a welfare check on my chickpeas a moral bankruptcy pulls me from a restraint on my stoop a clue found in my miniature espresso
rasp—my neurons are frayed while packing peanuts + PFAS dilute my membranes thumb-actuated airguns are hard to beat
silt screws cut like symbols (or is it cymbals?) weaned from reluctance + rigmarole merchants it’s the threat of the enema that never threatens that threatens incessantly
a glob of hornet + a flicker of worm a channel for my undesirable tendencies i eat the burglary of unmediated terms
What I’m Reading:
The whole Third Term Project isn’t actually about Trump. The people behind it know he will likely be dead or enfeebled by 2029. It is about them, the vastly unpopular group around Trump, wanting to grift us forever without elections.
Feeling particularly frisky and having been born in foul moonlight amidst the rancor of heat and the solitary investiture of a love shorn largesse — and because of this tainted spite — he bears a maggot face full of youthful miscarriage. A little awkward. A little stagy. Full of concocted melodrama and a derangement that recalled O’Connor’s Misfit: No pleasure but meanness. It’s no real pleasure in life. . .
Huh?
Despite your emerging self, despite your arc of transcendence, you fear there may be something to that bit of causticorioum. You bind your feet and clench you teeth and fling yourself at the open window. Your defenestration keeps you youthful looking — never mind the Botox. Your wish for a properly dramatic soundtrack to your speeding descent is fulfilled with shards from twelve-tone symphonies, something abortional from Berg or Webern — or better yet, both superimposed and played at once. This echoes from the left corner of the sky.
Oh, the sky.
Oh, the street.
Here’s the top of a cab.
Headlong. Accordionesque.
A suppuration of madras lentils or a dal makhani — or better yet, both superimposed and manifesting (curiously) at once.
This is the movement of fear.
What I’m Reading:
All it took was for a lot of seemingly decent people to put the wrong person in power, and then pay for their innocent choice.
I’m the pit of a floating wreck. Decked in dreck and delivered with the deckle of dynastic disjuncture — stop me from breeding before this sickness festoons another dead end generation. A wireless conflict limned shows phrenological depressions — your skull is a paradise of the longing for extinction. I’m superstitious of cemetery intimacies and apparitions with no soils or tactile imposition on this earth. Find me a day of the dead sugar skull phylactery factory for my arms feel naked and uninhibited and my hands uncontrolled specters at the chopping block of reason. Once I witnessed humanity acting humanely — just that once. Since then it’s reliquary aplomb, nuclear options, and dayglo charnel enemas. What a wonderful world. I stand in the shadows, that’s where I look best. Your peculiar gait suits me — a shuffle of consternation. You appear lost. I’m distinguished by my lack of intellect and abundance of orifices. Aren’t we two of a perfect pair?
What I’m Reading:
When you’re born into this world, you’re given a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat.
an eye asquint at weather roam through the ruins frontispiece in shards anew
cling to my vestments forks in the road are not forks my hairshirt newly shredded
you look up and smile blinded by the ecliptic — apocalyptic — you shall never attain this the world barren bears nothing
What I’m Reading:
Climate fiction is one reason ‘dystopian realism’ is increasingly ‘near-future’ rather than set in some inscrutable distant time. We’re in an era where we don’t have to construct thought experiments to see what a dark future might look like, because these days it feels the end of world as we know it is looming over us. In fact, it can make writing a near-future dystopian a tricky endeavor: Predictions might come true before a book is published.
— Yume Kitasei / “‘It’s Okay But It’s Also Really Not.’ When Dystopian Fiction is No Longer a Thought Experiment” / Lithub
The A plane by way of A. Johnson, brought down by ritual and lack of victuals. Deadeth on arrival: thorny ocotillos and twenty minute count downs. Tomorrow I’ll learn about writing what you don’t know—what throws you. Where have you been all these haggard years? My tears in time are tin stripes running down the length of your inebriate life. You left me unsure of myself and strident and missing the glyphs of my youth. You perish-wither— periscopes down—the Monitor and Merrimack your bedmates at the bottom of the bay. Bring back the ironclads by way of Iron Beer, or at least pass me a Materva because it is tomacal.
What I’m Reading:
… every expansionist power needs a good story to justify its plunder.
With the events in Cuba and the Philippines, the United States increasingly became a “culture of war” with a sense of global purpose, prone to jingoistic eruptions. The rhetoric of war became that of patriotism.
— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire
In my day, we knew how to drown plausibly, to renounce the body’s seven claims to buoyancy.
— Ben Lerner / “The Lichtenberg Figures”
The Splendid War created this, becoming the template for every American “small war” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It was a “war of choice” that started in a wave of idealism and disintegrated into brutality. America’s dependence on overwhelming force would form the assumption that, as in Cuba, war should be quick and relatively bloodless. Instead, outgunned opponents became an insurgency: the U.S. response throughout the coming decades would proceed with such near-identical ruthlessness as to seem scripted. Though usually treated as separate conflicts, the wars in Cuba and the Philippines should be seen as a continuum—one that begins with two similar Cuban and Filipino poet-martyrs who shape their nations’ identities and ends with the United States entering as a savior, only to become a scourge . . . As we’d already done to Native Americans, in order to save them, we had to kill them.
