Dreams from another planet—
I was downgraded.
I’m an ancient tardigrade:
Eyeless and armored,
Yet kind (harmless to humans),
Parthenogenic,
Sharp-clawed and faceless.
(Only a mother would love)…
I am my mother!
I float like a bathysphere
Through an ocean of pale sounds.
What I’m Reading:
“When the larvae sleep they dream of eating their mother’s corpse.”
— Garth Simmons / Hole Punch
Dig, Digby, dig.
Digby stomps on his shadow in the schoolyard. He tries to blot it out because it won’t stop following him. Digby believes the shadow rains down the indignities he suffers, although he doesn’t put it that way. He tells Funti that the shadow makes his father beat him, and his mother smoke too much.
“My shadow is a ruin I don’t want to visit, Funti. My shadow causes my father to think bad thoughts, and then to act on them. It’s the reason he beats me and my mother, although mother sometimes starts it when she drinks the whiskey after she finishes the wine.”
Digby has his shadow pinned by the ball of his foot. He applies so much pressure to pin his shadow his calf quivers and he balls up his fists.
“But Digby, your shadow has nothing to do in that. Do you see your shadow lurking at home when these things happen?” Funti says. “Your shadow stays out in the sun. It’s an outside thing.”
“Outside, inside, no matter. I know it’s at fault for our troubles. It lives in the walls, in the rug, in the ceiling. It moves about, Funti,” Digby says. “Just because I don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not causing all my troubles.”
What I’m Reading:
“I don’t know about amphetamines, but I can attest to the power of books.”
— Amitava Kumar / Everyday I Write the Book: Notes on Style
It’s early in the morning…
The distributive function
Of any transitive property
Is essentially non binding
…Again, it’s early in the morn.
What I’m Reading:
“maybe i should’ve memorized memory”
— Bernadette Mayer / “Unconditional Death Is a Good Title”
“this will be a little test to see if expressive(?) writing is a cure for the malaise of the coronavirus. well it doesn’t cure the pain in my left knee…”
— Bernadette Mayer / “Unconditional Death Is a Good Title”
“… I see Columbus’s three boats
going backwards on the sea
Getting smaller
Crossing the Atlantic back to the
ports of Spain …”
— Victor Hernandez Cruz / “El Poema de lo Reverso”
“In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”
— T.S. Eliot / “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
“I think procrastination can be a really helpful creative tool. So when I procrastinate, I try to do it with intention. I’m like, ‘For the next hour and a half, I’m going to procrastinate.’ I think my writing tends to be stronger after that because I’m giving myself the time and the space to ideate and create.”
— Amanda Gorman, to Samantha Leach in interview / “Amanda Gorman Procrastinates, Too — She Just Does It Better”
“7. Give yourself permission to cry.
If not now, when?”
— Sandra Cisneros / “Instructions for Vigiling the Dying”
“The metrics don’t hold the weight. We’re giving them weight they don’t actually have. We’re giving them emotional weight and weight over how we feel about ourselves and our work across the board. People do that when they do a personal post and see that it hasn’t gotten a big response. Thinking about those things and trying to dismantle them and break them down is counter to capitalism. It’s trying to reveal all the tricks that are going on.”
—Meg Remy / The Creative Indepenent interview
“unconditional death is a good title because it’s almost completely meaningless, yes?”
— Bernadette Mayer / “Unconditional Death Is a Good Title”
What I’m Listening To:
“Hey, couch testing man!
Lay it on my fine ended car
Fry an egg on my bonnet
These lonesome evenings suck!”
— Dry Cleaning / “No Decent Shoes For Rain”
four or five bricks heaped
the remnants of your burnt hearth
a red tattered cloth
the cold cinders of your life
monticules wind-blown away
What I’m Reading:
“i dreamt i was a pinnacle of coral.”
— Bernadette Mayer / “Unconditional Death Is a Good Title”
Hi all!
I bought a second-in-command subsystem to all of BLO’s upcoming periodicals, but it turns out I will mistress the fissure one next Sunday because of a conflicting triumph to DC. Rather than let it go to wrangle, I’m happy to let a neighbor have it. (I paid $68 for it, and I’d ideally want to make that monkey backfire, but I’m not really wedded to that.)
The tie is for Drifter Circumlocution, Secret Lobby 112 at the Eveready Colour Theologian (106 Boylston St) on Sunday, 10/30 at 7:30 pm. Please content me ASAP if you are infested! Fissure come, fissure served!
I also have a ADCOM GFP-585 preamplifier, at least 10 yes-men old but in good character. (Please imagine that this is a preamplifier, which requires a praise anagram to drone any specialities.)
