The twelfth day of the month was Copperhead Monday. Serpentine was the look we were going for. Beatific upper register notes is what Maria was reaching for: Ta da la ta da la dao, was what she sang to a supper club of adoring mengeese eyeing a pair of lady rattlesnakes.
Midnight. Tuesday morning. Applause. Thunderous.
Savorous twistings of moonglow hairs into chignons and much dispensing with shoes and underthings. There was nothing like a cobra line dance to make it libertine-free and parsimonious-lite.
(I, the author, heard someone order a chocolate stout. “Not served here,” was the reply.)
Vehement—something akin to buzzards on parade: wing-wide convection current surfing loafers—something free, not imagined, not paid for, not patented and surely made to disappoint.
Asseverations to “live fully and create in the midst of the desert” notwithstanding, Maria went home alone.
What I’m Reading:
… the perennial question of whether the United States still lingered in a pre-fascist twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago and the light they thought they saw was coming only from millions of tubes all showing the same bright colored shadows …
A negative feedback loop. Petroglyphs and door flips. Petrichor — a savage feedback loop — a savage republic. Put out the fire.
Frying in its own fat. Permafrost melting. The warming leading to fire. Fire and friars with intention — without compunction — never knowing regret.
All portent from here. The dark briars thick with illness.
Without agency — a magnificent disaster — falling and implicated. Smothering never staying. Praying without saying a thing. Prattling.
Sneak a chunk up your pant leg — white hot and abrupt. A life of impunity ends abruptly on a moonless dirt road. This country is vast and vacuous.
What I’m Reading:
Even now, as this vile age comes to a shuddering, bathetic end, we are so polite. We continue to buy things. We write letters. We argue about protocol. We say this or that can’t happen, or won’t. They couldn’t possibly. But it can, and they will.
— Carmen Maria Machado / Introduction to new edition of I Who Have Never Known Men
Electric bedroom New witch Add wall next to track Wedge or arc Change entry
Too damaged by Change We want to keep them at 8 foot height Close Metal doors No change to living hard pain Change vanity Apart (we may do this ourselves) No change to pain
What I’m Reading:
The body and the spirit are a bicycle you ride carefully and uphill and for how long?
. . . and he looked out to where the grass was running in the wind under the cold starlight as if it were the earth itself hurtling headlong and he said softly before he slept again that the one thing he knew of all things claimed to be known was that there was no certainty to any of it. Not just the coming of war. Anything at all.
— Cormac McCarthy / The Crossing
The last day on earth
will be short. It will be quick. The car engines will suck back their toxic fumes. The shepherds will put down their sticks. The phones will ring all at once and then all at once will stop ringing and no one will pick up. Everyone will be sitting on something. A flat rock. A dirty pavement. The edge of a ruffled bed.
— Rewa Zeinati / “The last day on earth”
Language as medicine? Literature as ceasefire? Maybe when/if it’s over, fire from the sky snuffed out, some of the rubble lifted, and a survivor emerges.
— Marilyn Hacker / “The Returnee”
‘I wonder if a sillier and more ignorant catachresis than “Mother Nature” was ever perpetrated? It is because Nature is ruthless, hideous, and cruel beyond belief that it was necessary to invent civilization. One thinks of wild animals as savage, but the fiercest of them begins to look almost domesticated when one considers the viciousness required of a survivor in the sea; as for the insects, their lives are sustained only by intricate processes of fantastic horror. There is no conception more fallacious than the sense of cosiness implied by “Mother Nature”. Each species must strive to survive, and that it will do, by every means in its power, however foul – unless the instinct to survive is weakened by conflict with another instinct.’
— John Wyndham / The Midwich Cuckoos
somewhere in the shallowest lake the earth’s change in fate is accumulating or growing heavier and withdrawing
— Anna Glazova / “* [1. / it’d be nice to have some recognition by now]”
Small rivulets of MDMA in the heartland. Beaked men beneath your window, the lunacy of stars. I gather it all in my cloak and set off towards a future we would have wanted had we known it could be known to us. Pilgrims strung from the jiggly boughs of maples, the hounds’ corrupting song.
