Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

My father loved to leave me
in a movie theater
by myself
beginning when I was six

seated alone
by the aisle

He paid the usher a dime
to make sure
no one kidnapped or molested me

— John Yau / “Memories of Charles Street, Boston”

“Remember who you are, American” … “Report Foreign Invaders” … “Pioneers, Not Illegals” … “Remigrate”: such white-supremacist graphics and slogans litter DHS social media, sharpening opposition between Americana and alienage. Immigration policing under this aegis is a domain of public terror. Any resident can, on the slenderest of pretexts and whims of street-level enforcers, be told: ‘Show your papers.’

— Nikhil Pal Singh / “Homeland Empire” / Equator

Happy tears? people ask. So happy.
I tell them my gratitude is like the sun.
In turns it ripens, in turns it spoils.

— Nikita Deshpande / “Post Partum”

Over the past year it has repeatedly violated the rights of citizens and foreign nationals – while also making a spectacle of these violent acts. Even when the “worst of the worst” turn out to be hairdressers, drywallers, fisherman or soccer moms, nothing will interrupt the imposition of serial brutality and accompanying slop-stream of ideological justification. In quick succession this month, US military forces kidnapped a sitting foreign president on the grounds that he is the elusive head of an imaginary drug cartel, and ICE agents executed a civilian inside her car, then retroactively slandered her as a dangerous radical.

— Nikhil Pal Singh / “Homeland Empire” / Equator

Outside it, vanishing species and rivers.
Outside it, Nanjing, Ninevah, Dresden.
Outside it, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, Kyiv. Here.

The world starts and ends, starts, ends, ends again,
restarts. 

— Jane Hirshfield / “I speak with the future.”

One of the paradoxes of contemporary fascism – if we want to call it that . . . is both apocalyptic and timorous. It can initiate a new round of small wars and damage the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, but it cannot successfully govern the country, let alone adjust the gears or switch the tracks of capitalist economies in the so-called developed world.

— Nikhil Pal Singh / “Homeland Empire” / Equator

The War goes on
                           & war is Shit.

— Ted Berrigan / “Anti-war Poem”

What I’m Listening To:

Put your smile on my face stop me wasting away
Make a promise and break
Green light all the way to a grey day

— Zoot Woman / “Grey Day”