Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Without poetry, it’s possible that violence would be the norm, the steady state, but because poems exist, all violence is unjustifiable, is monstrous.

— Raúl Zurita / INRI

I listened to some invisible bird
rattling off the facts of consciousness.

He used that exact word,
cipher.

— Molly Brodak / “The Cipher”

In the breeze-shaped silence laced thereafter, I held my palm up and let some of the ashes catch the current, then a whole handful, strewing it out in front of me like disintegrating rope. I felt an urge to eat some of the ash, too, and so I did, thinking of how what had once been part of her body now mixed with mine, a part of me forever, our new future.

— Blake Butler / Molly

IN JANUARY 2001, on TV, the President of Chile, Sr. Ricardo Lagos, acknowledged that the bodies of hundreds and hundreds of people who had been disappeared during the Pinochet dictatorship would never be found because they had been thrown out of airplanes into the sea and the mountains: into the Pacific Ocean and into the mouths of volcanoes.

— Raúl Zurita / “Author’s Note” / INRI

Earth shattered heat records in 2023 and 2024, with temperatures rising further than expected on the basis of previous trends and modelling. A mysterious reduction in cloud cover, combined with an El Niño weather pattern, could be responsible for temperature increases in 2023. However, scientists expected temperatures would decrease again in June 2024 when the El Niño subsided, which didn’t happen. Now they are racing to work out whether this sudden spike is just a blip in the climate data, or an early indicator that the planet is heating up at a faster pace than they thought.

—  Jeff Tollefson / “Earth shattered heat records in 2023 and 2024: is global warming speeding up?” / Nature

She brought me metal pansies
She said there’s a story in her family of a duck
Like all ducks this duck wore water
But didn’t like the wetness

— Zan de Parry / “If Feathers Were Cigarettes”

Strange baits rain from the sky. Surprising bait
falls upon the sea. Down below the ocean, up
above unusual clouds on a clear day. Surprising
baits rain on the sea. There was a love raining,
there was a clear day that’s raining now on the
sea . . .
. . . People rain down and fall in strange positions
like rare fruit of a strange harvest.

— Raúl Zurita / “The Sea” / INRI

What I’m Listening To:

Emma was my brand new friend
Fun to see how this one ends
Lovely sweet, she walks like she can’t see
Won’t hear her dance or see her run
There’s simply nothing to be done
When Emma sweeps the floor it turns more grey

— Horsegirl / “World of Pots and Pans”