Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Okay I won’t use the word Jewish
And I won’t use the word Zionist
And I won’t use the word genocide
And I won’t use the word apartheid
And I won’t use the word settler
And I won’t use the word colony
And I won’t use the word killed
And I won’t use the word watermelon
And I won’t use the word Palestine
And I won’t use the word resistance

— Omar Sakr / “Algo in the genocide”

A war happening in secret means the secret / is happening means the bag of rice / falls from an American chopper / in a storm of sand. / The bag rips apart. / The grains disperse to the floor.

— Mei Der Vang / “One Nation under Shadow Warfare” / Primordial 

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.

— Ernest Hemingway / By-Line: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades

. . . But from the inside
this life feels enormous, unlimited

by the self—by selfness—
vaster even than the sparkling

dark it can’t be seen from.

— Maggie Smith / “This human life”

I mean, normal is a type of madness, isn’t it? I think it’s just that the only madness society allows is called normal.

— Sayaka Murata / Life Ceremony

When I step naked into my shower,
I find, staring down at me,
its eight dark eyes peering over
the silver lip of the sprayer, a tarantula
the size of a bar of soap.

— AE Hines / “Peace Treaty”

What are we left with at the end?
A murdered dictionary and field
After silent field of unmarked graves.

— Omar Sakr / “Algo in the genocide”

What I’m Listening To:

I’m gonna write what I know
Kick around on the big brown
So the lies I tell
Send me up, and I can’t get down
I’m wearing big grass to town
I rip myself on
I rip myself off

— Aldous Harding / “One Stop”