thee istsfor manity reader

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

at the catholic hospice (redux)

my atheist father is tracing lines in the air
they’re shooting at us from the barricades, he says
it’s a half mile away and i felt the bullet fly by my head
the bastards are down from the sierra
che guevara, hijo de puta!
whispers float in from the hallway
followed by a lazy fly
the door slightly ajar
frames a flash of the priest i told to stay away
i watch my father’s hand trail
down to his side near the catheter that snakes
its way down to the rust colored murk
of the waste bag hanging below the bed
caña, he whispers, sugarcane
as the fly lands on his trembling hand
a desiccated death mask has emerged
all sockets and bony cheeks in
stark relief
his eyes a flurry of twitches
as he runs through the sugar cane field
the fly on the wall listens intently
ay, que oscuridad
el comercio esta cerrado
in the darkness that envelops him at midday
business is closed
a half minute later he siphons
another hard breath
the fly heads for cover
behind the blackout blinds
the man next door starts anew
on the cuban national anthem
the sixth time this hour
his voice trails off after the first verse
as his daughter turns up the volume on
one life to live
another man down the hall begs for mercy
then my father says
mama, me quiero bajar
mother, please help me down
the fly bangs repeatedly into the window
in a dizzying drone

What I’m Reading:

“i’m not revolutionary i’m regular. nothing radical in being the enemy of america, the country of enemies. we find our laughter between the horror.”

— Danez Smith / “anti poetica”

Interlude in Wake

It is recorded in some musty tome that in 1456 Pope Callixtus III excommunicated the comet to end all comets. A heathen astral rock glowing white-hot as it streaked across the sky. The stars are signifiers. The popes are pontificators.

This is an interlude, in wake—(with burrowing owls)—apropos of nothing.

What I’m Reading:

“i haven’t been much lately—the dark season lasted years, swallowing seasons, collecting itself in my shallows like a motor-sheered fish.”

— Danez Smith / “anti poetica”

Fou!

His ambition drained in a scruff
of the neck twist
a meager remembrance
of his days spent in a robe

His teeth chattering
he’s on apprenticeship
as ornithologist
and taxidermist

Fou!
says the Past
inserting its finger
in god knows what

He slogs knee deep
in hummingbird angles
tenuous and blur-fast

Before him shine the bones
of the pitiable Condor of Shiva

He is comforted in the knowledge
that the afflatus was hard won
speaking in tongues
wearing the cloaks of invisibility

His body taught
with a dab
of holy pedantry

Wombat love!
he cries

He walks out of the room
millions of people watching
on their television screens
without the slightest knowledge
of antipodal politics or wombat love

At that at that very instant
you arose
and turned off
your television

Wondering

What I’m Reading:

“My solitude is
like the  grass.  I  become  so  aware of its presence  that it  too
begins to feel like an  audience.”

— Victoria Chang / “Grass, 1967”

What I’m Reading:

“I know simply that the sky will last longer than I.”

— Albert Camus / The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays