ocean Vuong / “Independence Day”

WriteRightRite

If you insist I write at least 100 words everyday in this space, then, here goes: if I started at one hundred and started to count down until I had written another 99 words in this space then it would go something like this.

Somewhere around this point I’d have 50-some-odd words left to finish. Then I’d think hard and deep about concision, and how I’d write something meaningful in the space left to me—always being aware that 100 words is a minimum, and I could always write beyond that.

I’m not limited to 100 word stories, 100 word poems, or 100 word micro-essays—I could elaborate and reel off well beyond 100 words!

And then there’d be the picayune issue of extending the verbiage by writing “one hundred words” v. “100 words” every time I mentioned it—I’d add a word at every mention, further diminishing the pressure (the burden) to get to 100 words. Then, I’d want to know if (parenthetical) words would count against the self-imposed word count.

Then I’d come to my senses, my thumbs getting tired from poking at the gorilla glass (TradeMarked) on my phone’s writing app—and then I’d wonder just how far along am I? And I’d count (and include the parenthetical words) and find I’m at 223 words—more than the RDA calls for—and then I’d come to a dead stop at 240 words.

Here.

What I’m Reading:

… gulls were the only patrols in the sky;
when women in bright dresses
walked barefoot or in cheap sandals,
in sandals, in sandals
instead of boots,
before missiles.
Before missiles,
I, too, loved it all.

— Lyudmyla Khersonska / “When Crimea was still a place of light,”

boyfriend ogres

the moorlands…

southerners and vitamins felt on the drumstick
artful showers / groovy serializations / trippy visual sexes
innovative campground muckrakers
shopper-bug cup finches / impulsions on villages

the boyfriend ogres

trippy opiates / closing serializations /
including atonal flickering / experimental imagery
rectangles compete positive and negative expletives
lsd raging from felons of euphoria
to intense aquamarine
elixirs of the avant-garde

allow your head to be rearranged

What I’m Reading:

They love me.
Each morning they fill the strongbox
in my chest with grass
and salt pellets—I have good hallucinations.
I think I am a caterpillar. I think I am
a wall. They spray me with anti-freeze, they turn me
each spring, I watch the buds spread open,
metal lips fluttering.

— Mark Levine / “At the Experimental Farm”

octagonal agonals

im lost in the notion
of the circular motion
of your last rectangular
words

What I’m Reading:

Leave your coffins open.
The word for wind is, in another language, the word for soul.

— Carolyn Forché / “Wind”

i couldn’t

get it right
untruths undergoing a vector change

my nightmares forsaken and bubonic
my pestilential inner eye palsied
my parsley looks like paisley

i am contusion-adjacent in black
the quinces are in the tinderbox
and i am ill with the human condition

send colonists and hogsheads o’ vermin
we’ll rule the world in a century or two

i apologize for the indemnity of loud nonentities
i apologize for the quicksand martini glasses

oh bondage, up yours
oh bondage, no more

What I’m Reading:

Maybe it was a revelation. She’d felt so little anything in her life (longing, rage, hope), but out in the elements, with only a protective wrapping of simple cloth, she felt herself part of Earth, moving with it, drifting in outer space. 

— Deb Olin Unferth / Earth 7