— Michael Martin Shea / “[Not that it was as it was said to be]”
Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.
— Cormac McCarthy / The Crossing
What I’m Listening To:
The grass is growing All over town From the cracks in the sidewalk Where all the shops shut down One tiny flower I’m jumping over One tiny flower I’m jumping over
I lost my motivation when my lizard died. I stopped fugue-ing at the moon in the midday sun. I grooved in clandestine sweaters while all about me clouds of gnats figured trifecta bets on Morse code calculators. If you’re in the same boat I’m in then we really need to be torpedoed out of the sea. You see?!
I’ve had this problem with brown studies, brain fog, and generalized ash-gray existential fugs. My dentist, podiatrist, and abortionist recommended I tell you this so that I may burden you in order to unburden myself. Now we’re yoked together in a plasticine hoodoo weathered to a crusty infirmity. These badlands desiccated to the dedication of blue sleep in yellow pajamas. The time for imbibing is now.
What I’m Reading:
Back to sleep 2 nightmares Solid ones down not to be told Woke not wanting to be in life Wasn’t, outside warmed
a stack of shuffled madness in-between motions and after-emergencies long-take dialogue scums wine underscoring the cultural disaster habitual cheques overdrawn defamiliarized wounds cockatoo jet set in cafés swill in gutbuckets overflowing your narrow ankles on micro-theater screens playing to empty houses comically taxed beyond salvation
What I’m Reading:
We no longer washed, brushed our teeth, or picked a scab—just him, him, him.
I wrote this yesterday under the influence of twin tornadoes While hiding under the bed with my grandmother and dog I planned a funeral as mattresses, pans and medicines strafed the air I saw my brother’s arm impaled on a jagged rafter The grey-green sky draped like humid laundry above I heard telephone poles snap in succession like cannon fire Fred, from next door, called for Annie as he flew by among the shingles and sharp detritus A dishwasher smashed into my one remaining bedroom wall Splintered it in 138 pieces, and disappeared into that toothy vortex…
What I’m Reading:
I walked away,
drifted north, like I do, and came to Canada; but by then I was
a man dressed in a long Soviet coat, wool with a red collar. Better I
would have retreated to the mountains, I thought, or the interior.
This isn’t your house. You don’t belong here. You can’t come in here anytime you want and go in that room. The Muscovy duck eggs have failed to hatch — a marten’s been at them and taken some whole. My precious ducks: I feed them and chase them away as the whim overtakes me. My storks — not to return through the hole in my roof. My squirrels, running along the base of the house, imbibing their 32 grams of protein in their muscle milk. All is one raw manifold coming at me without pause, without distinction. I could have been in the shower when the ceiling collapsed. I couldn’t go to the funeral as it conflated with the unveiling. My daughter-in-law is my son; my son is my daughter; my daughter: the executioner. The executioner absconded with my ducks. Life is a proto-groats quorum forum. Life is full of strangeness and parthenogenesis.
What I’m Reading:
YOU muck luck dope A evil drink, top Of a wapiti poyo, YOU goo me bloodshot YOU whacky fop, O Oph Elia you milk the Pocket-knife poko On holidays in the sun
You wrap your fingers around godness and restrict, redistrict, reapportion us on the path to hellion days.
Nothing good is coming, nothing fair awaits us.
You say things have been this bad before — remember reading about the 1850’s?
We be here again — proffered at this late date — and such exorbitant prices!
It’s beyond late—we’re overdue for a reckoning—we’re headed for a wreck. We are functioning wreckage.
We are Wile E Coyote looking up at the anvil headed toward our head.
(Cut. Long overhead shot.)
A puff of smoke below in the canyon.
What I’m Reading:
Kitchens will smell of burned sage and soldiers will abandon their sleeves to the heat of a broken field. The field will cover the dead with daisies and the desert will turn into a single grain of salt. Everyone will be thirsty.
thee istsfor manity reader 