This grim tangerine bruised by daylight. This grim brinkmanship masking in its own eyeteeth. You rock adrift. A lover wrapped in muslin, caught in the sleeper sofa’s hush. Lichtenberg figures fillet your back, branching like bright frost.
Shadowplay.
Despite the pessimism, the taxing of thornbacks and other small griefs, the malnourished drag king eats beneath the hovering axe that never falls but threatens. In the dim ’30s and war-lit ’40s, fleas circled your wrists. They found their register in the upheaval lived in the shadows.
Nightmare thrum.
I tender you my seven firearms for review — for the workshop dreams dashed in Franciscan corridors. You find: A Guest in the Hatchway, Flash Hardwood Stab, the chill of my touch sealing, then the searing world shut. I’m the sergeant-major of nightmares driving my vision into your plastering light.
A grim tangerine indeed.
What I’m Reading:
I’m going to make a poem out of nothing. You and I will be the protagonists. Our emptiness, our loneliness, the deadly boredom, the daily defeats . . .
— Luis Alberto de Cuenca / “William of Aquitaine Returns”
I’m in a groove with Barry White’s Greatest Hits when I get a preprogrammed hit from SM-N900V. So as the Love Unlimited Orchestra swells to Barry’s “I love you, baby!” the Heliotrope unit beeps and a shot of SM-N900V’s love tincture hits my bloodstream.
I don’t care that it’s only the essence of Clementine coming through my cryoscreen, but Clemmie, as the artificial intelligence known as SM-N900V is referred to, is all I need of my life partner to see me through the next three hours on this sterile dying planet.
As her essence reticulates through my nervous system, I see her inside my retinas; smell her in my temporal lobe; feel her on my fingertips — her chest against mine…
The overseer counts: “one minute to go!” And it’s out the nearest exit in case of emergency—break glass in case . . .
II. Full of Goat Flakes
I’ve met the señora with charming daughters. I’m a mustachioed superhero bandido of fritos and fries—a speedy gonzalez typic-stereo imbiber of fire.
Desire.
I’ve got nothing but blues in my jumping bean boxes. Pouring 100 words out of my clenched sphincters—pores clogged and chugging. I’ve got the drudgery groove (mustache optional).
I’ve got the jangly, janky, guitar strum preceding me no matter the room I enter. I’ve got a glitter chain sunk on my sternum tuft. I drift with the dust—on the high plains, with the snaking bassline.
Low—full of goat flakes.
(What could go wrong?)
What I’m Reading:
Well, it’s the way the empire falls, imperceptibly, then shockingly. We have been declining gradually and then suddenly. I wrote The Unwinding in 2013 and now people say, you really saw all this coming, didn’t you? No, I saw social disarray, the social contract shredding, but I didn’t see a demagogue, I didn’t see authoritarianism. I’ve been writing about decline for quite a long time, but I felt like it was all happening at a certain register that can’t get to the deepest feelings.
— George Packer, to Andy Hunter / “When Empire Falls: Talking to George Packer About His New Novel, The Emergency” / Lithub
Since thee Chump’s ketches run low, mizzen-masted abominations, out of the thick, cloudy dregs at a barrel’s wake chucked overboard, you should stand at attention. Stay attached to your “telescreen!”
Havoc ensues if thee goat’s thrash goes unslaked.
Dada-daddy sometimes looks like Big Brother—no eascape—he’s always watching you.
Are you a recidivist? A lemon exiting a household on fire, occasionally writing on wallpapers graffitied by cherubim?
Are you gaffe-gobbler bragging of decathlons you fixed—the outcome certain to pay-off big in your favor?
If so, you are a randy gobbler! A paperweight sorbet raider whose neighbors have elided to the Ministry of Love.
As disincentives go, the best I can offer is The Wicker Mandible and a general lack of cohesion and sense. Choose!
All is:
A. aleatory and atonal
B. detritus and straightjacketed
C. eggheaded and folkloric
(you must choose one pair from the above)
There isn’t a trace of a muse within 63 leagues of the epicenter.
Fend for yourself. Forget. Endure.
For I am (probably) naughty.
What I’m Reading:
All I care about is holding a story in my hands. The square, the smell, the movement.
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.
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?
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”
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…
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
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”
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.
thee istsfor manity reader 