Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

If there is anything Spaniards and Mexicans have always agreed upon is that nobody is less qualified to govern than the government itself.

— Álvaro Enrigue / You Dreamed of Empires

I steal faces
and keep them in the branches.

I assemble this body
from walnuts
that someone’s parents
leave on the path.

— Luciana Jazmín Coronado / “Childhood”

Super-polluting plumes were also seen in the US, the largest detected in 2025 occurring in Texas and leaking 5.5 tonnes of methane per hour, equivalent to running about a million fuel-guzzling SUVs. Venezuela (five) and Iran (three) also had multiple mega-leaks from state-owned facilities.

— Damian Carrington / “Revealed: the world’s worst mega-leaks of methane driving global heating” / The Guardian

Fish speak fear in an emotional fever;
they’d move to warmer water
to have their temperature raised because they burn
up in stress. Like me,
they can suffer—

— Belle Ling / “Contemplating the Cod”

Young people are not driving. Gen Z is not driving. We should be building a city for the future not for the past.

— Sharon Durkan, Boston City Councilor / Boston City Council Meeting, March 18, 2026

Stewed meat.
My mother’s prayers:
“Oh, Crucified God!”
Blood in the east,
Napalm and bombs.
Children massacred,
parents massacred;
blood oranges.
The sky cold as a dead man’s chest.

— Marigloria Palma / “Daily Verses 1”

AI is basically sucking up all human knowledge and throwing it back at us, and charging a price.

— David Byrne / BBC interview

What I’m Listening To:

It has a crooked past, this crooked street.
Where cars patrol this crooked beat
Badges flash and sirens wail
They’ll be taking one and all to jail

— The Clash / “The Crooked Beat”

two variations on thwarting thwaites

there’s much to consider in tin
the thwarters
the thwarting of certain species banana seats
cause tolerance
issues with crafts engineering
and here I’m mean farts and crafts
not “vehicle” crafts.
Although witch crafts have a certain reliance
and tendency to attract
the individual’s tolerances on second hand — actually when thinking of the calving
of the Thwaites glacier
and how that will flood and fly …
so, in summation, there is …
there is … much to consider in tin

there’s much to consider in tissue thwarter

the speedball thwarting

banking secreto
celebrity tools jade
with the crazes of chimps in enterprise.
I’m speculating on lunar fatuousnesses
and the crazes that vent crazes.
Although wonder crazes reveal a certain remembered-captain and his terms
to attract cataracts
and the cloak of infallibilities.
Remember, captain, the sedative handkerchief when the thread of the craving snaps
and the Thwaites glimpses fodder goodbyes
so, in summation, there is …
there is … much to consider in tissue

What I’m Reading:

I didn’t want a map.
I wanted a machete to clear a path
in the jungle, to follow the unconscious.

— Anna Gual / “Profanity”

Strangely Attracted to a Lack of Sense

I’m feeling strangely attracted to the can of vicious motor oil in the corner. I could have said “viscous” but I’ve just come from the cornershop thrumming in a pink and light blue aura of sexiness, one that is ineffable in these turbulent times. Anarchic times for desolate people—times for rows and perturbations. Give me some kind of sign. It doesn’t have to be a walking on the waiter kinda’ sign or a multiplication of leaves and frog’s legs sign, but let it have that old-timey censer mysteriousness about it. It’s driving me crazy all the swinging censers that way, and what is that censorious smell? Is it frankincense? Why so critical? Why so blue? Gas prices gotcha’ down?

What I’m Reading:

You don’t tear the ocean like fabric or leave an imprint as you would in sand or snow. Plunging in, you condemn yourself to invisibility.

