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”
Small sharply defined puffs— No heat, no air compressors, Gaskets, rubber seals, rubber feet— Cloud-like, a shy homunculus, Trapped beneath a 5 o’clock crowd.
What I’m Reading:
“The above passage is carefully calculated to deprave the cultivated reader.”
“In a shared world we cannot assume that any way of understanding, ordering, or valuing is correct or final. Rather, we are required to attend to others in their specificity, to ask and re-ask with them: What matters here and what else might be possible?”
To find your own hand Handing them money To give the bleating goat Fat and red, a placenta Pulled open as if she had bitten Cold fingers combing The air in the north Eyes rimmed pink
Don’t worry just call it One long winter of plague
Perhaps they were right There is nothing between us
But
The head hung in a tree Old barnacled umbilicus Balled small enough to fit Inside Your mother’s shadow
“My nickname on his lips is all wrong. It’s like by saying it, he’s trying to make me feel like he’s a friend, instead of a mess masquerading as my father.”
“The human eyelid is not teartight (happily for the human eye).”
— Samuel Beckett / Murphy
“Mom makes a list of chores for my brother and I to avoid being slapped Or asked to assume the position from across the room.”
— Diana Marie Delgado / “People to Run From”
“hope you can find a poem or two in these; if not return those you cannot use, or the works. rejection is good for the soul. my soul is now a mule.”
— Charles Bukowski / On Writing
“It was my mother who taught me the one worthwhile thing: when they ask if you like what you see in the mirror, pretend that what they mean is what’s behind you—the shower curtain, the tile, the wallpaper, whatever’s there.”
— Garielle Lutz / “Mine”
“Do what you must, be wise, cut your vines And forget about hope. Time goes running, even As we talk. Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair.”
—Horace / from “Ode I. 11”
“… What if part of the reason so many of us have failed to act is not because we are too selfish to care about an abstract or seemingly far-off problem-but because we are utterly overwhelmed by how much we do care? And what if we stay silent not out of acquiesence but in part because we lack the collective spaces in which to confront the raw terror of ecocide?”
— Naomi Klein / This Changes Everything
“Neary leaned against the Pillar railings and cursed, first the day in which he was born, then—in a bold flash-back—the night in which he was conceived.”
— Samuel Beckett / Murphy
What I’m Listening To:
“And I What if I’m a weirdo? Maybe I’m a weirdo What if I’m a weirdo? Maybe I’m a weirdo”
