so cold i’m like a
frozen iguana falling
from a palm tree trunk
i almost look like a branch
a sign of weather whiplash?
What I’m Reading:
You are placed in landscape, you are placed in time. But, within that, there’s a bit of room for manoeuvre. To some extent, you can be author of your own fate.
— Kathleen Jamie / Sightlines
Mine
I am nothing but decay. A vessel for soft and hard drinking. A Celsius. An Ascent. Grain alcohol. The descent of man — an ascendancy of brimstone and vitriol. This is the time of peak pique — so let’s picket the piquant pissants. I’m embroiled in ecstatic ego. My right hand is frozen, and I’m going away for the last time. It’s like something from another world — and I lost myself out there.
Monochromatic. Color drained. Gray. Damp. Drizzly.
I’m going away for the last time.
And you say: there’s more opportunity for death — it’s insatiable.
I’m waiting for a foot of snow. There’s a big dip in the jet stream. A bowling ball of cold air on the way. At our doorstep. We could get into the car and drive west into the void. We could stay and open the door to oblivion. We’ll never dry out again.
You say: will it ever be the same?
I: I’m going away for the last time.
Vignetting at the peripheries of vision now. I’ll make glue from this horse. I’ll make dog food. I promise.
I: Do you ever get the feeling you’re in a linear narrative version of Last Year at Marienbad?
Now you!
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Yours
You say nothing this time. Only the sound of wind pressing its forehead against the window. It’s all static and soft rupture, like a station losing signal, like language attenuating and refusing to carry weight.
My mouth tastes of mist and metal. This mettle. The lights outside have bled into one another — sodium halos — vapors smeared across the wet pavement. Movement. This moment I want to speak but I am a ruin, a half-erased inscription in the fogged glass. A shard of knife edge in deep grass.
The world narrows, tunnels. Everything pulls toward its center — the eye of the storm, the stream of a singular point where thought collapses into weather. Whether you like it or not.
You riddle my shoulder. It’s already cold.
“Then I’ll go for the last time,” you whisper, though it sounds more like mercy than dismissal. Abysmal and dismal at once. Filled with inert gas.
So I do. Decide. To do nothing further than the necessary.
And as I step out, the snow begins — not in flakes but in the fine, endless, ash of a nuclear winter — each particle a quiet ending. Each ending a half-life too long. The sky folds itself shut behind me. A pin prick. More a kick than a prick.
The horizon erases its own name. “You mean, you’ll render my fear? You hydrolitic cur.” Again, you say nothing.
“This is more like an episode of Bewitched projected backwards. And I wonder…”
«¡Ahora tu!»
What I’m Reading:
Being asked to explain a poem is like being asked to explain an explanation.
— Carrie Hunter / “…and so History Constantly Dwindles”
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:
The old world and the Americas are straying apart at a rate of two centimeters per year, and Home is getting farther away from where I left it…
— Ahmad Almallah / “(Fig)”
I’ll tell you diasters might die out
if you stopped feeding them firewood. . .
— Asmaa Azaizeh / “Reflection”
The collective wealth of the top 10 US billionaires has soared by $698bn in the past year, according to a new report from Oxfam America published on Monday on the growing wealth divide.
The report warns that Trump administration policies risk driving US inequality to new heights, but points out that both Republican and Democratic administrations have exacerbated the US’s growing wealth gap . . . Meanwhile, over 40% of the US population, including nearly 50% of children, are considered low-income, with family earnings that are less than 200% of the national poverty line.
When pitting the US against 38 other higher-income countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the US has the highest rate of relative poverty, second-highest rate of child poverty and infant mortality, and the second-lowest life expectancy rate.
— Lauren Aratani / “Top 10 US billionaires’ collective wealth grew by $698bn in past year – report” / The Guardian
There are sixty days
to explain to the children
who do not yet know hate:
today The Nation weeded
and counted us among
the invasive species.
— Layla Faraj / “Sixty Days”
The name Equator refers to the crossing of boundaries that have been policed for too long, but also to placing equal weight upon ideas and experiences that have long been marginalised. We take the world as it actually is—not as European and American editorial boards imagine it should be. We reject the assumption that a handful of Western capitals should set the terms for the global conversation on politics, culture, and the deepest questions of human existence.
— The Equator team / “Welcome to Equator” / equator.org
My father taught us not to lie
then dropped us
into a wilderness that kills
the truthful
— Haidar Al-Ghazali / “I Left My Sorrows in the Laundry Basin”
The thing about living with someone is that even though you see them every day and can predict all their gestures in a conversation, even when you can read intentions behind their actions and calculate their responses to circumstances fairly accurately, even when you are sure there’s not a single crease in them left unexplored, even then, one day, the other can suddenly become a stranger.
— Valeria Luiselli / Lost Children Archives
Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.
— Wisława Szymborska / “Nothing Twice”
What I’m Listening To:
Somebody here is older
Macbeth times 2
A lazy suit and bloody hands
Come taste your faith in every street
The sound of money just kissed me in the face
My trousers aren’t the right size
I go straight to pocket
Take one step up and back to business
My mind is closed so my body speaks
My mind is clothed, my body squeaks
— The Wolfgang Press / “Raintime”
Juana weaves her homily—one uprise after another, unaware that she’s at the precipice of her irritating anecdotes.
Jean believes he deserves his honorific—the one Juana refuses to use when addressing him.
Gaffes occur in a world ruled by impertinences and reverberatory prayers.
I wish to crochet synchronized heartbeats for them, but my literary physics is pockmarked with black holes—letters and syntactic marks swept up beyond the event horizon.
