I don’t want to.
I’d rather not.
Please, no.
Negatory.
Nah.
No.
What I’m Reading:
“… the air around us—even where it’s clean, and smells like spring, and is filled with birds—is significantly changed. We have substantially altered the earth’s atmosphere.”
— William McKibben / The End of Nature
Weeds crack through asphalt
Vines choke exposed steel rebar
Man but a shadow
What I’m Reading:
“Without recognizing it, we have already stepped over the threshold of such a change. I believe that we are at the end of nature.”
— William McKibben / The End of Nature
We streamed into the stream
The water we stood in
We stood in
Only once
We eventually returned to where
We came from
We came from a desolate place
We began to melt away
I was not sorry
We had been in time
In time we’ll be again
Or we won’t
What I’m Reading:
“Anaphora makes a narrative.
Every risk a colorfield.”
— Laura Wetherington & Hannah Ensor / “Feel Fragments”
The woman in 316 drowned in a starless fog.
She danced herself dizzy and collapsed onto her bed. Then the fog moved in. She ingested too much of the antipsychotic. It altered her senses. The fog was impossibly thick—all at once—much too thick for this time of year. The air much too briny for this latitude. Seagulls materialized, much too loud and dimensional, like an overly rich headphone trip. She momentarily flashed back to a Pink Floyd planetarium laser show. She mumbled bitchin’ at an errant gull that darted dangerously close to her head. A blinding darkness seeped in from the corners of her vision, an hour later it ceded to a canker-gray and then a faint violet. At once the sound of a sick viscous medium—as if oil was washing up on a gray beach. The ooze swelled up around her. In this manner she was encased. In this manner she teetered under the influence.
Her room an obscure cube.
What I’m Reading:
“You can’t put a price on good sleep.
You can’t put a corpse back together.
One bomb dives into the sky like a rose.”
— Hala Alyan / “After Iraq Sweidan”
derecho blows in
like a spastic jumping bean
leaves fall in reverse
What I’m Reading:
“I write, that’s for sure.
Death, from the other side,
is levitating.”
— Melissa Sauma / “Reminiscence”
She woke up desirous of having acute control of mise en scène. She wanted to become a film director / cinematographer, and to live a future of more linearity and clarity. That night she explained her new found vision to her parents at the dinner table (glazed ham and haricots verts with herb butter).
Her mother said no, her fate was already sealed, and it was fatal. Her father added that she would come to her senses, and that it would rain intermittently tomorrow.
She arose, hovered over her parents, and said: call me Ozymandius . . . behold, and look upon me . . . She let out a little roar and poured the gravy over the table. She waved her hands, then laid hands on her parent’s heads and screamed: voila! Her parent’s heads disappeared, but their bodies quivered in an apoplectic dance.
She joined them, and they danced through the night.
What I’m Reading:
“I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.”
— Sylvia Plath / “Elm”
What can I offer?
A warring world where life is bereft of meaning.
Father on an amphetamine-fueled jag.
Mother, a dark figure, a smoke-like wraith moving through the house.
I stare and move my pen to the din of caffeinated voices, a garbled television, a tinkling piano.
The house is old and made out of coquina rock painted pale green.
I’m shoehorned in between them, and perched on the edge of my seat.
A whippoorwill spits an urgent call.
Someone will come in and check for irritation at 9:10.
Overnight the snow will turn to slush, then a sheath of ice.
What I’m Reading:
“The earth is warmer.
The crickets are still singing,
rehearsing for the last day.”
— Victoria Chang / “To the Hand”
The amplitude of echoes
Function like a phantom limb
Glucose seeps into the cells
Smell of white gas and charcoal
A swale once full of shoulder depth snow
Did you know Frazil are ice crystals
Formed in turbulent water, as in swift
Streams or rough seas?
Paradise? This isn’t paradise, son
You’ve cracked a tooth
The world doesn’t need anymore people
No further congestion or metal grates
I’ve apologized for the Spanish Inquisition
You can purchase a guayabera made China
Why did she pop up in a search for sorghum?
Her voice is a natural vibrato
Now you’ll have to get by on your own.
What I’m Reading:
“for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis”
— E. E. Cummings / “[since feeling is first]”
It’s all about noise. About the back and forth of improvisational counterpoint — an F flat ostinato call here, an arpeggio of the B scale in response there… like the scale of wildfires and flash flood cycles in call and response in a dozen places across the world… it doesn’t seem to end. Ash, dirt, and water transmogrified into an inexorable mud-wall swallowing all in its path… ten feet tall and half mile wide… There is no hope of escape in his mind. It’ll be his turn eventually… The skronk squalls out of his alto saxophone demand this much… But he can’t go on, even though the drummer beats an exquisite syncopation, and the bassist picks something near the upper bout so yawling and transcendent that he considers not walking away forever. But it’s not enough. The last note he ever blows is a C major. In C, he thinks, I’ve heard that before. He drops the sax as ceremoniously as thee final mic-drop, and bares his teeth — more grimace than smile — to the two dozen assembled in the dark. He beats it for the nearest bridge of fatal height. This is thee finale of seem.
What I’m Reading:
“But art doesn’t have to make sense. It doesn’t even need to be good. So don’t worry about being smart and let go of being ‘good.’”
— Jerry Saltz / “Jerry Saltz’s 33 Rules for Being an Artist”
Her sickness resolved—
Distilled, rasped clean by fever
Dreams, sharp even here.
What I’m Reading:
“No star burns forever . . . the world will eventually literally end.”
— Emily St. John Mandel / Sea of Tranquility
thee istsfor manity reader 