State I Was In

I took umbrage at the penumbra—
The darkling darkening of my mood—
Was it the reddening super harvest moon?
(Its waxing moony-moony face: jejune)
Or was it a flaring sunspot’s craquelure of quietude?
Or was it the plague?
Or the fascist wave?
Or the tactless foot?
Of the biomass soot?
Or the king tide poot?
Or was it the phallic gun-shaped state
I was in?

What I’m Reading:

A new report suggests that it might be possible to launch a swarm of satellites that reflect sunlight away from the planet to cool the global temperatures in as few as 20-40 years. The timeline of such a ‘planetary sunshade’ would depend on the rate at which heavy-lift rockets that could carry the materials into deep space are developed, the report says. A lot of people think this idea is “just fantasy”, says space-systems engineer Chantal Cappelletti. But the falling cost of space launches has made the prospect of space-based solar geoengineering seem more realistic.

— Jacob Smith / “A plan to shade the Earth from space” / Nature Briefing