thee istsfor manity reader

What You Don’t Wish To See…

… midway through a 20-mile bike ride…

What I’m Reading:

“Castrated socks. (Her name was words)
Anemia cells. your expression is also like the legs of a sparrow.”

— Yi Sang / “Au Magasin de Nouveautes”

The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“The chicken truck passes with its load of small-brained misery.”

— Kim Addonizio / “Kansas, 4 a.m.”

“I am vulture-heavy.  
My stories are caskets filled with black feathers…”

— Diane Seuss / “Folk Song”

“Whenever I come across, say, a rat or a fox, and I meet its eyes, I can sense a whole cosmos behind them,”

— Olga Tokarczuk / “The Art of Fiction” / Paris Review

“april is the cruelest month etc. what remains?
brian jones bones. jim morrison’s friend.
jimi hendrix bandana. sweatband angel.
the starched collar of baudelaire.
the sculptured cap of voltaire.”

— Patti Smith / “picasso laughing”

“Now it is back, it is back much worse – this is in America. It is back so much worse than it was in the 80s. Because it’s become political.”

— Judy Blume / “Judy Blume: book banning now much worse in US than in 1980s” / The Guardian

“How did you go wrong? With only blind faith
& a dead star left in your eyes, where’s North
America?”

— Yusef Komunyakaa / “Night of the Armadillo”

“Why does this trembling

pull us?

A: Beneath the surface we are one.”

— Toi Derricotte / “Black Boys Play the Classics”

What I’m Listening To:

“But they say, ‘Write what you know’
Don’t know much at all”

— Urika Spacek / “Accidental Momentary Blur”

Sumerian Script

I scarify my soul in the humorless moon of a long night in a clean well lighted place—which is a bullet ridden cafe in Lesotho during a monsoon month of dust and quiet whippoorwills.

I prune leafy trees leafless, hot with fleas, fleecing your sister’s sake.

You said, “I got mine and you’ll be fine.”

I said, “summer is sister’s fate in her shizophrenic haze in the strength of a weakness in her occipital lobe.”

You say my comedy was sublimely written, like it was written in Sumerian script in a Mandarin world.

What I’m Reading:

“Here all is strange.”

— Samuel Beckett / Happy Days

the night became an elipsis …

What I’m Reading:

“You look around and they are teaching CREATIVE WRITING at some university. Now they think they know how to WRITE and they are going to tell others how to. This is a sickness: they have accepted themselves. It’s unbelievable that they can do this.”

— Charles Bukowski / On Writing

What I’m Reading:

“As a child, when I closed my eyes to pray I saw a hissing wall of TV snow. The tighter I closed them, the harder it hissed.”

— Jennifer N. Knox / “Prayer of the Shy Forest”

bad breaker service

out of focal acuity

paired with bad breaker service

albino squirrels prevail

maps and legends

tupelo honey and soft shell crabs

east-south-east of sopchoppy

mudhoney delights

What I heard today:

“I didn’t know you were a mortician!”

— Peter / ACA Traveller

The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“where did the poems go? what is their trouble? what kind of water is i?”

— Danez Smith / “anti poetica”

“Sometimes people comment on how
beautiful my solitude is and sometimes my solitude replies
with a heart.  It begins to follow the accounts of solitudes
that are half its age.”

— Victoria Chang / “Grass, 1967”

“Notice nature
warn itself
of your intrusion—
that warbler
isn’t singing to you,
it’s alerting the bear
around the bend.”

— Clint Bowman / “If Lost”

“It takes a long time—too long—for me to understand the sun in this season is blinding, and the birds are flying into windows all around me, fourteen stories up. Flying into glass and falling.”

— Molly McCully Brown / “Virginia, Autumn”

“The people eat sick fish
because there are no others.
Then they get born wrong.”

— Margaret Atwood / “Frogless”

“Even if there was no grief
we wouldn’t stop lamenting
as though longing for the charm
of a distressed face.”

— Ha Jin / “Ways of Talking”

“If you can’t feel love in life you won’t feel it in death…”

— Sina Queyras / “Sylvia Plath’s Elegy for Sylvia Plath”

What I’m Listening To:

“Here comes life with his leathery whip
Here comes life with his leathery leathery
(Here comes life with his leathery whip,
here comes life with his leathery leathery)”

— Aldous Harding / “Leathery Whip”

Something Chthonic (redux)

I’m not feeling good about all that kyoodling outside. I think there are feral dogs and hyenas circling the house. Closing the circle ever tighter until they get in…

I’m cooking up something about the male gaze, about the dynamics of sexism, and the dynamics of power and being female in a world that hasn’t changed fast or far enough…

The first time lightning struck me you had just walked away after telling me about Dali’s paranoiac-critical theory. My head was swimming. No, my brain was a rain of caroming ball bearings. I fell right there in the red Georgia clay. I felt like a distended eyeball just poked out in some 1970’s Kung Fu film. You had me hooked…

I wrote about the flat head woman. My guide from Istanbul to Kathmandu. The sun, a pink-red ulcer, tacked down the cobalt sky…

Then a sojourn to Greece — a slow ferry to Poros…

Aqui estamos, I say. 

The flat head woman says, is it true what they say about Latin men? 

To which I say, never believe what they say. They always speak in tongue twisters and riddles. Nothing makes sense, much less what we’re doing. Abandon all hope of ever singing in the proper register. Too many things are written that are lies, and too many lies are told that are truths. Abandon me like I will abandon you. Do it first.

So we show up at the appointed hour. No one there. Just a cold wind blowing a garbage can lid down the street. A calico cat sniffing at a small pile of Acropolis detritus. No one. We’re alone. 

Don’t go a woolgathering, she says. 

Indulgence in idle daydreaming, say I.

(There’s actually much more, but it doesn’t appear here because we’re standing outside of the infamous rotunda of plenty and the coroner is busy “inquesting”) 

An unseen Greek chorus sings: “Something Chthonic” — don’t fazzle our muckwumpus dazzle the accretion of deletions in the sky… the wormholes in the ploversticks and pattiwhacks all die…

Upon closer inspection my uncle ingested the harvest moon and darkened the sky.  He ran through the living room with a glass full of bloody moon and a minute later the house was thrown into darkness… Greeks be damned!

The feral dogs and hyenas are now inside.

What I’m Reading:

“Developed countries have created a global crisis based on a flawed system of values. There is no reason we should be forced to accept a solution informed by that same system.”

— Marlene Moses / Ambassador to the U.N. for Nauru