The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“Some words live in my throat
Breeding like adders. Others know sun”

— Audre Lorde / “Coal”

“Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.”

— Blake Crouch / Recursion

“I’m going to make a poem out of nothing.
You and I will be the protagonists.
Our emptiness, our loneliness,
the deadly boredom, the daily defeats:”

— Luis Alberto de Cuenca / “William of Aquitaine Returns”

“And I wondered about how the real is no longer real, how misinformation and disinformation have led to a decline in trust in traditional sources of authority. I wanted to understand where all this might lead.”

— Paul Lynch / on Prophet Song / The Guardian

“We could help you feed every nation, commune  
with the all-seeing sentient energy that palpitates  
through all known forms of matter.  
Nah! they said. Teach us to vaporize a mountain!  
Teach us to turn the moon into revenue!  
Then the Earthlings  
left a faucet running and flooded our basement.”

— Matthew Olzmann / “The Earthlings”

“Meanwhile, a preliminary finding by the Copernicus Climate Change Service says that Earth had its most-heated day ever last Wednesday. ‘Our best estimate is that this was the first day when global temperature was more than 2 ℃ above 1850-1900 (or pre-industrial) levels…’”

— Sam Burgess / “South Braces for Summer from Hell” / Nature

“I am a prayer of fire who arrived to care for humans, then was misused to destroy
I am a prayer”

— Joy Harjo / “I Am A Prayer”

What I’m Listening To:

“Tied iron to my feet
Then watched as I
Sank down just to prove a point
Just to nail it right in

— Squirrel Flower / “Open Wound”