Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Listen. This is modern times all over the world
Go sit under a tree.

— Lorenzo Thomas / “Displacement”

Somehow, the entire human race seemed momentarily united in a single entrancing dream—the hope that the next generation they would bequeath to Mother Earth would be whole, healthy, sane, capable of making amends for the rape they had inflicted in olden days.

— John Brunner / Stand On Zanzibar 

There’s many things perching
in the sky. Oh many things
perching. But no pepper birds.
They don’t come.

— Paulé Bártón / “The Bowl Seller”

Many more of me would yet be born, but I didn’t have much longer to live. Goodbye, I repeated silently to the many of me I’d never meet, then carefully brushed away the dusting of snow that had started to settle on my garment.

— Hiromi Kawakami / “Narcissi” / Under the Eye of the Big Bird

He is remembering a place
he has never come back from
trying to learn of whatever
finally became of him
Hurrying across the paper
his pen makes the sound of
evening pushing through grass

— Fredric Matteson / “In Jackson’s Study (A Year After He Has Gone)”

You can’t blame the people who can’t hear the warnings; you have to blame the ones who can, and who ignore them.

— John Brunner / The Sheep Look Up

And a day goes by, and the snipers, and the market
itself has no salt: so I said: No worries,
the merchants have plenty of sadness.

— Nasser Rabah / “Untitled”

What I’m Listening To:

I got high I thought I saw an angel
But he was just a ghost
He was making wooden posts out of my family
What if birds aren’t singing they’re screaming
What if birds aren’t singing they’re screaming

— Aldous Harding / “What if birds aren’t singing they’re screaming”