What I’m Reading:
I am full of water but as thirst is a form of
suffering, I would not wish it upon you. Instead, I will
work my way through your dreaming, which I know is of
endless snow fields. I will wait in this puddle of melt.
— Kimberly Quiogue Andrews / “Poem in Which the Poet Ventriloquizes the Beloved”
Everything is fine: a means to endure
news cycles, historic cycles, menstrual
cycles. This is walking home after work,
crawling into bed naked. Night, quiet with
snow. I am an empty bank account.
I am a pylon glowing in the dark. I am
a primal scream. I am not here.
— Amy M. Alvarez / “Burn Out”
The fossil fuel industry is essentially running the United States government from the inside. It’s a desperate industry. They know that clean renewable energy is cheaper. They know that they only compete by virtue of massive subsidies from being allowed to pollute for free, which nobody should be allowed to do. And they prop all of that up with enormous amounts of political corruption and leverage and a huge climate denial fraud campaign.
— Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, to Akshat Rathi, Oscar Boyd, and Jennifer A Dlouhy / “Sheldon Whitehouse on How to Confront ‘Fossil Fuel Monsters’ in the US” / Bloomberg News
She sings “America the Beautiful.”
She sings: From sea to every goddamn American sea.
I walk away but her song follows me,
carried on by some aura I can’t outrun.
— Natalie Scenters-Zapico / “Aura”
Last year has been confirmed as the third-warmest year on record by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service and US research organization Berkeley Earth — despite the return of cooling La Niña weather phenomenon. “The warming spike observed from 2023-2025 has been extreme, and suggests an acceleration in the rate of the Earth’s warming,” said Berkeley Earth in its report. Burning fossil fuels remains the main cause, but the situation is probably being made worse by hot seas and changes in cloud patterns caused by warming, and (ironically) the cleaning up of sun-shading air pollution.
— Jacob Smith / “ 2025 shows Earth is getting hotter, faster” / Nature Briefing
On the road home the tide is rising.
Riding the road-tide is dangerous
but it’s not safe to stand still.
Hang on the verge & you drown.
— Marie Ponsot / “ Rain All Night, Paris”
But research increasingly suggests that reading may be more powerful than we realize. In fact, doing so regularly has been linked to lower stress, stronger memory, protection against cognitive decline and dementia, and even a longer life.
— Daryl Austin / “Reading books can help you live longer—here’s how” / National Geographic
A California of snow and the surprise
Of illness. I throned myself in the white
Noise of its silence and watched as the world
Fell away. All the silver flickerings of possibility
Going out like the sound of horse hooves
Clicking into the distance. It is almost the end
Of the world.
— Cynthia Cruz / “January”
What I’m Listening To:
Hate speech
Climate change
They/them
Tile drainage
Trauma
Privilege
Uterus
— Kim Gordon / “ByeBye25!”
• mulberry stained mouth
• truncheons and cigars to fear
• orgasms on hate
• his revulsion unfiltered
• napalm nosegays in the morn’
What I’m Reading:
If you ever want to feel your place in the scales of the universe, go into a Walmart Supercenter. It’s a universe that offers a lot of almost identical and not very attractive choices.
— Ben Markovits / The Rest of Our Lives
On 19 January she wrote in her journal:
It’s been six days since I fell through the crack. I’m spiraling down depression way again. The crack has been widening and if I don’t do something to sort it out— San Andreas fault be thy name — you unholy fucking fissure! I’m out. This is a familiar landscape, I’m never too far from stepping through it, into it, farther and farther down — canyon-like — now in a skirl of whorling minimalist notes, repeated and repeated until I am tranced out and lost.
Having lost six days now I ask myself: what’s next? Which way do I move? What direction? How do I get out of this, and here I am writing again. Is it fair enough to start like this again? The only option really. How did I get here again? How do I avoid ending up here again? I don’t think I can adequately answer the latter, but the first question must be asked always because it presupposes awareness of the situation. And here is where I usually make the pivot, because a pivot is required. The only other option isn’t really an option. Is it? No.
So here I’ll start again, and content myself with starting again. This is an acceptable… No, it’s a good step forward. It had to begin somewhere. Why not right here?
******
The next day, the 20th, she wrote:
I exist in meaningless patter, in the trifling titter of expense and abuse. I persist in this dominant issue of breaking a standard that I once pretended to. I perform unlimited horrors on my own discernment and troubled world view. I will disengage from timbre and search for a tone so acute it pilfers life itself. This signifies nothing within nothing.
Didn’t Thoreau say, Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. And that’s why I persist with this thumb tapping. To use what little heat warms these fingers attached to a tepid body sitting on a cold toilet. And so I start anew.
What I’m Reading:
The primary duty is not to live but to write. I write because I’m unhappy. I write because it is a way of fighting unhappiness. If I didn’t write, I would blow my brains out, without a shadow of a doubt.
— Mario Vargas Llosa / “The Art of Fiction No. 120” / The Paris Review
I often stare into the sun. It’s the only way I know to calm down. My father required it of me when I was a young boy—he broke me early and often. He was the superintendent of our crumbling building in Boca de Camarioca after the revolution. Our homely squalor had a taste and a color: bile-yellow.
When I was a pre-teen my mother also demanded that I stare for hours at the sun. One early morning she plunged all of my father’s screwdrivers—a dozen from his tool box—into his chest; and when I say early morning I mean when it was still dark out. The talon ends of three claw hammers were embedded into his head.
None of this was traumatizing at the time. But over the past few years I find myself living inside that visionary loop multiple times daily. And here, when I say daily, I mean when it’s light out. In the dark I have other devices and literary tropes to rely on.