Not until the conflict in Cuba and the Philippines did America’s love of war become so bold that one can track the transformation.
— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire
no more money for the endless throat of money. no more syllogisms that permission endless suffering. no more.
— Sam Sax / “Ode to Those Who Block Tunnels and Bridges”
The culture of war became indelible: a new Orwellian world in which, according to Paul Fussell, war becomes “peacekeeping” and the acceptance of any act “in the name of freedom” a citizen’s duty. “Those who challenged the authenticity of American altruism were by definition evil-doers and mischief makers,” observed the historian Archibald Cary Coolidge. “So fully were Americans in the thrall of the moral propriety of their own motives as to be unable to recognize the havoc their actions often wrought on lives of others.”
— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire
Today my mum said she doesn’t remember arriving at my house with a dishcloth, doesn’t remember me telling her my kitten stayed overnight at the vet, that I’d be coming over to help with bills. What she remembers is now. She knows her memory is a ship leaving port without permission . . .
— Kelli Russell Agodon / “Dementia Is a New Way to Be Buddhist”
It’s easy for moral certitude and blindness to be one. At its heart lay a darker certainty: those who needed our help were lesser beings—because they were not American. It lay in the order of things that they accept American guidance; dissenters were not only misguided but corrupt, and thus enemies. The myth plays out often—in my life, from the Bay of Pigs to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The leaders we elect always act surprised when things go awry.
Since one classical definition of mental illness is the tendency to repeat obviously self-destructive behavior, one wonders how deeply our cherished myths make us willfully blind and mad.
— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire
What I’m Listening To:
Everything we love is gonna start to die It’s only a matter of time Till all we love has gone and died It’s only a matter of time Till all we love has died At least we tried At least we tried
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:
JR: Could you tell us your biggest sources of inspiration?
LK: The bitterness. I am very sad if I think of the status of the world now. This is my deepest inspiration. This could be also an inspiration for the next generation or generations in literature. Inspiration to give something for the next generation, somehow to survive this time because these are very, very dark times and we need much more power in us to survive this time than before.
— László Krasznahorkai, to Jenny Rydén / “First reactions. Telephone interview, October 2025” / nobelprize.org
One thing that is so striking about the modern age is that we’ve lost an ethical vocabulary in engaging with leaders. I mean, fundamentally, what is Donald Trump? He is shameless. It would be very difficult for Aristotle or Cicero or a Renaissance theorist of politics, or indeed the writers of the American constitution, to imagine this degree of shamelessness, this degree of contempt for constitutions, contempt for minorities, contempt for the truth, the open performance of immorality. And very difficult also to imagine that we would have entered a world where we, at some level, are so tempted to just enjoy the spectacle, and have just lost the ability to be shocked that every day he does three or four things which in the old world would have shocked us to our core.
— Rory Stewart / “How to live a good life in difficult times: Yuval Noah Harari, Rory Stewart and Maria Ressa in conversation” / The Guardian
O get me off this train of consanguinity — the congruency of my talents wane. This bass line leaves me ill. This tune is a torrent of deterrents. This road craggy, rent, and ruined.
Can you make purchase and navigate? And what of the fog and interminable rain?
Signs read: Say NO to rat poison.
Is nothing safe?
Ascetic and anesthetized he moves through life in quandaries and sobs, through the ether in quadrants and smogs. He arrives at the media res by ditching the prefatory rags. He travels the cystic creeks with abettors of abattoir asininity, and dires foul the weather with fever speakers.
He delayed his belay because the descent was vitreous not vertiginous — this may sound incongruous, even spurious, but he’d like to throttle himself with a chapped leather belt in an autofictional immolation — an authorial affectation not worth the pissbottle it’s printed on —
and on and on and on —
this infinite obloquy goes on.
What I’m Reading:
in the story i was taught alongside my first language it takes god six days to make the terrible world and on seventh day he rested and on the eighth we blocked traffic.
— Sam Sax / “Ode to Those Who Block Tunnels and Bridges”
You told me once you believed in God. The old man waved his hand. Maybe, he said. I got no reason to think he believes in me. Oh I’d like to see him for a minute if I could. What would you say to him? Well, I think I’d just tell him. I’d say: Wait a minute. Wait just one minute before you start in on me. Before you say anything, there’s just one thing I’d like to know. And he’ll say: What’s that? And then I’m goin to ast him: What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway? I couldnt put any part of it together. Suttree smiled. What do you think he’ll say? The ragpicker spat and wiped his mouth. I dont believe he can answer it, he said. I dont believe there is a answer.
thee istsfor manity reader 