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.”
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?”
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
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.”
“Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.”
— Audre Lorde / “Poetry Is Not A Luxury”
“With words at your disposal, you can see more clearly. Finding the words is another step in learning to see.”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer / Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses
“We will sit and watch the body of water That we once called a sort of death You know even in my dreams You say I’ll never get it right This is not a dream We are burning here with no escape”
— Dorothea Lasky / “This Beautiful Planet”
“Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.”
— James Baldwin / Notes of a Native Son
“in the wind / an inky air
in the air / finchness
in the ink / a stone”
— Elizabeth Willis / “In Strength Sweetness”
“the windows are open but butterflies don’t fly in to display a sense of love”
— Jesús Papoleto Meléndez / “spring again”
“I saw my name in print the other day with 1932 and then a blank and knew that even now some grassy bank just waited for my grave.”
— Linda Pastan / “1932”
What I’m Listening To:
Old, old, old, old Old never looked so good Lumps, bumps, deaf, grumps Punk is a full-time job
A note stated that his left arm was touring the Costa Brava, visiting the sites where Joan Miró sketched a biomorphic vision or two—while the right arm was tracing Darwin’s “finch routes” through the Galapagos.
Over the next weeks the arms sent him postcards, twice-weekly, as they extended their travels to the former ice fields beyond Ilulissat, slowly paddled the Zambezi River, and covered portions of the Annapurna and Appalachian Trails. The arms had a fruitful summer.
Back at home Hortensio became well acquainted with the adroitness of his feet. They were both usurpers, ever trying to make him realize the superfluity of his arms.
Daily they harangued him to break off relations with his peripatetic and prodigal arms: “The fortune they are spending! Their wanton disregard of your dexterity!” was the constant cavil.
At his feet’s prodding, Hortensio wrote both arms a note at their next appointed stops—Iquitos for the right arm; Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky for the left—telling them not to bother returning home: “Your services are no longer required.”
At the right foot’s prompting, Hortensio filed a complaint with the State Department which prompted an alert from Homeland Security. “That’ll fix ‘em,” the left foot said.
His arms are wandering rogues to this day.
Detail of Louise Bourgeois’ “Cell (Hands and Mirror)” / 1995 / ICA, Boston
What I’m Reading:
“Every year I live before society collapses is another year I won’t feel was stolen from me by the appalling recklessness of my own kind”
— Emily Flake / “Reasons I’m Glad I’m Not A Young Person”
thee istsfor manity reader 