thee istsfor manity reader

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Two brass rings:
ornaments, curatives, punishment,
what’s the difference,
pain swims for a microscope.
The rings around Saturn swim too,
a girdle of mist which hurts space.

— Fanny Howe / “Original”

That’s what white supremacy, what racism is. It is an act of violence. What was new was the cameras. There was certain technology that was able to take that into the living rooms of America. And we’re going through a similar thing right now, but the violence is not new.

–Ta-Nehisi Coates / “Ta-Nehisi Coates on Police Brutality: The Violence is Not New, It’s the Cameras That are New” / Democracy Now

III. Do Luna Moths Hurry?

When life is but ten
days: one turns sage in a week.
Wide eyespots evolve.
One disdains food—thinks only:
legacy, new moon, lift, glow.

— Antoinette Brim-Bell / “Insomniac Tankas”

The worst heatwaves are being supercharged by climate change, posing a threat to ecosystems and to people’s health and livelihoods. Scientists used predictive models and looked at historical data to discover that the most extreme heat waves are getting longer, and their duration increases faster with each degree of warming. In equatorial Africa, for instance, heatwaves that are longer than 35 days are projected to be more than 60 times more common in the near future (2020–2044) than in the recent past (1990–2014).

— Flora Graham / “Extreme heatwaves are accelerating fastest” / Nature Briefing

I was alive in a decade. Sometimes
dreaming of another region
was my religion. It was
a place before trees, prior
to the flame. When the deer died,
I was in my house dreaming. Then
the drought came. Cessation
of sound. Flames as red as apples
lodged inside my throat hissing.

— Andrea Rexillus / “The Way Language Was”

An artificial-intelligence system called Centaur can predict the decisions people will make in a wide variety of situations — often outperforming classical theories used in psychology to describe human choices. Trained on data from 160 psychology experiments in which 60,000 people made more than 10 million choices, the system can simulate human behaviour in tasks from problem-solving and gambling, and even those it hasn’t been trained on.

— Miryam Naddaf / “This AI ‘thinks’ like a human — after training on 160 psychology studies” / Nature

I was digging a hole to virtue
in the body of a beast.

— Fanny Howe / “The Original”

What I’m Listening To:

When I police myself I never made contact
When you betray yourself
You’re only revealed
And when I see your face
I never see reason
How can you move so well
Spinning inside yourself
And not understand me now?

— Loma / “Half Silences”

What I’m Reading:

Even so, even the thousands of fragments of images AI would use to make a non-existent child had to have come from children who’d been complete children once.

Where were they now? All of them, the maybe-real ones cupping their chins so happily here in the sun in the photo and all those ones whose images had been fragmented into digital splinters and borrowed and used to make up an aggregate image of a child who’d never existed.

— Ali Smith / Gliff

the wrist

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.

— Han Kang / We Do Not Part

flicker film fugue

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

star foil frappé

we are all transience
waiting to happen

a shooting hardens into a moral expense
cutting and loathed

a gutting shorthand anchored in a heart
prickly and petty

a persistent vicar of bastard pipe nets cast
dreamlike and bleak

a dirge a dirge a dirge
stark
dark

What I’m Reading:

I discovered violence
which lay, like pointed orchids under the scab
of the Earth, in me,
and the violence was good, and better.

— Fanny Howe / “The Original”

Fissure

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

congealed bacon (redux)

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

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

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

— Kim Gordon / “Bye Bye 25!”

[detonation nation]

a bullet whizzes my ear

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”