I am the day’s encryption / I am nylon whir on fetid skronk / I am must + disequilibrium / I am growth opportunity / I am terror in the grass / I am green bastion in silence / I am the shock of slice before sanguinary / I am bloodlust / I am carnivore. I am chaos + confusion. I am / eye.
What I’m Reading:
As they slept-the bikers and the cops, Uncle Sam and the Statue of Liberty, the millionaire on his magic pillow-adolescents from Guatemala scalded the killing floors at the slaughterhouse in Grand Island, Nebraska, their hoses like snakes spewing rivers that bubbled in the steam. Around them, the blades of skull splitters and bone saws waited for their fingers to slip, fangs lurking in the murk of early morning, in the daze behind the goggles on the faces of adolescents from Guatemala, sleeping the next day at Walnut Middle School, shaken awake by teachers who spotted the acid burns on their hands.
— Martin Espada / “The Snake” / Jailbreak of Sparrows
stelae and sediments rough as chip seal rolled flat and torn up what are you going to gain
why is she crying
not bad saving alkali balls from demolition — devotion and diminution — that’s depraved pontificate in your jodhpurs
wail in your pith helmet
there’s something trapped and spasmodic in the smoke tree now taut — now frozen in time unnatural — gone dark
throat tight — send help
What I’m Reading:
Clouds of dust settle on the coughing neighboring houses— their noses swollen by the heat of the scorched air. A girl passes by, sees the bleeding door, opens it. A corpse lies beneath. The earth weeps.
the fear bitterness & hatred the witch fellow falters the work the starkest darkest & the most sharply subversive pair of shoes the wartime years self maneuvered & censored the jingoistic pension conditional the use of memory & his own words the struggling fellow & his eleven existential roadblocks the ensuing disarray & immiseration the annoyance laced travails the low key lighting the austere camerawork the crossfade to black the avant-garde soundtrack the elbow to the side of the head the endorsement of filial piety followed by the kick in the eye the filth the pith the pit
the the
What I’m Reading:
He hates his neighbors’ flowers, claims his are redder, bluer, whiter than theirs, believes his bees work harder, his soil richer, blacker. He hears birds sing sweeter in his trees, taller and fuller, too, but not enough to screen out the nameless faces next door that he calls liars, thieves whơ’d steal his juicier fruit, kill for his wetter rain and brighter sun.
— Richard Blanco / “Dreaming A Wall” / How To Love A Country
Is my attention on loving, or is my attention on who isn’t loving me?
— Andrea Gibson / “Wellness Check”
There is a feeling I get in my mouth after reading writing produced by a large language model. It reminds me of the oily, filmy coating I used to get at Friday night dinner after eating parev ice-cream: the sense that I haven’t really eaten anything. I’m not left with a taste (AI writing doesn’t have a taste) but with a texture; or to be more precise, a lack of it. This texturelessness, and the filmy feeling it generates, is my synaesthetic reaction to something that, at the moment, remains uncanny: the knowledge that I am trying to parse meaning from something that, while grammatical, has no motivation to carry it.
The problem is not so much that AI has no intent, no feelings to communicate (to fall short of articulating), but that we have built a world in which language is depersonalised and so often uncoupled from meaning as to erode our expectation that the two exist in a relationship of symbiosis. We do not expect all the language we encounter to carry meaning. Most language is not poetry or a conversation with a friend, it is advertising.
— Matt Greene / “On the Rise of ChatGPT and the Industrialization of the Post-Meaning World” / Lithub
Nests fall like dry leaves. Peeled eggs are no window onto life. A rainstorm of darts. Migrant flocks drag their defeathered bodies.
This is when I swallow my words.
— Elvira Hernández / “Cross-Armed”
Every day as a cyclist, I witness gobsmacking displays of lawlessness, road rage, and distracted driving on our streets. But you know the scariest part? All it takes is a few minutes behind the wheel for me to be the one cursing under my breath, cutting corners, and putting others in danger. Cars and traffic just have a habit of bringing out our absolute worst tendencies as humans.
— Rami Abou-Sabe / “My bicycle could save the world … if you’d all just stop trying to kill me” / Boston Globe
I had a calling
to be a nun. My forehead was that criminal. For heaven,
I’d grind my knees into pavement until they’d bleed,
stare unblinking at the sun. Pain’s blaze simplified me,
gave me a bone to break.
— Amy Thatcher / “Unholy”
Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent and many scientists say human-driven climate change is increasing the intensity of heatwaves, droughts and wildfires, while also creating conditions for sudden, destructive storms.
The continent has endured three stifling almost back-to back heatwaves so far this year. Intense heat has also been blamed for thousands of excess deaths in the May to June period.
— Renee Maltezou and Michele Kambas / “Fires in Spain and France, hail in Balkans; Europe’s erratic weather persists” / Reuters
Live hidden Without a sound
Not seen Nor heard
Be not From this earth But from nothing.
