All jacked up, full Of caffeine in a tailwind, Some climbing to do still —
Look at the plumes! Are those dust devils?
A few spotty flakes. It’s ash, It’s people.
Fire zipped down the dark sky — Flattened the school. Now shards of students and books
Rain down from the tumescent Night of flickering shadows — Birthing death.
What makes a nation great? What makes a nation miserable?
What I’m Reading:
The night air seemed to vibrate with worlds just outside of comprehension. A future hovered, soaked through with memory, between the buildings and beyond. Her future, ready to be met.
My father loved to leave me in a movie theater by myself beginning when I was six
seated alone by the aisle
He paid the usher a dime to make sure no one kidnapped or molested me
— John Yau / “Memories of Charles Street, Boston”
“Remember who you are, American” … “Report Foreign Invaders” … “Pioneers, Not Illegals” … “Remigrate”: such white-supremacist graphics and slogans litter DHS social media, sharpening opposition between Americana and alienage. Immigration policing under this aegis is a domain of public terror. Any resident can, on the slenderest of pretexts and whims of street-level enforcers, be told: ‘Show your papers.’
— Nikhil Pal Singh / “Homeland Empire” / Equator
Happy tears? people ask. So happy. I tell them my gratitude is like the sun. In turns it ripens, in turns it spoils.
— Nikita Deshpande / “Post Partum”
Over the past year it has repeatedly violated the rights of citizens and foreign nationals – while also making a spectacle of these violent acts. Even when the “worst of the worst” turn out to be hairdressers, drywallers, fisherman or soccer moms, nothing will interrupt the imposition of serial brutality and accompanying slop-stream of ideological justification. In quick succession this month, US military forces kidnapped a sitting foreign president on the grounds that he is the elusive head of an imaginary drug cartel, and ICE agents executed a civilian inside her car, then retroactively slandered her as a dangerous radical.
— Nikhil Pal Singh / “Homeland Empire” / Equator
Outside it, vanishing species and rivers. Outside it, Nanjing, Ninevah, Dresden. Outside it, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, Kyiv. Here.
The world starts and ends, starts, ends, ends again, restarts.
— Jane Hirshfield / “I speak with the future.”
One of the paradoxes of contemporary fascism – if we want to call it that . . . is both apocalyptic and timorous. It can initiate a new round of small wars and damage the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, but it cannot successfully govern the country, let alone adjust the gears or switch the tracks of capitalist economies in the so-called developed world.
— Nikhil Pal Singh / “Homeland Empire” / Equator
The War goes on & war is Shit.
— Ted Berrigan / “Anti-war Poem”
source: Oxfam International
What I’m Listening To:
Put your smile on my face stop me wasting away Make a promise and break Green light all the way to a grey day
Bombardment. Body snatching. Wrath. Susceptibilities. Just four psychological subalterns, as essential as conceit and distraction.
Shall we start a sacrilegious adherence imperilling the hegemonic horse-carts of bodice rippers?
Bring out yer’ dead!
Bombs can be dropped like bread stuff only by those already hobbled by the hardship of have. Who runs the turnstiles? Who counts the crocodile tears forfeited by the ripeness of insecurity?
Bring out yer’ dead!
The rightness of bully power. The right to do as you wish. As you decree.
Bring out yer’ dead!
Let us decree . . . NO!
NO! to sanity.
NO! by way of bone-pile monticules.
NO! by way of wedding parties attacked from empty skies — and the rightness joysticked by half-bored video game zombies 8,000 miles removed.
NO! by way of fiat and orders executively deranged.
NO! . . . way to stop this nightmare slowly unspooling — as we worry about our club’s relegation, or the college championship, or who will be crowned the best dancer, singer, housewife, or where the betting line hovers . . .
Let us take solace in our neat, and twisted, insignificant lives — thee world is shaped by great men.
Let us take solace in thee “resurrection men” and bombardments; body snatchers and thee demented fools and their llickspittles.
Let’s joystick ravenously to oblivion like Slim Pickens on thee missile of mighty hegemony.
Let’s crush our denim and crush our enemies. Let’s crush our oranges and crush our pestilential ideals (never worth the ink investiture, anyway).
Let us continue to invest in death by numbness.
Bombardment be our holy name. Holy aim, and god-given blight.
What I’m Reading:
Like a man on a bike hit by a car. His spine, singing.
He rolled over the hood. Into the shattering.
Like time after the painting expanding, believed-in —
I’ve been, generally, very happy with the professionalism of this tin-opener as opposed to the nonsense vaso-ergots — nothing to clown about, just go, go, go, go, go!
My only condescension is that recently I’ve been black-out dizzy upon posting these phone spasms — both prone and listing. And I am listing. There have been some slight neckaches (nothing on the skidpan) — and especially distressing to me during my fencing lessons imagining my ill ex-lover at the end of my rapier.
On guard to them!
I’m an arthritic dagger artist at the end of my wits — 5,000 watts too far gone in my electroconvulsive therapy. I see mill-workers, under the sea, at half-past every hour — and on the quarter-hours, too, during REM sleep. In various dreams I’ve seen tracers transecting my tibia while I tour Tenochtítlan in my teens. My youth impacts my transfiguration.
Please advise.
I thread the western way: lovey and consumerist. I’ve ordered uncounted products recently. I’m trying to reset affluence all on my own. I may have been too keen on being number one.
Again, maybe too strong for my current skidpan. My bedpan is fine, a bit underutilized but never unfertilized. Morning constitutionals are my thing. The deposits: moderate to wreckage. Exchequers be damned!
