She’s frozen in the web of a nascent season. The season of decay at the doorstep.
Summer is dead, she says, from the elevated ramp.
I’m blue about the blues, she says. I’m sorry, it all sounds the same—just different riffs.
I’m nonplussed—in pain—my achilles is driving me batty.
(Lap Dissolve)
Streaks of antelope white face black splotch—play for a dollar on the continental divide. Scenes of a concrete dance floor nibble on a beer bottle label, then drinking paint thinner at dinner.
A picnic cleansing in these United Stockades military truncheons on our streets. Masked men in black trucks seeding mistrust and zip-tying us behind backs leading us into damnation—or black box countries currying favor—by our foisted wrists.
Something’s gone amiss in this already far-askew country.
Building-sized posters of the dear leader . . . backdropped half-dozen handgun monticules arched by automatic rifles . . . row after row after row.
Wow! What a place!
What I’m Reading:
The generally acknowledged truth that the world is going to hell should remind us that we do not currently live in Hell.
We were nostalgic for foolishness, because it meant wisdom might matter. We were nostalgic for fakery, because it meant realness might matter. We were nostalgic for trompe l’oeil, for fool’s gold, for crocodile tears, for Mercator globes, for mimeographs, for velveteen, for signifiers unmoored from signifieds.
— Donna Stonecipher / “The Ruins of Nostalgia”
If I fall silent and words ripen it’s the voice of an olive tree in its quiet seed.
— Ronaldo Kattan / “Two-Blooded”
My intent, like his, was to take a singular interest in all I encountered. To turn my attentions away from the noxious chatter of Washington, the tribal feuding on television and computer screens, and care only for the particularities I found along the way. To shrink my horizons to that of a walking man and to root my views of the world in what I encountered step by step. To honor and respect what I saw.
— Neil King Jr. / American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Rememberance
Half-naked in her ankle-length dressing-gown, my mother is battling with mosquitoes —
or not so much battling with as bowing to — the phalanxes of bloodthirsty mosquitoes
that whine their high-pitched whines in her hair and will not let her sleep. Not a chance.
— Selma Hill / “Zvuv”
Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.
— Elizabeth Kolbert / The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
The math
is grammar school: X thousand workers, Y hundred jobs. The shoe factory closed last year. Nobody’s starving, but the church is in fear it’ll lose some paying customers.
— Thomas Lux / “Somebody’s Aunt Out Swabbing Her Birdbath”
Stopped in cars, we are waiting to accelerate along different trajectories. I catch the rising pitch of a train—today one hundred nine people died in a stampede converging at a bridge; radioactive water trickles underground toward the Pacific Ocean; nickel and copper particulates contaminate the Brocade River. Will this planet sustain ten billion people?
— Arthur Sze / “Doppler Effect”
What I’m Listening To:
Hail, hail, the Eyeball Kid Well, the first time I saw him was a Saigon jail Cost me $27 dollars just to go his bail I said, “Your name will be in lights, and that’s no doubt But you just got to have a manager, that’s what it’s all about”
I need solitude. I have come forth to this hill … to see the forms of the mountains on the horizon — to behold and commune with something grander than man.
Forests burn into their clearings. A sense of dread. It has something to do with the flags of the age. There are huge weapons, poison gases, insecticides to injure us. Who’s holding them?
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
— Abraham Lincoln / First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861
fist of this tyrant kingdom: my city of industry, my city of atom bomb, my city of warheads, of plutonium kept clandestine, of slow killings accomplished to more efficiently kill, of truths & metals forced underground
— Marissa Davis / “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dead Fish”
thee istsfor manity reader 