— Mariette Navarro / Ultramarine

ephemera finds a home

a monk’s murk roils
on tuesday thursday
within the hairshirt
of sadness and fury

the exophony of another
tongue begs:
please move on
with this glossolalia jacket

a derecho blows
feckless anagrams, altostratus,
and tornado doppelgänger
swing the heartache (beyond set)

beyond recognition
Ñackets, Ñackets! bullyboy cries,
this is the movement of fear
so watch your peripheries

do the bullyboy creep
and squall
it’s my birthday, too, yeah!
another year in the life of the fugu-flaker

we’ve hit the coda — poison,
lenticular, monocular, oulipian (in spirit)
and bipedal . . .
an ouroboros unclenched from its tail

parapraxis
say what?
another mono-tonal slip —
we’re plucking the scabs

this is a minatory moment
this is a crisis of faith
ephemera
finds a home

What I’m Reading:

As fascism always does, today’s Armageddon complex crosses class lines, bonding billionaires to the Maga base. Thanks to decades of deepening economic stresses, alongside ceaseless and skillful messaging pitting workers against one another, a great many people understandably feel unable to protect themselves from the disintegration that surrounds them (no matter how many months of ready-to-eat meals they buy). But there are emotional compensations on offer: you can cheer the end of affirmative action and DEI, glorify mass deportation, enjoy the denial of gender-affirming care to trans people, villainize educators and health workers who think they know better than you, and applaud the demise of economic and environmental regulations as a way to own the libs. End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy. 

— Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor / “The rise of end times fascism” / The Guardian

 fritillaries hanging

i lived on dandelions
when oxygen would not suffice

the soul craves . . .
the soul sinks from its own weight

sound and suffering
what do you see when you see death from above

there is no discernible end
to our inhumanity

there is only occlusion, delusion,
fritillaries hanging,

and the deal struck with the devil

What I’m Reading:

We might think Amazon was about making books available to us that we couldn’t find locally—and it was, and what a brilliant idea—but maybe it was also just as much about eliminating human contact.

— David Byrne / “Eliminating the Human”

cologne and ammonia

her delicate blue-veined wrongdoings
her slender handfuls of bone shards
her clubhouse lay crushed and pathetic
her lathe upon her black veil
her fragile fraction of cologne and ammonia
her frangible fiction coiffed in toxins
her old frayed cataract
her daughter’s prickled shank armhole
her boilers
her cowards
her tomes un-dusted
her snow-white petulance
her pickled discontinuities

she freed of meaning

What I’m Reading:

People who use large language models are picking up writing patterns, reasoning methods and even opinions from the chatbots, some research suggests. This pattern threatens to homogenize human writing and discourse, argue some computer scientists, and could even influence text written by people that aren’t first-hand AI users. But not all researchers in the field agree. In one study, a team of scientists found that certain groups of writers held on to their personal writing style after using AI, and some even developed one that was more markedly distinct from that of the LLM.

— Jacob Smith / “AI use could ‘same-ify’ human expression” / Nature Briefing

The Lady-Killer

The uterine is blasphemous!
His desultory words matched his affect —

Didn’t you have a mother?
Don’t you have a significant other?

Have you been to the Levant?
Do your needles pass an elephant?

You must know of what I speak —
Riblets, man! Riblets!

The tzela. The tzela, man!
His spittle spray profuse.

He had my father’s eyes —
That madness innate.

Semiotic spew —
Signs arranging and rearranging
In obscure topographies.
He wrote his own hagiography.
A drug-addled Rasputin shooting
Lasers from his third eye.
Healing hands like cudgels
Ready to inflict . . .
What?

Confusion, delusion, repulsion,
Disrepute.

Go now, you unmoored ghost.
Back into the recesses of a lunar mind.
Back into forgotten memory . . .

until the next visitation.

What I’m Reading:

I don’t want to have to go to work for someone else. I don’t want to have to participate in an economic system that leads to, you know, bombing a school of kids on the other side of the planet.

— Bike Farmer / “What Am I Even Doing Here, Instead of Working?” / Instead of Working

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.

— Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor / “The rise of end times fascism” / The Guardian

Bad men become trees.
The earth forgives them, as do I. They begin
to give. The wicked also dream
of love. They know darkness overhead
means night before and night behind, yet drops
of starlight have shot through this earth’s evening;
overhead, gingkoes have flared
against sun.