— Cecilia Vicuña / “Ex Nothing”
What I’m Listening To:
And I shouted out an apology And then I felt like a twat And then I hugged the track of naked stone Where the glacier used to be Her eyes filled with tears The glacier feeds the river As she said The river feeds the lake Which plants grow from ash?
time and space yield to no one tho anthropogenic change has slowed the spin of the earth milliseconds of fat water around the equator you and your grandchildren’s grandchildren may not note it but the meta— verses will: a financial irregularity a capitalization a millisecond too late mega millions missing or lost and so, no matter how far away i move from my hometown the places stay the same but imperceptibly changed in a tangential but indelible way way too often i return nothing is ever really the same the more i come back the more i change the song remains the same
What I’m Reading:
A car slides on our asphalt street, like an iron running on an ironing board. But in my city, streets are never flat. Potholes from bombs are everywhere, like crows’ nests in a forest of noise.
Minimalist clap trap insouciance get away from my baroque personage. Someone once said they were transpecies extraordinaire, and someone cut in and quailed: surrender your gender; then an acerbic other cut in sniping: exploiters, exploiters, exploiters while standing in gray back-alley New York. Some tinkling, and someone singing this is the day, followed by a slew of pimply-faced youths miming the lyrics and someone doing an accordionist’s job at playing as if they were in earnest. What did it mean as it flashed by, a mere whir of postulates without proofs—proofs without antecedents. And the best you can do now is remember something you read from Kierkegaard, who was too much religious, (and worse a christian, just as you had been hoodwinked into when you were too young to do anything about it) for your palate, but it was an incisive leap on his part, that century and a half ago: “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” The angst-y freedom to be a serf to your lifestyle, to your politics, to your country, to your family, to your life and how you’ve lived it … and it dawns upon you in ever sharper cubist shards—it’s awful. It’s offal. It’s awful offal. Oh, take another shot of distilled teenage epistemological tripe and go back to your dark corner counting the moldy efflorescences on your shower stall. Really! No one ever.
What I’m Reading:
I used to think that my experience on the road made me safe. Thousands and thousands of miles. Countless hours mapping routes. A few too many seasons in a bike shop storage room. So, so many rolled-up greasy pant legs. But the tragic death of Louisa Gag, the 36-year-old bike advocate and city worker killed by a driver in a recycling truck this month, has shaken my confidence. Are any of us really safe if one of the most experienced cyclists in the city was killed doing the thing she loved?
— Rami Abou-Sabe / “My bicycle could save the world … if you’d all just stop trying to kill me” / Boston Globe
So she’s says to him, “when I was younger and finally got a prescription for Prozac and Lithium I thought my life was finally pivoting.”
He was nonplussed. He’d been talking about the horses and such.
But she went on: “I hoped the medication would uptake all that awful brain chemsistry and wash my brain in the good stuff. That the darkness that pervades my thoughts, my emotions, my outlook would somehow lighten…”
But he’s still thinking about trifectas and quinellas, and what if the odds are correct for that pedigree. He’s still engrossed in the Daily Racing Form.
What’s that?
The horse racing newspaper, dear.
Okay, and then?
Oh, she hadn’t paused a beat, she was still wound up, she said: “I never wanted to be an ‘up with people’ type person, and attend Sunday services, and say things like ‘praise the lord’ and ‘thank you, Jesus’ in conversation—I still wished to enjoy David Lynch, Joy Division, and Samuel Beckett, without having to live the life portrayed in their art. But much to my amazement the medication—”
And he hit her!
Don’t even!
He hit her with that Daily Racing Form. I remember it was the July 14, 1987 issue. The newsprint left that date marked upon her forehead.
It was the darndest thing!
What I’m Reading:
The fishermen spend Sundays singing karaoke salsa classics on the public beach, their voices trained by salt and resignation.
The reef rests, regenerates. The seafloor is a neon feast. Elkhorn corals celebrate, turtles come close to shore.
And he must hold on to the sink and stand firmly on his left leg because his right leg is useless. It doesn’t respond to his command all Henry can manage is to drag it along and he doesn’t dare stand upon it because he doesn’t trust it to hold him up.
In this fashion Henry starts his day, everyday. He doesn’t know how he will go on. But he goes on, and the next bit is the worst part of every morning.
Henry?
What, already?
What does regret mean?
A metal machine skronk segues to a lower register followed by a thin glass skittering from the closet.
Nothing. Nothing but the black suit, white shirt, black tie and demon shoes. A glint catches his eye, and there in the corner a drunken spider makes it’s way across it’s derelict web toward a sidereal moth in its throes.
“Henry, you were such a good boy. So tender to the touch. Remember the day you discovered the Sassaby’s? All you said for days was, I am a sassy Sassaby. Oh, you were such a dream, Henry”
Henry rotates the bird cage, shakes it, places his ear to the felt pad on the bottom.
It’s not that Henry is on the road to perdition as much as he is in Satan’s bowels. And then it all begins again.
What I’m Reading:
a stone near a cemetery suggests why give birth to children at all
thee istsfor manity reader 