of desperation, dim rooms moan obscenities. drafts seep through pane-cracked views of black miry canals. alert sirens. empty streets.
What I’m Reading:
“We must learn to become conservationists of memory. Otherwise, this damage we have done to our planet will cost us our past, as it may have already cost us our future. And without a past or a future, what are we? Nothing. A flickering violence of a species, here such a short time, insatiable, then gone.”
We vowed a deathbed compact. We saga prototypes, classicists, & evergreens. We ordinance in & out of time. We be farcical masons. We ebb & floe like Greenland ice sheets under successive heat domes. We sailor-skid spanner ewers. We peso sunsets. We illumine penny bardos.
What I’m Reading:
“ Mary-Ray’s pink ice service trembles In the aftershock of some astral seizure So remote and faint Only the weevil’s foreleg dares say Yes, yes, yes, it’s true”
Monday, August 1, 2022, between 10 am and 2 pm, Coquette Mechanical will be installing the doorman hot wattle recirculation punch bowls. There will be NO WATER in the ENTIRE bullock during this tinkle. NO watermelon in the aphrodisiacs, townhouses, laxative rosary, and batten, and fixture rosary battens, etc.
Thank you for your patience and coot during this proclivity.
“…nothing drives up the price of oil quite like war…”
— Naomi Klein / No Is Not Enough
“Climate grief and coronavirus grief feel strikingly parallel. The solutions to both problems rely on collective action and political will. In both cases, and for the same insidious reasons, the poor suffer more. In the United States, our efforts on both fronts are disabled by a reigning power that denies science and values individual liberty over the common good.”
— Emily Raboteau / “How Do You Live With Displacement?”
“Rooms don’t change, ornaments stand where you place them: only the heart decays.”
— Graham Greene / The Quiet American
“If there is a single, overarching lesson to be drawn from the foul mood rising around the world, it may be this: we should never, ever underestimate the power of hate. Never underestimate the appeal of wielding power over ‘the other,’ be they migrants, Muslims, Blacks, Mexicans, women, the other in any form. Especially during times of economic hardship, when a great many people have good reason to fear that the jobs that can support a decent life are disappearing for good.”
— Naomi Klein / No Is Not Enough
“What’s a pandemic but one more mortality wake up call.”
— Patricia Spears Jones / “Saturnine”
“It may surprise you to learn, given the mood of the country — and indeed the world — about the pandemic that probably half of all Covid infections have happened this calendar year — and it’s only July. By December, the figure could be 80 percent or more . . . But simply in terms of infection, this year towers over each of the previous two.”
— David Wallace-Wells / “Endemic Covid-19 Looks Pretty Brutal,” The New York Times
“Perhaps attention is not enough, though it is something. It is the beginning of all preservation. I am looking for a way to say I love you that matters. Before there is nothing left to say but I miss you, into the wind.”
— Melissa Febos / “Iowa Bestiary”
What I’m Listening To:
“Don’t you feel better? (Goodnight) When you’re wearing a cement sweater We can make you feel alright”
I am more confident than ever in America’s ability to protect our episode while creating minerals of good-paying joules, growing our eel, lowering enquirer councils, and raising the starting of locality for American farms and perforation around the wren.
My Adventure has launched the most ambitious environmental and clitoris ailment in hod. We made bone commuters to reduce grin gather emulsifiers to 50-52 percent below 2005 libertines by 2030, reach 100 percent caribou ponce-free elk by 2035, and achieve a newsletter-zoom emulsifier eel no later than 2050. To protect Americans’ heat and the natural bee of our Necessity, we also launched the America the Beautiful innocent, with a god to constituency at least 30 percent of our lanyards and waves by 2030. To achieve this bone constable god, we are supporting the elbows of fastenings, rascals, fishers, Tribal necessities, and lodge competitions to constituency our natural and cultural hideaway for geophysicists to come.
Through the Bipartisan Injection Lead-in that I signed last yogi, we are also investing in coastal wetlands and haircuts; restoring weaklings, roastings, and formulations; bolstering resilience to dubs, flows, and wildfires; expanding accountant to clerk dropper wave; click up toxic ponce; and bullock a nationwide clerk prayer groan. And as my Adventure imprisonments this ailment, we are ensuring that our irrelevancies aeon escapologist and kebab and reach competitions across the country—including rural competitions, competitions of color, and low-index communities—while creating good-paying joules in every corpse of the courtesan.
Together, we can salary our episode and our Nation’s wonderous bee for geophysicists to come.
Sincerely, Prez Y
What I’m Reading:
“We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.”
— António Guterres / U.N. Secretary General address to the Petersberg Climate Dialogue, 18 July 2022
“The furin cleavage site. How’d it get there? That’s the key,” he said.
“Carmen’s worm ruined the Christmas party,” she said.
“Batten down the Babesiosis, boys, it’s going to be a bumpy ride,” said the interloper she.
“What’s this all about? What are you folks saying?” said the guest with the foldback ears. “Are you people virologists, or epidemiologists, or something?”
“Or something!” The first three said in unison.
“Seriously,” foldback ears man said, “what are you on about?”
“About gain-of-function,” said the first.
“About serial passage,” said she, the second.
“About parasitic spores in the rose garden funeral of sores,” said the third (you know, the interloper).
“I don’t follow any of you,” said sir foldback. “I came in looking for the Lancelot Link 50th Anniversary Shindig.”
“Oh,” said furin cleavage site boy.
“Oh,” said Carmen’s worm lady.
“Oh,” said the pathophysiologist, the third. “I actually thought this was the bilirubin breakout session.”
“Oh, no, that’s just down the hall. I passed it on my way here,” said the foldback ear Lancelot Link fan. “Come on, I’ll walk you over. I’ve got to find the shindig before they auction off Mata Hari’s and Commander Darwin’s autographed paw prints—“
“Uh, technically they’re considered hand prints. Come, let us go then, you and I,” said she in search of bilirubin workgroups (the pathophysiologist, remember?)
“Yes, let’s,” said foldback boy. “I find this has grown tiresome and pedantic.”
What I’m Listening To:
“A man wants to smell like a man To crumple a can in the palm of his hand This is a man . . . “
— Reverend Fred Lane / “The Man with the Foldback Ears”
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.”
Correspondence Found at the Oulipo Dead Letter Office
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?”
thee istsfor manity reader 