Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

A toenail clipping floating in a toilet bowl
like a crescent moon reflected in water,

beauty is quiet and self-conscious.

A character in a novel
sits on the toilet.

Sometimes for forever.

Speaking of which,
where does the shit of a billion people go?

— Hua Xi / “Toilet”

In rejecting the myth of America as ‘a universal nation’, the Trump administration has aggressively destabilised the idea that the US’s own racial and colonial history is – for the most part – internally settled, and beyond Constitutional adjudication. ‘Mass deportation’ in this sense serves a range of purposes beyond its ostensible aims: it cultivates a constituency that elevates ancestral primacy, creates a paramilitary policing layer incentivised to assert despotic authority, and justifies governing via broad emergency decree. The Trump administration envisions not only high numbers of migrant removals, but the authority to revoke citizenship by the sovereign-executive. Deportation, in short, is the watchword for a sweeping ideological attack on the consensus and institutions of postwar liberalism.

— Nikhil Pal Singh / “Homeland Empire” / Equator

What if the land had its own language?
No alphabet but steady drone
of grasslands, groan of mountains,
drought-fire’s scream—a drawn-out cry . . .

— Alison Hawthorne Deming / “National Forest”

In Miami, denying climate change would be like denying the nose on one’s face. Even so, even knowing what’s coming, the city and surrounding county have struggled to protect themselves—and especially their most vulnerable residents. 

— Vann R. Newkirk II / “What Climate Change Will Do To America By Mid-Century” / The Atlantic

The light that is shining
over there is a traffic sign.
I returned the money I borrowed.
I am getting on very well.
I get up at 7 o’clock.
The sun rises at seven o’clock.
What’s the matter.
The clock has struck 10
He struck me in the face.

— James Tate / “If You See K . . . “

The good news is that the US is a large, diverse, energetic country, filled with people who do not like to be bullied and coerced, who still possess significant degrees of autonomy, and who are beginning to stir and fight back. The culture of fascism and authoritarianism now spewed from government social media, and amplified by paid right-wing influencers and bot farms, reflects neither popular sentiment nor the ordinary conviviality of daily life, particularly in cities.

— Nikhil Pal Singh / “Homeland Empire” / Equator

. . . How often I prayed
for blood. How I charted the empire 
of endometrium and eggs. How I knew
that trees assembled their shadows 
just so. And how now I am on the other side
of all such worries.

— Didi Jackson / “Spot”

What I’m Listening To:

I feel the sea, dishonest art in me
Blood in my nose sent to say you’re right on time
Venus down in the Zinnia

— Aldous Harding / “Venus down in the Zinnia”