What I’m Reading:
“If I feel helpless living a baffling existence on an unfathomable planet in an indifferent universe, my being cries out for redemption, for purpose, for hope, but climate change just compounds the uncertainty and existential misery of day-to-day life lived in this deteriorating shell of an animal body. If that seems grim, well, so it is. But I take great joy in creation …”
— T.C. Boyle / “T.C. Boyle on Surviving and Satirizing the Climate Crisis”
We streamed into the stream
The water we stood in
We stood in
Only once
We eventually returned to where
We came from
A desolate windy place
We began to melt away
We were consigned
I was not sorry
We had been
In time we’ll be again
Or we won’t
What I’m Reading:
“Where does it go, the Sunday angle of sunlight once only yours, wide and open as a window?”
— Debra Allbery / “Sidereal”
“[In this space,] a small fountain of
Concrete. Permanent seasonal
Arrangement disorder.”
— Thea Brown / “The Gardener”
“Some people have asked if I’m on a quest to figure out what to do with my life, but it’s almost the exact opposite. When I’m outside, I get so immersed in wherever I am that it’s sort of impossible to think about my long-term future.”
— Matt Green / “Leaving His Footprints on the City” / The New York Times
“… there must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism. Call it what you may, call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr. / The Radical King
“It is extraordinary, in a week when record spring temperatures are affecting Europe, and in a year when El Niño conditions in the Pacific could result in the planet coming within a whisker of the 1.5C dangerous climate change guardrail, the government is doing all it can to keep the oil and gas flowing.
You really couldn’t make it up.”
— Bill McKibben / “Cool Earth”
“I have seen the sun own the land. I have seen it bake
into our hands. And I have seen it sleep in a dark coverlet
while the sky opens loose, and the coyotes, in their constellation,
propose a trick.”
— Analicia Sotelo / “Eating the Moon in Cotulla, TX”
“Where did my edges go?
What holds
head to neck, hand to fingers,
brain to sickness?”
— Allison Hutchcraft / “Though from Here I Can’t Smell the Smoke”
“The climate crisis is not really about the climate. It’s about us.”
— Ben Okri / “A Sacred Place”
What I’m Listening To:
“Kiss the boot of shiny, shiny leather
Shiny leather in the dark
Tongue of thongs, the belt that does await you
Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart”
— The Velvet Underground & Nico / “Venus in Furs”
x. is a naturist who’s grown disenchanted
with her fellow ornithologists —
she’s on the fringe —
she loves a rouge finch
a house finch
with a particularly ruddy head
her disability —
she rubs the promenade of her femurs
her frontal lobe
abuts her occipital lobe
she finds herself lurking in shadows
and kicked a well-known addiction
for rondos without recurrences
and she surfeits epiphanies
she hatches a finch
it won’t be like other finches
it will be the final
finch.
What I’m Reading:
“In the presence of a crow it is incredibly difficult to pretend to inhabit a world in which all else is passive background to human lives and dramas. If we pay them even the smallest bit of attention, crows burst the anthropocentric bubble with spectacular flair.”
— Thom van Dooren / The Wake of Crows
A dendrite explodes into tufted blue chenille.
I’ve lost touch with the spirit world.
A hip-critic stands, head enveloped within the upper blue-puff downy mildew.
The view tangled in fuzzbox squall mirrored in the underside of a limitless panorama of blue.
A headless body intones sibilant recitatives from an oscillating installation.
Wonder and irony are cheap, say the ground and the sky simultaneously.
Oh, for the love of annihilation, says your father’s father’s ghost.
What we have here is the world anew.
Luna or the Moon by any other name.
The bane of our limited language.
Our desire for proximity forever deferred.
Another road not traversed, another opportunity missed.
The Moon. Jejune. This month before June.
Will summer never come. (it’s here year-round)
Let’s hide behind this hallway wall.
What I’m Reading:
“We say that there is a climate emergency. But it is truer to say that there is a humanity emergency. The climate crisis is caused by us human beings, because we have forgotten the intimate relationship we have with nature. We treat nature like a resource, a thing to use without end, for profit and for our ascendancy. In this way we treat nature like an enemy.”
— Ben Okri / “A Sacred Place”
It unfurled under the moon of twin pandemics
All of it challenging
Most of it bare
All of it raw
There are no terpsichoreans in drabble
Brevity and drag
The angels in the firmament made of cheap tin
Rain and wind continually eat the land
Reshaping it
Creating a coruscated landscape
Flash in the pan
Pointless concordances
Citations and indentions missing
Erosion errata
(come now see it now
then come see it later
and later even again
and yet some other time and compare
the canyons are scored
if it — whatever it is — doesn’t catch
and you don’t know what you intended
it may be lost forever)
Open your pipes
Eat the acid
Swallow the sky
What I’m Reading:
“When I am sleeping
I find my pillow full of dreams.
They are all new dreams:
No one told them to me
Before I came through the cloud.”
— Hilda Conkling / “About My Dreams”
the mathematical odds of being struck
by a meteor while you mind your own business
the odds of a flying fish slapping you
in the face while deep sea fishing
the chances of a teacher killing
a creative spark within you
the certainty a parent will mindlessly
treat you the way their parents treated them
the struggle to chart your own course
in order to avoid the mined waters
the entropy
the will
the choices
the chances
made
and not
What I’m Reading:
“Is it possible I could go mad and do something horrendous?
I’ve gone very mad before.”
— Rae Rose / “Am I Going to Kill My Daughter”
a gap in the node
then a node in the gap’s gap
then cycle again
the beginning is the end
the end is the beginning
What I’m Reading:
“My fallopian arms have lost
the power to draw miracles from her fingers
at her own volition. Our eggs are drying up.”
— Julene Waffle / “Without Consent”
What I’m Reading:
“I walk in order to somatically medicate myself against the psychosis of contemporary urban living.”
— Will Self / The New York Times
“The most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school.”
— Haruki Murakami / What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
“Someone forgot to whisper your death to the bees
And so all the bees have left
And the fruit trees have died.”
— Ansel Elkins / “Someone Forgot to Whisper Your Death to the Bees”
“You’re stepping on your father, my mother said,
and indeed I was standing exactly in the center
of a bed of grass, mown so neatly it could have been
my father’s grave, although there was no stone saying so.”
— Louise Glück / “Aborigonal Landscape”
“This raises the inevitable question: What’s your policy
on fog? When it gets in bed with you, who’s on top?
Dances with you, who leads?”
— Bob Hicok / “Elements”
“If you touch it between the legs,
the splendid body will quicken
like bubbles in a just-on teakettle.”
— Rebecca Lindenberg / “The Splendid Body”
“… AS YOU STAND THERE AND GRILL HALAL
NOT JUST A REFUGEE WITH A BIG BEARD AND TRACKSUIT
NOW A DRAGONFLY LANDS ON YOUR ARM”
— Yahya Hassan / “Ramadan”
“Wonder is where it starts, and though wonder is also where it ends, this is no futile path.”
— Herman Hesse / Butterflies: Reflections, Tales, and Verse
What I’m Listening To:
“He grew up in a trailer, by the time he was nine
Rolled off to join the circus, telling fortunes on the side
Hail, hail, the Eyeball Kid”
— Tom Waits / “Eyeball Kid”
thee istsfor manity reader 