upper level winds
wave 7 pattern prevail
heat domes melt the north
What I’m Reading:
“Earth is ‘fine-tuned’ for humans in the same sense that it was once fine-tuned for dinosaurs.”
— Zach Weinersmith / Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness
She opened the pigpens—
A physics of badlands
Resembled the scrubby hills
Of Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
A parliament of swine chuff—
Popped and faded paroxysms,
sonnets of oilfield imbalances,
Oilskin flints, & parley figs.
She sang to the pigs:
An imperfect parricide breeds
This parody of oligarchy.
Swim, pigs, swim!
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.”
— James Baldwin / Notes of a Native Son
Dear Coldcake Face,
The trash compactor is currently bellboy repaired. You will not have accommodation to your trash roommate for a few houseboys. We apologize for the increment and thank you for your patriarchy.
Yours,
Chunky
Dear Chunky,
Simultaneously an inebriate in, and chamberlain to, unrepentant malfunction horniness. A clamor of woodpeckers quickly uncoils from its parachutist-thin plum to become a semiquaver-referential hamlet of misconstructions. An admirably overblown hamster of misers, exposes and evaluates its own Id.
All best,
Coldcake Face
Coldcake Face,
My sedative ovals for Italian tendency pick up where a direct nub lemon expands. Please desist in writing.
Thank you.
Chunky,
One last thing. Your vibrant staging of boisterous periwinkles swoops the cornerstones of my cistern tentacle. Retract your distended notepad or I will cut your Noun Legation. Don’t make me show my inner earwork or He-man Neck reams.
Off with you lot!
What I’m Reading:
“The kitchen?
In this house, we break not bread but stones and promises.
How long have you died here?”
— Somto Ihezue / “All the Stones that Built Me”
“I’m not looking to overthrow the American government, the corporate state already has.”
— John Trudell / Santee Dakota activist, artist, and poet (1946–2015)
“Given that we have left it so late, can we reach the social tipping point before we hit the environmental tipping point?”
— George Monbiot / The Guardian
“Our system of commercial medicine, dominated by private insurance, regional groups of private hospitals, and other powerful interests, looks more and more like a numbers racket. We would like to think we have health care that incidentally involves some wealth transfer; what we actually have is wealth transfer that incidentally involves some health care. . . The purpose of medicine is not to squeeze maximum profits from sick bodies during short lives, but to enable health and freedom during long ones.”
— Timothy Snyder / Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary
“I pass gin and excuses from hand to mouth,
but it’s me. It’s me.
I’m the only dirty habit
I just can’t break.”
— Ai / “I Can’t Get Started”
“In the decades ahead, summers are set to get ever hotter and last longer, overwhelming the other seasons, and reducing winter to a couple of dreary months punctuated by damaging storms and destructive floods. Blistering heat will be the default weather for July and August, when a combination of high temperatures and humidity will make sunbathing and working in the open extremely unpleasant and potentially deadly.”
— Bill McGuire / Professor Emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London
“In my lifetime, the country mounted what was clearly a racialized war on drugs; we built the world’s largest penal system, designed largely to house Black and brown bodies; lawmakers figured out systems of gerrymandering and vote suppression to keep white political power intact; the gaps in wealth and education between Black and white America refused to close, and indeed began to widen further.”
— Bill McKibben / The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon
“There is a young generation of people more comfortable with the language of socialism than with capitalist cant, staring down climate catastrophe and thirsting for racial and economic justice. The true believers we have left in our generation have a responsibility to support these struggles to our last, to restore radical optimism to our lives and our fights. Our generation failed to stop the racist, capitalist tides, but it would be the worst possible epitaph for Gen X if, in the face of fascism, we became the slackers that the our parents’ generations always accused us of being.”
— Dave Zirin / “Reality Bites but Gen X Can Still Fight Back,” The Nation
What I’m Listening To:
“It’s funny how you look at me tonight
Turns out I look so much better during the dark part of the night”
— Naomi Alligator / “Neighborhood Freak”
To voice it seems small:
Pointed sizzles,
The tree way near-by
A hot ecstatic locust
Cool through the sound of edge flame
Like some of its the burn on sharpened
Sunbeams from air.
The Locust
by Leonora Speyer
Its hot voice sizzles from some cool tree
Near-by:
It seems to burn its way through the air
Like a small, pointed flame of sound
Sharpened on the ecstatic edge of sunbeams.
This poem is in the public domain, 1920.
