The Best Stuff I (Barely) Read This Week

“Pick your place anywhere in the world and Great Salt Lake is a mirror reflecting a flashing light on what is coming and what is already here. Our natural touchstones of joy will deliver us to heartbreak. Each of us will face the losses of the places that brought us to life.”

— Terry Tempest Williams / “I Am Haunted by What I Have Seen at Great Salt Lake” / The New York Times

“you could mistake grief for a diamond
the way it shines when cut into, like fish
eyes in a boat’s drain.”

— Melissa Studdard / “Philomela’s tongue says”

“… I looked at you in the photograph, coming apart into each grain of your gesture, and I wanted to know this. I wanted to know when I looked at your hand in the air of the photograph, alight but limp, almost floating, toward whose caress I cannot know, what the grain is.”

— Chad Bennett / “The Grain”

“But through the box walls, I feel their fingernails
rising out of the corners of my rooms,
their presence, these strangers, these spies,
these unknown people who have walked
through my home,
have touched my private places in my home,
done this abominable thing of touring

my bedroom, my sleeping place, where at night
I revisit my ancestors…”

— Patricia Jabbeh Wesley / “Black Woman Selling Her Home in America”

“When my daughter’s class made a gingerbread house for the holidays, I licked the frosting and told her how good it was because emotional connection optimizes mental health. But I secretly spit it out since frosting’s nutrient profile is suboptimal.”

— Tom Ellison / “I’ve Optimized My Health To Make My Life As Long And Unpleasant As Possible”

“Should there be a new language for this off-kilter world? When mackerel, the traditional catch of West African and Spanish fishers, show up in Iceland, are they still mackerel? Are pelicans that glide over the Schuylkill River, at least five degrees north of their historical habitat, still pelicans, or must we translate them?”

— Anna Badkhen / “The Language of Catastrophe”

“I made a bouquet of bones and left them for coyotes.”

— Terry Tempest Williams / “I Am Haunted by What I Have Seen at Great Salt Lake” / The New York Times

What I’m Listening To:

“I’m just a symptom of the moral decay
That’s gnawing at the heart of the country”

— The The / “The Sinking Feeling”