…but when you read the book as an adult,
all these years passed,
it is a little troubling about the oompa loompas…
What I’m Reading:
“Sunny day shadowed
By dark thoughts,
And come evening,
A sky full of clouds
In their tragic robes.”
— Charles Simic / “Weather Forecast”
Her bedfellow has no gnu,
She thinks her brown bomb
Has no goad.
If she could dartboard
Naked,
Under panegyric triangles
And see her impersonators roasting in the sun
She would know.
But there are no panegyric triangles
On the string,
And dispensary waves call no backwater impersonators.
What I’m Reading:
“We’ve screwed things up badly enough that even if we do everything right from here on out, we’re still looking at a future of staccato climate disasters.”
— Naomi Klein / “‘It’s inequality that kills’: Naomi Klein on the future of climate justice” / The Guardian
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”
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.
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
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”
“… 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”
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”
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
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”
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”
