of saturn eating

Blood Moon

Have you ever felt like a fatherless waif
In the presence of your father?

Have you ever felt like a cornered cat
As your mother hovers
Over you in the blood-moon light?

I dream of Saturn eating his children

I dream of the children I never wanted
I dream of the children I never had
I dream of what I’m capable of doing
I dream of what was done to me

I dream of your equanimity

What I’m Reading:

seizure I am
walking waves 
the express
way ordinary
           I of familia 
less song
canopy & cave

— Urayoán Noel / “sueño convulso (seizure dream)”

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butter ball exegesis

Drill (The Year is Halfway Done)

Dearest Depression Residents, 

Your neighbor on the 16th floor is having a folly of amour fou and replacing his rat traps with soft diffuse ambient lighting. You may hear executions for the next happy needle or two. 

A husband and a harpy will drill you into extinction. 

Thank you for your volleys of shotgun blast and peanut butter ball exegesis. The edge of sanity welcomes only a few—and we are not of that lot.

Thank you,

Your deluded and denuded management.

What I’m Reading:

Sometimes, with some dreams, you awake and sense that the dream is ongoing elsewhere.

— Han Kang / We Do Not Part

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cusp of space-time

Entropy Schmentropy (redux)

She was crowned Queen of the Universe

The Anti-Christ teetered at the edge of the balance beam
on the cusp of space-time

A crowd gathered on the accretion disk keen
for a victor

The supergiant elliptical galaxy IC 1101 was unmoved—
filled with the inertia of 3 billion white dwarfs

What I’m Reading:

why have you become a star or a chain of water on a hot whirlwind or
          an udder of black light or a transparent tile on the groaning drum
          of rocky being

— Hans Arp / “The Swallow’s Testicle”

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in this (my) neighborhood pt. 98 (65 miles across connecticut edition)

What I’m Reading:

In the long hallway, everyone’s doors were closed.

I touched every doorknob and saw myself magnified.

— Callie Siskel / “Echo”

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all existential pathfinders

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

In the end, we are all existential pathfinders: We select among the paths life affords, and then, when those paths no longer work for us, we edit them and innovate as necessary. The tricky part is that while we are editing our trails, our trails are also editing us.

— Robert Moor / On Trails: An Exploration


[We Paint the Rocks Blue]

so they look less like tombstones.
So the riverbeds—dry now,

just paths for deer to walk—
seem less like ghosts.

— Rob Carney / “We Paint the Rocks Blue”


Accumulate, accumulate. That is the Moses and the prophets. Accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production.

— Karl Marx / Capital


And you could say we’ve been living in clover
From Walt Whitman to Barack Obama.
Now a dictatorship of vicious spineless slimes
We the people voted in has taken over.
Once we’d abolished slavery, we lived in clover,
From sea to shining sea, even in terrible times.
It’s over. 

— Frederick Seidel / “Now”


There are nights that we remember
like words engraved on stone pillars
There are nights so long
so very long
they could form rivers of tears

— Irma Pineda / “There are nights that escape”


Boxturtles who enjoy bickering with lesbians are usually fervent proponents of the functionality of Bauhaus … Ptarmigans have a tendency to feel cold and often need five or six cardigans to get warm. Rattlesnakes love riding the monorail.

—Anne Tardos / “Considerations”


In one thunderous clap the Planet hurled 
an instant standstill to our haywire 
to our decapitation of mountain tops 
our butchering of tree-communities 
to our murdering sprees of elephant 
and whale, tiger infants 
and elders, mothers and girls

— Nancy Mercado /“2020 A Year to Forget“

What I’m Listening To:

In the lost motel
there’s rust in your eyes
birds in the sky
Maybe you lost your way
I’m already here

— These New Puritans / “I’m already here”

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all over again

She Said (redux)

She said to herself: Thanks for renting a space in this life. Despite the scrofulous and desiccate in life you stayed around to witness the swirling swallows above, and their reflected pantomime in the water below—a whirlwind of life all about you. Now get some sleep and start all over again tomorrow. Your boulder always awaits you.

What I’m Reading:

I stretch out on the ground.
Naked. One-armed. Crowless.

— Anne de Marcken / It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over

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no longer holds

cross-wired (redux)

the morality of it doesn’t enter in to any of this

we can hold two mutually contradictory ideas
in mind at the same time

fritillary
herbaceous
& compromised as a corpus callosum
that no longer holds
a mind together

cross-wired and twisted beyond reproach
a mother shakes her baby ‘til it passes
out

by proxy
in the flesh
or via smite of gilgamesh

we may as well drown
in the euphrates
tomorrow or 5000 years ago

we all make our way into shadows

What I’m Reading:

I’m writing 
a love poem 
even with 
an American 
boot to 
my throat. 

— C. Russell Price / “I Decide to Tell Ghost Cowboy My Intentions”

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earth a cinder

a cinder haiku

stepped out of the fire
straight into the frying pan
the earth a cinder

image: wcvb

What I’m Reading:

We have known for more than a century about the climate consequences of burning fossil fuels. And it wasn’t just the scientists who knew. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson was warned, as have been many presidents after him. By 1977, Exxon (now ExxonMobil) not only knew that decades of burning fossil fuels would heat up the atmosphere, but developed in-house climate models that projected those changes with remarkable accuracy. Despite that knowledge, we have not only continued burning fossil fuels, we have continued burning them with reckless abandon. In a sense, you could say we have built a heat-fueled rocketship that is taking us, for better or worse, on a trip beyond the Goldilocks Zone.

— Jeff Goodell / The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

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worn pouffy sieges

Sense / Relatives (redux)

Then there was my uncle Mao. His own generational AI—his Little Red Bookworm in the rainstorm and no one left wanting his worn pouffy sieges. But that’s exactly what my underage blackguard aunt wore on her spectacles so it seemed as if half the day was a courtroom of wisecracks—retainers jutting out of her headgear. Not a good look in anyone’s book or on anyone’s Delphic oracle aunty.

My, my…how sense is relative.

What I’m Reading:

Part of me is always about to turn
in a direction I will never go. Trucks roar
filled with things people need. Sometimes I sound
to myself like a robot.

— Matthew Zapruder / “The Pained Desert”

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in my neighborhood pt. 97

image: p. remer

What I’m Reading:

This is war
so all the birds would flee

— Irma Pineda / “This is war”

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