Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

But you. Rain on the hot sidewalk.
Turned mist. Handsome aura. Gone.

— Nicole Callihan / “Summer Elegy”

The sky is low and charged with snow that has not yet begun to fall. A flock of starlings keeps lifting off and landing, lifting off and landing. The sound of their wings all at once is soft and explosive. A hundred feathered concussions.

— Anne de Marcken / It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over

The universe demotes me,
yet again, to coin-operated laundry,
and each night, when everyone
is sleeping, our tongues all migrate
one mouth to the left.

— Josh Bell / “The War Against Birthdays”

The American narrative is morally unresolvable because the society that saved humanity in the great conflicts of the twentieth century was also a society built on enormous crimes—slavery and the extinction of the native inhabitants.

— Robert D. Kaplan / Earning the Rockies

Much like plate tectonics, poetry is a measure of time, decades and seconds felt equally, refreshed until we pass out or think of better ways to explain what this means. 

— Jean Prokott / “Trust the Hours: Poetry to Reclaim & Rename the Sorrow”

I still lived alone in those days. The man who’d helped me make the baby had left to find his way into the television. Specks of skins of selves he’d been in other years still lay around me on the air; and, as such, I’d breathe him in. I pulled his long hair from the sink pipes.

— Blake Butler / Scorch Atlas

. . . mechanical autonomy on a bike opens other doors, such as going on long trips with the confidence of knowing you can face any technical problem.

— Laurent Belando & Louise Roussel / Practical Cycling

What I’m Listening To:

I’m lost at sea
Don’t bother me
I’ve lost my way
I’ve lost my way

— Radiohead / “In Limbo”