But hold on, this isn’t about the serial graphemic elements indicating syntax—no, this is about love gone awry. Misanthropy, misogyny, miserliness, and misery. The human condition paradigm.
So why the tangent?
(The tangential has potential, so we diverge.)
Now, Juana deconstructs Jean’s argument and shoves him in his place: You don’t blaspheme in here!
Jean retorts: Midriff-clavichords are the only way to go. Get behind thee, Satan!
Juana says: You know, I always thought clavichord should be spelled “clavychord”—it has a jauntier ring to it. It’s zingy and fun to say, say it with me “clavychord … clavychord …clavychord …”
Jean realizes his education was fraudulent. All is relative. There is no solid ground. Nothing to rely on. No exit.
There’s a naked preamble about the paradigm of the photocopier. Transient elation ensues.
One must imagine Juana and Jean happy.
What I’m Reading:
Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!
We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead dahlias.
But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;
flesh exists.
— Federico Garcia Lorca / “City That Does Not Sleep”
Does anyone have ballroom gabardine
to sell a gigolo?
Are you upgrading your ballpoint
gab for sundial gadgets?
Or looking for a private future?
(I’m looking for sunhat provosts
to enjoy the upcoming spring cleaning
& the summons of the new balm)
If that’s a big: NO!
then thank you and aloha—
I’ll be doing the funky Nassau
& the Dada Death.
What I’m Reading:
Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
— Ben Lerner / 10:04
a hapless haptic shadow
infinite dashed lines
funk seeps in through puncture holes
won the night and lost ourselves
gloom at the peripheries
as fireflies streak the darkness
the darkness harkens headfuls
of childhood disjecta loosed
our voices freeze in the night
sound iced in our throats
a pall of smothered silence
there are some good days
when voices of exile bray —
the start is the end
the mournful rumble we hear
widens a crack in our souls
What I’m Reading:
And these days I can no longer find any relief from my house’s infestation of men by fleeing outside because other men, distant men, men who are growing fat on their own cruelty, are making the sky collapse on our heads; every day the sky comes a bit closer, oppressive, so low in some places that it has been swallowing people up out of their lives.
— Lauren Groff / “Mother of Men”
I hear the prattle of death’s rattle as it searches for its corpse. It does not come for me tonight, but its search is in earnest. I can hear the effort in its breath and the lead its step. I’d like to address it, correct its step, elude its attention. Were there enough people in the tower you ask. I don’t know — were there?
I’d ask you to ask, but I know you’re reluctant to engage death directly. There are fifty-five mothers in there, where are they hiding death? Do they all nurse it? Who has the temerity to burp it? Thunder in the anteroom, ice in the basement, yet the casements melt and I feel rather provincial and spun into a dense web of misplaced filial piety. I voted in an elusive election and was awarded electrocution instead.
Proper elocution was de rigueur — Derrida was stuck in your escutcheon, and you forgot the keys to the crypt.
So I’ll elide my vowels for the rest of my days. My days full of short scrums and long pitches. I’d like to spend my remaining middays ordering my consonants into flotation devices — my vices tend to sink like the Kursk or the Graf Spee. I still wish to live in a bathysphere, for I have an abundance of sins at the pawn shop and you’ve got a pocket thick with cash. And here is where you proclaim your hazy thesis riddled with jocular contradictions: spatially condensed sins are best macerated in your urine specimen effusive and elusive. Thunder only happens when you’re draining and evil presses down upon us all.
Upon us all.
Now we track, and contract, the constellations — knocked out of their obstinate orbits: Look, the night sky appears to be scratching its skin off!
What I’m Reading:
Well, we’re barely a nation at all anymore, but I’m glad we’re still in space. We have to be going some place other than down the toilet.
— Octavia Butler / Parable of the Sower
Three astonishments shy of a high-strung melodrama I flickered and boasted about my existential moodiness. I was three compositions short of a wartime screenplay and much too invested in haunting atmospheres. I craved numerous occult tropes of uncanny hunger. In short, I pitched decanters of sherry at obedient patients of the supernatural. Again, I was transpecies extraordinaire with a flat rear tire — passenger side. I was aggrieved and antic, send me a fur fringed papoose as a conversation starter. I say nothing when I’ve got logorrhea.
I evolved out of an overplayed lachrymosity just to change into a tank top made of human skin — ancient vellum, not to worry, I only skin my bestest of friends on alternating thanksgivings. Give thanks for moribund cummerbund fitters, the most underappreciated vocation. I moved in that direction and met the cleanest tapeworm I ever roomed with. Take that to the tripe!
What I’m Reading:
Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots trained on ‘brain rot’ content — vapid social media posts that are the equivalent of mental junk food — are worse at generating accurate information. Researchers found that chatbots given a diet of popular and sensationalist Twitter/X posts skipped steps in their reasoning process (or didn’t use reasoning at all), spat out wrong answers and demonstrated ‘dark traits’ such as psychopathy and increased levels of narcissism.
— Flora Graham / “AI gets ‘brain rot’ from social media” / Nature Briefing
I dreamt of zombies last night.
I asked you where you put them: In the garage?
You said in the closet.
I told you to move my father’s stuff over and put your stuff in there — not the zombies!
You said it was your day of the dead prerogative and quoted dialogue from Hiroshima, Mon Amour.
This is how we doomscroll our days of the dead in the Anthropocene.
What I’m Reading:
While leaders in Europe are grappling with overtourism at popular sites, tourism officials in the United States are scrambling to let the world know that the country is still open despite government shutdowns, political rhetoric, tariff wars, shootings, National Guard deployments, expensive visas, and immigration crackdowns.
— Christopher Muther / “Global tourism is surging, with one notable exception: the United States” / The Boston Globe
thee istsfor manity reader 