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.
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
. . . 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
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;
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’
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.
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.”
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
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
thee istsfor manity reader 