— Medha Singh / “Another Life”

The rate of global warming has surged since 2015 and is now nearly double what it was in the 1970s, according to a new study. That’s faster than some other estimates, but the authors say their analysis captures a more accurate picture because it accounts for the effects of natural factors such as the El Niño weather pattern.

— Flora Graham / “Climate change is speeding up” / Nature Briefing

Water becomes water’s shape in the water, inside the machine we become
the image of the machine, the dusk becomes the machine’s dusk,
in piercing we are pierced by the machine, we must use
a defective good to prove we are defective goods

— Zheng Xiaoqiong / “Water Becomes Water”

Time marches on, but literary discourse is eternal. The last week has seen a revival of the “should aspiring fiction writers actually read books?” debate. I won’t bother bothering you with the origins or the arguments. Obviously, good artists study their mediums. They also tend to enjoy the art forms they spend their lives working with. Why would you want to write books if you don’t like books? Or make music if you dislike music? Practice and study are the two ways to improve in any field. Everyone knows this, which is why I kind of love this discourse. It’s so absurd that it loops around from inanity to insanity.

— Lincoln Michel / “What Not Reading Does to Your Writing: More thoughts on ‘TV brain prose’ and why reading is, yes, useful for your writing” / Substack

News, a tragedy—so easily ours—
already breaking as I crack my eggs. Rage and prayers, rage and prayers, a boon
for the tycoon’s fear-campaign, clicks for the zillionaire buying up the moon.
Ad, ad, an AI figment, someone squawking, someone hawking—hours
consumed, of this only life, and who is left in the garden, who is tending the flowers?

— Leila Chatti / “The World Is Too Much With Us”

The wonder and horror for climate is that the great majority of people on Earth support climate action. The obstacles are not technological. They’re political. The fossil-fuel industry and the rich and powerful and governmental figures who either are or serve the fossil-fuel industry are what’s holding us back. So the wonder and horror exist side by side. You can be thrilled by all the things that are happening and horrified by all the things that should be happening but aren’t. Everything we can save is worth saving. Everything we can do is worth doing. We’ve already lost a lot, but we don’t have to lose everything. We don’t have to surrender.

— Rebecca Solnit, to Devin Oktar Yalkin / “Rebecca Solnit Says the Left’s Next Hero Is Already Here” / New York Times

What I’m Listening To:

Industrial waste never goes out of taste
In the Red Desert, the future is real
Fingered in the fog
Let’s pretend there’s an epilogue
Let the world burn
Feel your coin flames go higher
Stock market buy, it’s a black out
Stand by AI, AI, AI

— Kim Gordon / “Black Out”

What I’m Reading:

After missiles damaged oil depots and refineries this week, Iran’s capital Tehran has been blanketed by pollutant-laden ‘black rain’. Experts say that this rain probably contains both soot, which can damage people’s lungs and eyes, and cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene and toluene, released by the burning of oil-refining byproducts. The pollutants could be dispersed in the air if there are no new fires, says atmospheric chemist Gabriel da Silva. But Tehran’s position in the Alborz mountain range can lead to temperature inversions, a meteorological phenomenon that traps polluted air masses. Rain could also disperse the chemicals, but that could lead to contamination in soil and waterways, da Silva says.

— Jacob Smith / “The consequences of ‘black rain’ in Tehran” / Nature Briefing

Phantom

The amplitude of echoes
Function like a phantom limb

Glucose seeps into the cells
Smell of white gas and charcoal

A swale once full of shoulder depth snow
Did you know Frazil are ice crystals
Formed in turbulent water, as in swift
Streams or rough seas?

Paradise? This isn’t paradise, son
You’ve cracked a tooth

The world doesn’t need anymore people
No further congestion or metal grates

I’ve apologized for the Spanish Inquisition
You can purchase a guayabera made in China

Why did she pop up in a search for sorghum?
Her voice is a natural vibrato

Now you’ll have to get by on your own.

What I’m Reading:

Peace is      
outworn;
it’s chaos that feeds the algorithm, no likes for the actual, the tangible.

— Leila Chatti / “The World Is Too Much With Us”