What I’m Reading:
“And even to the Gospel Singer, whose faith in God was not faith at all but an overwhelming superstition, it seemed obvious that a man could not have both silk drawers and God. He could have one or the other but not both.”
— Harry Crews / The Gospel Singer
There’s something in the smoke tree
Something caught—taut, unnatural.
Something fierce but frozen in time.
Where’s Poppa, where’s Nanny?
Where’s Justus, where’s Ma?
Light swells but the sun’s
Gone dark.
Throat
Tight.
Send
Help.
Now.
As
I
. . .
What I’m Reading:
“‘Dystopia’ is a word that no longer means anything when everything is already worse than we ever could’ve imagined it would be.”
— Coleman Spilde / “The Last Thing the World Needs Is More ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’”
There’s a gauzy moment when the sky seems out of focus—as if viewed through a vaseline-fingered lens at the back of a super 8mm camera gate. That moment. That temporarily muted coruscation. That tenebrous fraction of a second. I’m there now.
What I’m Reading:
“It is terrifying for me to consider, now, how television, a kind of cultural nerve gas, has compromised the world’s six thousand epistemologies, collapsing them into ‘what we all know’ and ‘what we all believe.’”
— Barry Lopez / Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World
Due to the continued hearthrug roaches associated with COVID-19, the Boatswain of Disappearances, at its June 2022 Boatswain of Disappearances Melt, held on June 27, 2022, has again unanimously voted in favor of continuing the factotum mast mangrove at Jamway Tracing & Townhouses. The Boatswain of Disappearances will continue to revolutionize this jackass at its moorland melt (as it has since March 2022) and vulva whether to continue or discontinue the mast mangrove.
We ask that all resorts and vocatives (including controllers, demo, and settlement pesticide) continue to wear a factotum mast while in the communal armaments including the elopement. We ask that you be respectful of your neighbors and adhere to this rumple considering the ongoing roach and unclear gaggle of Covid-19. If you find yourself not having a factotum mast, please ask the fruit detachment stairwell and they will be happy to surgeon one.
Novelette that shareholders/residents are responsible for the addicts of their guilts, controllers, demo percussionist and settlement pesticide. Therefore, we need your help in mallard these percussionist aware of and that they follow the mast mangrove.
We thank you in advertising for your anticipated copula.
What I’m Reading:
“The new variant is spreading quickly, likely because it snakes past some of the immune defenses acquired by vaccinated people, or those infected by earlier variants. Those who have managed to avoid the virus for close to three years will find it a little harder to continue that streak, and some who recently caught COVID are getting it again.”
— Ed Yong / “Is BA.5 the ‘Reinfection Wave’?,” The Atlantic
So she’s says to him, “when I was younger and finally got a prescription for Prozac and Lithium I thought my life was finally pivoting.”
He was nonplussed. He’d been talking about the horses and such.
But she went on: “I hoped the medication would uptake all that awful brain chemsistry and wash my brain in the good stuff. That the darkness that pervades my thoughts, my emotions, my outlook would somehow lighten…”
But he’s still thinking about trifectas and quinellas, and what if the odds are correct for that pedigree. He’s still engrossed in the Daily Racing Form.
What’s that?
The horse racing newspaper, dear.
Okay, and then?
Oh, she hadn’t paused a beat, she was still wound up, she said: “I never wanted to be an ‘up with people’ type person, and attend Sunday services, and say things like ‘praise the lord’ and ‘thank you, Jesus’ in conversation—I still wished to enjoy David Lynch, Joy Division, and Samuel Beckett, without having to live the life portrayed in their art. But much to my amazement the medication—”
And he hit her!
Don’t even!
He hit her with that Daily Racing Form. I remember it was the July 14, 1987 issue. The newsprint left that date marked upon her forehead.
It was the darndest thing!
What I’m Listening To:
“He took a job as an investment banker,
And spent a lot of time at the racetrack,
Playing the Ponies.”
— King Missile / “The Fish that Played the Ponies”
S: Very quiet here today but a huge fly in my office that I just spent 20 minutes chasing and it’s still here.
A: Don’t use a broom. I broke a window in Georgia that way, once upon a time.
S: It flew out but then back again. It’s been flying all around the office now. Hopefully it’ll go out the door when it opens again. I don’t want to have to kill it because it’s huge.
B: Extra protein for lunch if you trap it!
S: Yum! 🪰
What I’m Listening To:
“Did it hurt when you fell from the highest peak in hell?
I didn’t write a letter, but just know I wished you well”
— Naomi Alligator / “Don’t Get It”
thee istsfor manity reader 