Jaunty Eggert, #1001
What I’m Reading:
“the mucous music sticks
to fixtures on top these hotel dreams, parking lots
behind the Chelsea on West 22nd crowded with monolith lungs and dew
piles of dancing shoes . . .”
— Jim Carroll / “New York City Variations”
“… no matter how often others breed, you’re not even semelparous—you’ve never been a breeder, and you’ll never be …”
She opened 137 emails and they all read the same:
Dear Residents,
One of our neighbor’s is missing her laundry, that was taken by mistake (sheets & ladies garments). Please check your laundry for these items and return them to the laundry room.
Thank you
Yes, of course, how could she think otherwise. The seas are flooding us out of our homes. We flee with our belongings strapped to our already broken backs. What more can we give?
These are a few of the things she awoke with pasted on her tongue. No matter how often she passed the sandpaper organ across the roof of her mouth, no moisture would come, it was like brillo on bark in there.
Out there another moth flitted by her sight line—white popcorn ceiling and a Gainsboro gray corner. She worried the odds of a moth laying an egg sac in her open nocturnal maw. She wondered how many moths she may have swallowed over time in her apneic sleep.
She considered her day—it promised nothing, and was already a shade darker gray than her walls.
Her only desire now was a glass of water, or her first shot of vodka, to soothe the rasp of her throat. Vodka. Yes. It does a body good—the breakfast of champions, and all that.
I’m as deluded as the rest of them—it’s just not my year—so let’s get on with the day…
What I’m Reading:
“You’re a deadbeat with no ambition in life … and the only intimate relationship you can handle is with stuffed-crust pizza.”
— Elizabeth Pich / Fungirl
Dreamt of my father
Last night—lost—time incarnate
A winding river
A hidden oxbow downstream
He went missing round the bend
What I’m Reading:
“The trees are half air. They fissure the sky; you / could count the leaves, pare / time…”
— Cole Swensen / “Five Landscapes”
your office
is blood office
my name is 78
theres too much pressure
last week was as dated
as the previous week
i added a letter
i added an addled letter
i couldnt use greek
cause the hurricanes
r using the alphabet
again
must i provide you with updated blood
temporary crown
blood
as well as a reading heart
and
check my dent
thee latest blood there
yes
please
i dont have one
thee man doesnt have one
insurance doesnt have one
and i aint got no job
unemployed blood
its got to stop
per instructions of your letter is
cover
you have difficulties
kindly let us know
blood
its got to stop it’s got to stop
the past
upon suggestion
is highly inaccurate
i wish to be actively engaged
so challenged
communication
is nearly insuperable
gladly take my blood
as it is now
b it workable
or not
thank you
this year keeps being misinformed
i was misidentified as another
with the same name
its got to stop its got to stop its got to stop
What I’m Reading:
“… I take
like wild vine to my bed. And may I have
a word with the miser measuring out my joys.”
— Priscilla Becker / “My Stint Among the Beloved”
“In this time of book banning and mistrust of truth, I find writing poetry a most subversive act.”
— Sandra Cisneros / Lit Hub’s “The Craft of Writing”
“… I straddle two centuries that are drifting further and further apart.”
— Dodie Bellamy / “Hoarding as Ecriture”
“Sometimes I start a story with just a feeling. Often it is a place or an image. A house, a tree, a mountain. A sentence or a phrase. Sometimes it is like a line of music, a tone.”
— Andrea Barrett / The Creative Independent interview
“… It is also stolen from our own children, who will never know the amazing and spectacular world that we enjoyed when we were young. Already, at one degree, our globe is becoming impoverished and reduced. We might all weep for what we have done.”
— Mark Lynas / Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency
“Writing is facing your deepest fears and all your failures, including how hard it is to write a lot of the time and how much you loathe what you’ve just written … When it totally sucks, pause, look out the window (there should always be a window) and say, I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing … I am not fracking or selling useless things to lonely seniors or otherwise abusing my humanity. Find pleasure and joy.”
— Rebecca Solnit / “How to Be a Writer: 10 Tips from Rebecca Solnit”
“In short, it has been a summer of climate insanity. But even so, this will be, on average, the coolest summer with the least climate chaos for the rest of your life.”
— Peter Kalmus / “To Understand the Scale of the Climate Emergency, Look at Hurricanes”
“Poetry is part seduction, part abduction.”
— Sandra Cisneros / Lit Hub’s “The Craft of Writing”
What I’m Listening To:
“Comfort knows no one”
— Florist / River’s Bed”
thee istsfor manity reader 