All these years later I live in exile, in Hialeah, and as you might imagine I am half-blind. I still look into the sun out of habit, but the sun at this hyper-capitalist meridian is out of tune—a legato A minor flat 6 chord that fills me with revulsion. I want to go back to my island where the sun is in the proper key.
But for now I wait in this dollar-rama thrift shop of a philosophically bankrupt and pestilent country. At least I still have my guaguancó and my son montuno. I carry those in my heart everywhere I go.
I do like the sound of the word kookaburra but I hate the fact that’s it’s a silly looking bird. It should be a sabre-toothed marsupial with a name like that. I hate it when life does that!
Life does that all the time.
And I hate inhabiting my skin. It gets to me, especially these days—it happens more and more that I find myself with some sharp implement in hand ideating about all sorts of bitter and painful ends for myself, but I can’t get anything to happen. My hands won’t conform to the images unspooling in the projection room in my head.
But, man, do I remember mother and those stare-downs with the sun. For the record, I never blinked first. I was always called away to do my chores.
Sometimes I envy how the Mongols had Caffa (I think they call it Feodosia now) and their trebuchet delights; how the Spaniards had their mastiffs for Taino ambush oneupmanship; and how deftly American colonials deployed their pox blankets.
Why can’t I get what I want?
Please, please, please let me get what I want… but I’m even off of that song, as the man who sang it is a white supremacist of some sort now.
The rails—bottom and top—don’t stay in place anymore… everything that rises must converge… or so mother told me. But I found, as all frauds are eventually found out—it was really something she gleaned from a Flannery O’Connor narrative… and then she said that Hemingway rewrote the last page of The Sun Also Rises 39 times.
Apocrypha?
Sometimes I feel like a detached bathysphere.
All I have is this metaphoric gibbet and the wheel: I’m here alone. Pitched up here—30 feet in the air, spinning a half turn with every stiff breeze…
What I’m Reading:
She was courting her own disgust, these days. The way she’d picked at her knee scabs as a kid — knowing it would end in blood but doing it anyway. Revulsion was a stimulant.
— Lydia Millet / “Tourist” / Atavists
the avatar of the atavist
the flange of the falangist
the love of the loveless
the urea in your urine
the dread of the dreadnought
the mares in your nightmares
these are a few of the things
these are a few of the phophenes
these are a few burns trailing your closed eyes
see it all when you see nothing
say nothing
do not
no
What I’m Reading:
Only the wrinkle
of a disappearing squirrel
breaks the snow stillness.
— Suzanne Matson / “January Poem”
I am a stuffed ghost
Without natural breath
I work on box breathing
I am a scarecrow
See me waste throughout the season
See my headpiece fritter away
Murders of crows blacken the sky
Hear the caw caw cackles
See the darkness alight
Smell the awful offal
I work my box breathing
I can’t breathe
What I’m Reading:
“Bringing children into this apocalypse is selfish and unethical.”
— Charlotte McConaghy / Wild Dark Shore
tinker the keynotes of a deficiency with a wee underhand
heighten the exertion by magnitudes of ephemera
hide-and-seek the tumults of your well-worn dissolution
your distractions are treacherous — more so in their new wrappings
you evoke the predictable incompleteness of subaltern strident camouflage
and yet
you’ve become a remainder-man — anonymous and circumstantial
compulsory
inelastic
terse
attenuated
and
lost surrendering
to outrage
subterfuge
What I’m Reading:
I am damned, thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die.
— Nick Cave / The Death of Bunny Munro
A poem, while it can expose us to our
imagining selves, can also trick us
into imagining
ourselves as something beyond our behaviors.
— Prageeta Sharma / “Friendment”
I kept a picture of Stalin by our bed.
My wife set it face down when we made love.
I closed my eyes and thought about the dead
gossiping on the long train to Lvov . . .
— Morri Creech / “The Marriage”
There a clock stands in front of a closed shop,
its hour not late, though the moon has come
early to mirror the white coin of its frozen face.
— Suzanne Matson / “January Poem”
Someone, somewhere, is playing
the violin in the background
of violence.
Before all of this, we didn’t think
too often of heaven. We wanted to fly
through clouds, not above them.
— Sara Abou Rashed / “Gaza I”
The future / is where I’m going only because / I have no choice, because time / moves in one direction, dragging / a bit of itself behind like meat.
— Maggie Smith / “The Picture Before”
it’s madness
to hate the visitation
of grackles
— Uche Nduka / “A Green Dream”
all my understanding dribbles down the chin
onto the chest & is summarized as:
life is merely
to ovum and sperm
and where those two meet
and how often and how well
and what dies there.
— Renée Nicole Macklin (Renee Nicole Good) / “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs”
What I’m Listening To:
Like early Abba
I don’t give a fuh
I don’t give a fuh
I don’t give a fuh
I feel resentment in my soul
Maybe it’s time for men to clean for like, five hundred years
I’m not too concerned about that, uh
— Dry Cleaning / “My Soul / Half Pint”
briar worms for boys
nab schoolfellows at dark work:
hide-and-seek with ICE
truncheon and tear gas hopscotch
window baton candy crush
(y’all come back now, ya hear!)
What I’m Reading:
The violent confrontation that Trump craves most is the war at home, against the enemy within . . . Next Tuesday will mark one year since he returned to office. Trump may have started out by trash-talking America; now he is simply trashing it. Minnesota is his legacy. It is American carnage made real.
— Susan Glasser / “The Minnesota War Zone Is Trump’s Most Trumpian Accomplishment” / The New Yorker
thee istsfor manity reader 