the lifetime of a sprat
especially a gourmet sprat
in the baltic waters off latvia
what to say?
short? spry? sharp?
a fishy kind of happy life?
don’t ask
don’t know
once netted
how tasty
What I’m Reading:
“I think we’re past the tipping point…”
— Gerald Kooyman / “Emperor penguins abandon breeding grounds as ice melts around them” / Science
My heart is shrapnel —
Incised, excised, in your wake —
Fragments, incomplete.
What I’m Reading:
“i almost become vomit / resisting being / a jellied woman / mopped up”
— Therese Estación / “ICU II”
someone called me “brigand”
all i managed
my doctor says
10 mg daily
generic follow-up
elevated total
mildly abnormal
slightly low
long-term blood
3 to 4 months
never called me anything again
What I’m Reading:
“We live as we dream … alone.”
—Joseph Conrad / Heart of Darkness
doctor says
insecure sinecures
flesh ribbons
garlic tongs
olive throttling
vile beauty
uncorrupted debasement
see ya next year
What I’m Reading:
“The air is of melted glass, / Solid, filling interstices”
— Beatrice Ravenel / “The Hummingbird”
“Someone calls me by the skin
I did not know I had
and to this I think—language, …”
— Mathem Shiferraw / “Beginnings”
“The greatest challenge the Anthropocene poses isn’t how the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, whether we should put up sea walls to protect Manhattan, or when we should abandon Miami. It won’t be addressed by buying a Prius, turning off the air conditioning, or signing a treaty. The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront our situation and realize that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the difficult task of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.”
— Roy Scranton / Learning to Die in the Anthropocene
“We carry a pinch behind each eyeball”
— Lisel Mueller / “Love Like Salt”
“The story of human civilization has been steady expansion. Out of Africa into the surrounding continents. Out along the river corridors and ocean coasts as trade grew. Into new territory as we cut down forests or filled in swamps. But that steady expansion has now turned into a contraction. There are places it’s getting harder and harder to live, because it burns or floods. Or because the threat of fire and water is enough to drive up the price of insurance past the point where people can afford it.”
— Bill McKibben / “An Ever-Smaller Board” / Substack newsletter
“The sky is / blue-gold: / the freedom of possibility. … Today, I broke your solar system. / Oops. My bad.”
— Fatimah Ashgar / “Pluto Shits on the Universe”
“Carbon-fueled capitalism is a zombie system, voracious but sterile. This aggressive human monoculture has proven astoundingly virulent but also toxic, cannibalistic, and self-destructive. It is unsustainable, both in itself and as a response to catastrophic climate change. Thankfully, carbon-fueled capitalism is not the only way humans can organize their lives together.”
— Roy Scranton / Learning to Die in the Anthropocene
“Signs that the end of summer is nigh / The skies will darken, / Pumpkin spice shall rain down upon the land and the rivers will run red with cider…”
— Gemma Correll / “End of Days” / The Nib
What I’m Listening To:
“T.V.O.D.
I don’t need a TV screen
I just stick the aerial into my skin
Let the signal run through my veins
T.V.O.D.”
The Normal / “T.V.O.D.”
press the eject + cut the tape
“… if the story is starting to feel very forced, or if you become excited about an alternate possibility for your story, feel free to abandon or modify one of these constraints”
the wild is where we belong
“I find myself writing about family and the little betrayals that can occur between parents and children, brothers and sisters. The family is such fertile terrain for fiction, because there’s shared history there, such intimacy and love, and yet our families are forced on us. No one knows quite how to push our buttons like our family members, and small gestures can take on huge resonances.”
enough of that
“Often my entry into a story is a pair of characters…”
buried alive
“FORMATTING: All manuscripts for this class should include your name …”
full of rats
What I’m Reading:
“By the mid-1960s, we would discover Gysin’s ‘cut-ups,’ a creative methodology enabling a far more accurate reflection of so-called consensus reality than any linear structure could impose. In turn, this retroactively liberated me from feeling obliged to formulate any formal sense or shape out of the mess my fractured memories delivered.”
— Genesis P-Orridge / Nonbinary: A Memoir
still alive
chest tightens
these trees
days darken
there’s my hinge
this is me
folding
What I’m Reading:
“Yellow spreads and smooths, a downpour
of the pure light of its name,
tropicordial.”
— Adélia Prado / “Praise for a Color”
What I’m Reading:
“The ruin we made of our garden
Is confusing even today.”
— Fanny Howe / “Tapestry”
What I’m Reading:
“… in a world that runs on gallons / of cheap violence. Lately, / I don’t know who I am / writing for.”
— Sa Whitley / “Body of a Cat”
flickering my eyes
i will decenter the I
like a flicker film
caught in the gate / melting down /
the WE — is the one thing real
What I’m Reading:
“Every-man-for-himself politics will have to yield to we’re-all-in-this-together; otherwise, it’s going to be far grimmer than it already is.”
— Bill McKibben / “An Ever-Smaller Board” / Substack newsletter
thee istsfor manity reader 