Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

The Story of the human race is War. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.

— Winston Churchill / The Aftermath

I have had my dream—like others—
and it has come to nothing, so that
I remain now carelessly
with feet planted on the ground
and look up at the sky—
feeling my clothes about me,
the weight of my body in my shoes,
the rim of my hat, air passing in and out
at my nose—and decide to dream no more.

— William Carlos Williams / “Thursday”

At least 35,000 more people died during Europe’s four record-breaking, back-to-back heatwaves this summer than would normally be expected, according to incomplete figures from barely half the continent.

Excess mortality in three of the EU’s larger countries – Germany, France and Spain – alone has already exceeded 25,000, according to the provisional national figures, and experts say the toll will rise significantly once August totals are consolidated.

— Jon Henley / “At least 35,000 excess deaths recorded in Europe’s back-to-back heatwaves” / The Guardian

Here everything is
documented. Now we die forever.
Now we’re live. What matters is Desire
doesn’t keep. This is what life is like
when Away.

— Temperance Aghamohammadi / “Behnt: Automata”

Last week, a flash flood in Nepal killed more than 1,000 people and left thousands missing. Today, UNEP published a report saying we’re about to breach the 1.5°C heating threshold countries agreed to limit ten years ago.

The two events are not unrelated. What happened in Nepal is the report’s warnings, translated into real life.

Even the best-case scenario now shows warming peaking at 1.8°C in the coming decades. But if we act now and fast, warming can plateau sooner, and we still have a chance of getting back to 1.5°C or below.

Overshooting 1.5°C and coming back down won’t undo everything. But the report is clear: every fraction of a degree avoided reduces risk. Every year by which overshoot duration is shortened reduces exposure.

Despair is exactly what coal, oil, and gas companies are counting on.

We’re not giving up. Are you with us?

— 350.org / Facebook post

what I am looking for doesn’t matter.
that I am looking doesn’t matter.
I exert no meaning.

— Donika Kelly / “When The Fact Of Your Gaze Means Nothing, Then Youe Are Truly Alongside”

We are, all of us, moving through the void.

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

What I’m Listening To: 

While really we keep on living like monkeys
Incredible things are happening in the world
Magical things are happening in this world

— Stereolab / “Peng! 33”

disengagement / engagement 

. . . and with a deep suspiration she set her thumbs to tapping on the gorilla glass:

a disconnect with attainment of desired goals
a disconnect with engagement of daily responsibilities
a disconnect with realizing this awareness and affecting change

an over engagement with the virtual world
a disengagement with the physical world

few, if any, goals are actuated by the aforementioned

it’s fight or flight time . . .

then on with the headphones, on with her iphone, on with sic alps’ message from the law
and on she danced to a new transcendence . . .

What I’m Listening To:

I received a notice from the board
They were telling me get out, get out

But i worked for me, my rent was cheap
I died
In the kitchen I cried
Barely looking back
Squarely on the map

But it’s nothing but crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap
Save me

— Sic Alps / “Message from the Law”

peripeteia (redux)

we dream about a walkabout. we exhume gutter politics before they’re buried in the rattle brattle bund. we sling jagged zeugmas. we qualify this and that—our words signify nothing—we fill the interstices with air. the beckon calls for dr. bombay wanted down at zeugmatography go unheeded. we list and keel for what could have been—it inflects every point in our day. it infects every bitter requisition. a far away voice revives a chant:solidarność, solidarność, solidarność—opportunities taken, opportunities missed. a dead man says, a dream has the power to pollute the day. anoxic water is all we find—a blue-green algae, then a blood-red tide. we ramble on with viper thoughts … reality’s dark dream.

What I’m Reading:

We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day;

— Percy Bysshe Shelley / “Mutability”

the pareidolia amok

the muck amuck amok
i see faces repeating and repeating
in these morning flakes
in the bread crusts drear
in the wake of your leaving
as the motes of particulate air roil
about the emptiness you created
by vacating this space inside
my now soiled heart

a conspiracy of eyes and mouths
a cabal of carnal teeth
fangs bared and aglow
limned by the maw
of dark impulses
a face in the strawberry preserves
jesus laughing at me on the face
of the rubbery naan you left
on the plate of hashed teeth

What I’m Reading:

but my hand is full of words like
grass perforating the old lattice

leave your eggs here in the helix of my ear
safe in the ‘world-class banking scheme’

— Mantra Mukim / “Raipur”

stained pink rayon

first responders were able to get him out

the stained pink rayon nightgown beneath
his torn clothes was unexpected
no one says a word

he was not in the water but he was taken
by the 8-foot wave nonetheless
rough surf justifies
a rough serf

higher and higher
both he and the waves
he had plenty of sunscreen
slathered on slippery as a forlorn right whale
the right whale for harpooning
back in the day

humidity is up
but it’s only monday
im bleeding
he says

so he’s got that going for him

What I’m Reading:

… Scream it.
Automata! Automata! Yes, I am behnt
at the edges, powdering my cheeks
A coccyx electricity gets me going,
arranging my limbs mechanically,
oiled ambrosia in the patinated city
where swans whirr in fixed loops.

— Temperance Aghamohammadi / “Behnt: Automata”

She is Splooting on the Sward (When Shooting Won’t Do)

One strong throat emerges to tell the straitjacket-story of a gifted and complicated mandible:

Her despots are both deeper and weirder—splooting rib-deep on American fangs. Her handguns—blue steel euphonies—flexible, transcend fanfare fortifications.

Her epistles rifle in candid installments. Her work seamless on the paintbrush—especially on maxims of broiler politicians about to lift-off, gerrymandered igloo divots, and ferret interiority. The most passionate voice ever on the matter.

Her pantoums never show properly on the third Tuesday of the month—on lesser tongues they sound tinny and pedantic—rhyme schemes rhizome into the fallow earth.

She is thee chaplain-malingerer: tormentor of numbskull litanies and bittersweet honesties. She is the genuine curve. The careful reproof. A committee of candid insteps not bound to overpronation.

She is an amphetamine throwback that emerges without deficits—a profound tonal restoration.

She is a healthy octave above will.

What I’m Reading:

“When I say ‘man,’ I mean ‘mankind,’ ” explains Moses.
“Your speech is codified in patriarchal microaggressions.”

— Tess Gunty / The Rabbit Hutch

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