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”
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”
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 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”
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,”
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”
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”
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
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”
Time to estivate is past. The nights have a coolish edge now. Dreams are especially vivid and more often remembered.
The dragonflies flit away from your outstretched hands.
The crows are louder. Their murders more numerous. They blacken the sky at noon…
What I’m Reading:
If I throw myself fully into my work again, very good, but I shall always be cracked.
— Vincent van Gogh / Letter to Theo van Gogh, May 3, 1889
thee istsfor manity reader 