in our blood

Posted on February 16, 2023 by istsfor manity

embodied (tanka)

a strange faith we breathe
into our lives, in our blood
violence braided
quotidian & steadfast
embodied death incarnate

What I’m Reading:

“Do you lie thinking
The stars in the sky
Were a big mistake?”

— Charles Simic / “Dear Lord”

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bouffant of divinity

Posted on February 14, 2023 by istsfor manity
Image: Panel from Kyōsai’s Pictures of 100 Demons: II, Kawanabe Kyōsai, ca. 1890 / image in public domain.

Community Email @ N+1 ~ N+15

Deathbed Resistors,

You may plait your ballroom gabardine backside on the balm. Please use caution not to touch the bouffant of divinity. Also, no floppy cowlicks are allowed. If we are storing your balm gabble, please let us know by Wednesday, February 15th if you need astrologers, we will deliver on Thursday, February 16th. For those who want to retrieve your future yourself, you may do so on Friday, February 17th.

Thank you.

Image: “Basics of Mongolian Astrology,” ca. 1800’s / image in public domain.

What I’m Reading:

“My two favorite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything. The perfect day: riding a bike to the library.”

—Peter Golkin / Arlington Division of Environmental Services

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face in shadow

Posted on February 13, 2023 by istsfor manity

Marginal

1.
I found the box of photos & letters
you said
please destroy my letters

2.
Particularly the ñ’s
the rr’s (the rolled
r’s) and the x’s
that sound of
j’s

3.
I found a shard of your umbilical
cord pressed
between two
yellowing balls
of cotton

4.
You were missing
teeth in some
of the early
photos

5.
Some photos had dates
Aug. ‘65, Jun. ‘66, printed
on the margins

6.
Your marginal life
at those marginal
moments in the gloaming

7.
your face in shadow

8.
your right hand
caught in the last
ray of light

9.
Another photo
you looked
into the distance beyond
the stranger taking
the picture

10.
You bracketed by parents
all of you lacking air
strangled by fear

11.
Why take a picture
then

12.
Why this
moment

13.
Why the strangled
umbilicus?

What I’m Reading:

“As an atheist I don’t have particularly strong opinions about God’s preferred pronouns. However, I do have strong opinions about how language shapes the way we see our world.”

— Arwa Mahdawi / “The Week In Patriarchy”

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vibrant violet light

Posted on February 12, 2023 by istsfor manity

The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“… neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.”

— James Baldwin / Notes of a Native Son

“In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior. Within this society, that group is made up of Black and Third World people, working-class people, older people, and women.”

— Audre Lorde / Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“And he, the boy who never grew up, aloft the Omega, a golden filament in the vibrant violet light.”

— Patti Smith / “He Was Tom Verlaine”

“he is not gesturing for rescue
he is shouting ‘go away’”

— Richard Shelton / “Local Knowledge”

“I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”

—Frederick Douglass / Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“to hell with the arms you want
she hissed,
be glad when you’re cold
for the arms you have”

—Lucille Clifton / “poem to my yellow coat”

“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”

— James Baldwin / Notes of a Native Son

What I’m Listening To:

“Lead me to another life
All my ties are broken
I’m in wonderful
Disarray”

— Loma / “Ocotillo”

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fields of metastasis

Posted on February 11, 2023 by istsfor manity

ultrasound pinnacles

lost in the ultrasound pinnacles
those monochromatic ridges
striations of organic skronk

get away with your revelatory awe
slide down those valleys of cancerous scree
& talus fields of metastasis

let us palliate the darkness
festoon it with fairy lights
this is monstrous lustrous

insides should be kept in
darkness

What I’m Reading:

“She can hear and read every single word, but her lips won’t crack open to emit sound. Like a shadow bereft of physical form, like the hollow interior of a dead tree, like that dark blank interstitial space between one meteor and another, it is a bitter, thin silence.”

— Han Kang / “The Middle Voice”

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shadow only shadow

Posted on February 10, 2023 by istsfor manity

Here, Hear Here

Here are the doldrums.

Here is sickness and listlessness.

Here is shadow, hear the shadow.

Here is formlessness, hear the formlessness.

Here the auger of an augury bores a hole—

into darkness. Hear it!

Here the quicksand swallows.

Hear the strangled cries.

Hear here.

Hear.

Here you hold on and endure.

Here.

What I’m Reading:

“There aren’t any rules. I can no longer read other writers. I am a loner. But I borrow from others in my spaces of nil.”

— Charles Bukowski / On Writing

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simplicity defies resolution

Posted on February 9, 2023 by istsfor manity

Call and Response

Here comes sickness.

Here comes balance and counterpoint.

Here comes call and response.

Here comes death.

The simplicity defies resolution.

What I’m Reading:

“we who stay in the ruins are secure
against enemies and friends”

— Richard Shelton / “Local Knowledge”

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don’t you see

Posted on February 8, 2023 by istsfor manity

The Sapling Purr

Sometimes known as the naked monarchy purr is a truly remarkable little ravage. The only mediators that keep the tenets checking certain boxes and benighting surly apparatchiks.

This is not intended to be confusing. It is incontrovertibly clear: even the outside tendency is very different—they’re the only mammalian thermoregulators that can keep their bohemian temptations within certain limits.

Don’t you see?

They lacquer their sentences to the page. Their senescences are renown for their trajectories—red, indifferent, full of ermine flourishes. Have you ever seen a stoat without it’s coat? A ghastly sight that! It’s getting warm in here, now, north of 79 degrees—so a digresssion is in order:

…petrostates and oil companies are remarkable little animators…profligate & skinflint users of boffin templates in nubbin thinking…ignorers of dictionaries…losers of bobbins in dark corners and drowning in unspooled yarn…oh, vengeful visions…

Digressions over, we return to the gist: our low metabolic and respiratory ratings—wait, was this ever about that?

And so we resume. Wee! We are serenaded in our skullcaps and slender slanders.

We wish for a conclusion—you certainly do / (I secretly hope this would go on)—but you prevail.

It stops.

What I’m Reading:

“Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?”

— Edgar Allan Poe / “A Dream Within a Dream”

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to be home

Posted on February 7, 2023 by istsfor manity

Medium-Density Amorphous

The longing for home—as darkness descends & sickness and death lurk at the peripheries.

The new ice—the medium-density amorphous ice.

The geophony of home—how the wind howls at 212 feet elevation.

It’s good to be home—wherever that is.

What I’m Reading:

“Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them go hungry to bed at night.”

— Audre Lorde / Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

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pale ash gray

Posted on February 6, 2023 by istsfor manity

A Day Gray February (redux)

Dark thought on a gray day —
gray in every gradation:

18% gray card gray
the ideal photographic gray

of wet city streets
& shards of east river gray

the cold of gainsboro
gray rain

dead-eye gray
pale ash gray —

the fortune teller cried last night
& auguries of apocalypse

revealed themselves
in halftone grayscale.

What I’m Reading:

“I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.”

— James Baldwin / Notes of a Native Son

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