Damnation, I’m late to the inquest and streams of consciousness are drying quickly. Please send nephews and arbitrators! Collective bargaining turned right at Paducah. Kankakee is next to godliness. Consult the oracles.
Consult your orifices.
Gulp if you’re able. I’m on my windowsill keeping my daggers company. Go ahead and butcher your 4,000 calories.
I, on the other hand, will be ingesting these 1000 ibuprofen blended in to my mackerel shake. Weatherproof your vanes veins.
All best.
What I’m Reading:
A saola is wounded in the act of capture. A saola grows ill in captivity. A saola dies and takes this future with it.
— Mai Der Vang / “Death in Captivity, a Surrender” / Primordial
She is clearly not amused. Events have gone awry. It is her score (to settle) now—it is placid and peat-boggy notional—certainly “doable.” She will take back her river of grass. The dissonance is too much to bear. The timbre is in the blue spectrum according to her synesthetic nerve pincers. The shadings smell of coronal shadows. The sky will turn white. Each pitch shift has a half-life of citrus suffused with cadaver. She tilts her ear to the sun—it is all hers for the taking. She tips her right index finger, points it up at the void, and begins.
What I’m Reading:
My mother, if that was what she was told me drowning was the most efficient way to leave the house, no footprints, hard to trace
Clothes hoist. They can’t stop every time it gets windy or they’ll never finish the job. Don’t disturb Papa. He’ll rage out of the room and throw darts at us. I wish we had never given him that dartboard as a present—it doesn’t matter how professional grade a set it is. We’re the ones who have been the targets of those darts. Look at that welt on your temple—it still looks angry as hell . . .
A kind of ode to money for which the widower shines. I’ve been drinking and my alexandrines are sleek by the dozen, she said. Here, look, a whole armada of alexandrines. For food I had guayaba and queso blanco—the breakfast of conquistadors with too much time on their hands, and hairs on their hides. We’ve run out of auto-da-fe candidates, he says. Go bugger yourself, she says. Do you just live beyond quotation marks now?
i live beyond grammar and orthography she said rules are for rabbits dont u know and philology is the is valium for the gods i will go on as i wish making myself seen and heard by the dusty corner of our southwest wall i become unmoored an a syntacticle mispeleing fer pleashur n shur to pleace no von im a lower case werd person with nuthin 2 loos
¿Que tu dices?
I’ve lost my ellipses . . .
What I’m Reading:
Meanwhile, from Greenland to the “Gulf of America”, fantasies of lucrative resource wars and land grabs beckon. Like a latent image formed after harsh exposure, the Homeland Empire is what comes into view after the dissolution of America’s fading liberal imperium.
I had a prism. It bent the light. I mistook it for vision.
— Lisa Wells / “13.”
A good way to marginalize the most dangerous political movements is to prove the success of your own. If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promise of strongmen, they need to offer the fruits of effective government. Redistribution is important. But it is not enough.
— Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson / Abundance
Cousin Death joins a table at the wedding, the white cloth gleams, the waiting plates, all are made welcome. Mother War smooths the silk of her dress, she feels young and will dance again, after years, with her husband‚ Pity.
— Jane Hirshfield / “The Wedding”
The years from 2015–2025 have been the hottest stretch on record, according to a report by the World Meteorological Organization. For the first time, the report includes a measure called Earth’s energy imbalance — the difference between incoming energy from the Sun and the amount radiated back into space — which is at its highest level since observations started in 1960. And in 2024, the latest year that global figures are available, atmospheric CO2 reached its highest concentration in two million years. “In this age of war, climate stress is also exposing another truth: our addiction to fossil fuels is destabilizing both the climate and global security,” said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres in a statement.
— Flora Graham / “We’ve just had the 11 hottest years on record” / Nature Briefing
. . . for when the doors are knocked in hot metal to force my poem where my mouth is as a kingdom in the 21st century buys one nation to obliterate another our commander pins the future to a magic orb and gives ol’ reliable a spin he is rewarded handsomely while the children starve. as practice i light prayer candles the way one would a spit we are royally fucked unless we tenderize the rich.
— jess rizkallah / “bootstraps”
All of this can be stopped. A better America is around the corner.
And protest is the first step to that better future. We know that non-violent protest works. It helps to stop authoritarian takeovers. And it opens the way for a better politics to come.
— Timothy Snyder / Bluesky post
My first language was memory. The skin of my face my manuscript.
— Lisa Wells / “13.”
What I’m Listening To:
We put up our tent on a dark green knoll Outside of town by the train tracks and a seagull dump Topping the bill was Horse Face Ethel and her Marvelous Pigs in Satin We pounded our stakes in the ground, all powder brown The branches spread like scary fingers reaching We were in a pasture outside Kankakee
— Tom Waits, Kathleen Brennan & Ken Nordine / “Circus”
I ate the wrong crawfish on my first float trip. It really wasn’t wrong, but eating it raw sure was. A specialized blood test found a lung fluke eating me from the inside out. I didn’t like this because women don’t generally like men with parasites in their lungs. I was scared that I’d have this fluke in my lungs for twenty years. Then a secondary infection led to the removal of fifty percent of my left lung. After six weeks I went home, I was feeling like myself. Now I drive a pick-up. I like that, it looks pretty.
What I’m Reading:
As I fell from the sky, I smelled fish. The fish was in my mouth. My eyes were fish eyes, bulging, bugged out.
I fell like this for years, in the fishy air. I stopped panicking. I could think as I fell.
thee istsfor manity reader 