Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

We were nostalgic for foolishness, because it meant wisdom might matter. We were nostalgic for fakery, because it meant realness might matter. We were nostalgic for trompe l’oeil, for fool’s gold, for crocodile tears, for Mercator globes, for mimeographs, for velveteen, for signifiers unmoored from signifieds.

— Donna Stonecipher / “The Ruins of Nostalgia”

If I fall silent and words ripen
it’s the voice of an olive tree in its quiet seed.

— Ronaldo Kattan / “Two-Blooded”

My intent, like his, was to take a singular interest in all I encountered. To turn my attentions away from the noxious chatter of Washington, the tribal feuding on television and computer screens, and care only for the particularities I found along the way. To shrink my horizons to that of a walking man and to root my views of the world in what I encountered step by step. To honor and respect what I saw.

— Neil King Jr. / American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Rememberance

Half-naked in her ankle-length dressing-gown,
my mother is battling with mosquitoes —

or not so much battling with as bowing to —
the phalanxes of bloodthirsty mosquitoes

that whine their high-pitched whines in her hair
and will not let her sleep. Not a chance.

— Selma Hill / “Zvuv”

Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.

— Elizabeth Kolbert / The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

The math

is grammar school: X thousand workers,
Y hundred jobs. The shoe factory closed last year.
Nobody’s starving, but the church is in fear
it’ll lose some paying customers.

— Thomas Lux / “Somebody’s Aunt Out Swabbing Her Birdbath”

Stopped in cars, we are waiting to accelerate
along different trajectories. I catch the rising
pitch of a train—today one hundred nine people
died in a stampede converging at a bridge;
radioactive water trickles underground
toward the Pacific Ocean; nickel and copper
particulates contaminate the Brocade River.
Will this planet sustain ten billion people?

— Arthur Sze / “Doppler Effect”

What I’m Listening To:

Hail, hail, the Eyeball Kid
Well, the first time I saw him was a Saigon jail
Cost me $27 dollars just to go his bail I said, “Your name will be in lights, and that’s no doubt
But you just got to have a manager, that’s what it’s all about”

— Tom Waits / “Eyeball Kid”

What I’m Reading:

Our bodies carry everything that has ever happened to us, the way the land carries everything of humanity.

— Lidia Yuknavitch / “Unearthed”

What I’m Reading:

I need solitude. I have come forth to this hill … to see the forms of the mountains on the horizon — to behold and commune with something grander than man. 

— Henry David Thoreau / Journal, August 14, 1854

What I’m Reading:

Forests burn into their clearings. A sense of dread.
It has something to do with the flags of the age.
There are huge weapons, poison gases, insecticides
to injure us.
Who’s holding them?

— Daniela Gioseffi / “Falling Into Sand”

What I’m Reading:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

— Abraham Lincoln / First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861

What I’m Reading:

fist of this tyrant kingdom: my city
of industry, my city of atom bomb,
my city of warheads, of plutonium kept
clandestine, of slow killings
accomplished to more efficiently
kill, of truths & metals
forced underground

— Marissa Davis / “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dead Fish”

What I’m Reading:

My mother smiles at walnuts
as though time in the heart never started.

— Brian Matur / “As Though”

we the masters

of the heated thermals — rising
lifting in the swell
headed south like geese unspooled
unlooosed upon a slough of icebergs

how tall is a dark sky city?

searchlights illuminate the falling snow
no auroras just cracks in the ice
cracks in the ice cracks in the ice — cracks

3am a flat hissing noise
a strange hiatus as giant wind turbines slow

then stop
a breakdown in reciprocity

you suspected it when you saw the foothills
you were certain when you saw the distant mountain ridges

light gray upon white hard to distinguish
sea from sky — there it is
a margin no bigger no longer
than what it reminds us of
it doesnt surprise us what we are
what we’ve become

we are not beautiful objects of contemplation

this is all like a dusty sun bleached diorama
we contain nothing but shadows —
and our shadows are long

What I’m Reading:

Sometimes misadventures are the best adventures. Sometimes a tent is a room of one’s own. And sometimes you don’t know what to do but you do the best you can.

— Laura Killingbeck / “Life in the Yard”