the flesh domestic squabbles sexual torments and economic setbacks
a piano of arresting tonal crudity corporeal and untamed
headlong riots cantankerous contentious the wrist on fire
remarkable pluck caustic worldview a portrait of defeatism
What I’m Reading:
It can be difficult to distinguish forbearance from resignation, sorrow from partial reconciliation, fortitude from loneliness. I thought about how difficult it can be to tell these emotions apart on the basis of facial expressions and gestures, about how the person in question may struggle to distinguish these feelings in themselves.
i sat through a flicker film festival paul sharits tony conrad a couple kubelka’s
fences on color or was it feces in dolor?
crowds snakes choral singers did I see helen dance the frug? (look it up on youtube!) in a flicker film?
oy!
it was all too much too fast too fractured to take in
amateur potters carvers of sophisticated wooden celluloid six-cornered exasperation dreams explicit full of vibrant constellations of synecdoche succotash filled with ethnic + linguistic diversity
then the inexhaustible error of human creativity in miniature and endlessly hilarious in three dimensional silver halide crystals
it caused a wave of seizures throughout the screening room pilfered by rapid fire
images repeating + repeating repeating
What I’m Reading:
4 Billion The number of people — about 49% of the global population — who experienced at least 30 additional days of extreme heat between May 2024 and May 2025 because of climate change.
— Climate Change and the Escalation of Global Extreme Heat Report
It snapped The great mass of humanity A final offence Floating coal A dream softened then brutal Reflection and prison Sweat-kissed pressure The fissure underlying the weak substrate A giant maw Gnaws cloaked in shadow
Doomed as all other empires doomed Distorted by the ripe and endless cavils
A fire. A fissure. A fruiting of smoke
We are all rendered new and Alien
What I’m Reading:
I want to leave a record so that, in case the inevitable happens, the people who come after us, the future generations, can know that once we all lived in the same country. That it was possible, once, for us all to live in a shared reality. If they can understand the process of our separation, perhaps they can figure out the process of rebinding, if there is a process of rebinding.
— Debbie Urbanski / “Long May My Land Be Bright” / Portalmania
i googled white nationalism— flashes of congealed bacon
you play the tragic heroine toothy femme fatale
dont judge my painting until i finish my ropa vieja
dont cut your hair before tinting it blue
i fix you a tongue on rye my marbles gather dust
we wait for slide guitar solos on an unmoored pontoon bridge
in darkness your voice has the timbre of rime
the choice you say—love love
is love
What I’m Reading:
The factory makes food, and also children. The origins of the children are randomized. Some are derived from cows; others from whales or rabbits. “Why don’t they make human-derived children?”
— Hiromi Kawakami / “Keepsakes” / Under the Eye of the Big Bird
For me, the biggest shift was deciding that cycling wasn’t optional, that it was just as important as sleeping, work and family. Because without cycling, all of those things suffer. The cool thing is, once we start thinking that way, we naturally start prioritizing it.
— D. Klein / Everything’s Been Done
When I hear the young poets describe the algorithms by which search engines will generate sundry fragments and whimsical text-stubs
from which to cut-and-paste their latest aleatory verses, I think, yes, I too shall stick needles in my eyes…
— Campbell McGrath / “When I Hear The Young Poets”
Dreams are terrifying things. No-they’re humiliating. They reveal things about you that you weren’t even aware of.
— Han Kang / We Do Not Part
… Weapons are created. To / deter their own use. To make null their own / necessity.] / [Monster yourself. / Exert evil to dissuade evil / in others.] / [Preventative measures. As motive to conquer.]
— Mai Der Vang / “Notes in Rebuttal: What They May Have Known about the Possibility” / Yellow Rain
There are people, new people, living in big houses, on high floors, and for them the end of the world didn’t matter, because disaster had already been priced in. Safely hedged, they could dream their timeless dreams. For the rest of us there was no choice. History did not stop for us. It came howling on.
— Hari Kunzru / Blue Ruin
To bed, as sleep extinguishes The planet in whirring dreams Where slowness flows to be Breathless, like a bicyclist.
— Tom Clark / “Where I Live”
I don’t know if this is what happens right before you die. Everything I have ever experienced is made crystalline. Nothing hurts any more. Hundreds upon thousands of moments glitter in unison, like snowflakes whose elaborate shapes are in full view. How is this possible, I can’t say. My every pain and joy, all my deep-rooted sorrows and loves, shine, not as an amalgam but as a whole comprised of distinct singularities, glowing together as one giant nebula.
— Han Kang / We Do Not Part
What I’m Listening To:
Diversity Tribal Transgender Hispanic Green Fluoride Female
the strangest, most riveting fists found purchase at my temple a familiar scenario
a rough patch— a dispatch—
aggression unmoored this land is not mine / not yours it belongs to all / to none
so take your right cross & elbow shuck listen as i convert it to poetry for the empathically challenged suck on hardscrabble knuckles tattooed
“H A T E”
a brusque burlesque of mutual disdain convened long before the season of fake fascist spray-ons
all these deft scraps of ignorance a cutting shorthand of petty grievances dyspeptic interlocutions & prickly retractions unretracted unredacted — i remember last year was so hot
this will be hotter
this year will demarcate — forthwith — the honeymoon croon from hell
the detonation nation
plug your ears it’s coming
What I’m Reading:
these are not hypothetical concerns we craft memorials to forget stitch flags to unite violence
— mónica teresa ortiz / “the city that loves the bomb”
thee istsfor manity reader 