What I’m Reading:
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”
What I’m Reading:
My mother smiles at walnuts
as though time in the heart never started.
— Brian Matur / “As Though”
We are all, you see, toys of the life-force. It made you numerically strong, but mentally undeveloped; it made us mentally strong, but physically weak: now it has set us at one another, to see what will happen. A cruel sport, perhaps, from both our points of view, but a very, very old one. Cruelty is as old as life itself. There is some improvement: humour and compassion are the most important of human inventions; but they are not very firmly established yet, though promising well.’
— John Windham / The Midwich Cuckoos
Sometimes I think we weigh down the people we love most when we’re trying to learn to carry ourselves.
— Brianna Madia / Nowhere for Very Long
The CDC was a gem to the world . . . That standing is gone. So much expertise is gone. People who wanted to go into public health don’t see a future. The debate that we’re all having is, will the CDC ever recover, not how long it will take. I don’t know that it can ever recover to what it was.
— Wendy Armstrong, vice president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America / “Crisis within CDC is spilling into real world, experts say” / STAT
Oh never let them come to steal our dreams,
never let them entwine us in our bed.
Let us hold on to the shadows
to see if, from our own obscurity,
we emerge and grope along the walls,
lie in wait for the light, to capture it,
till, once and for all time,
it becomes our own, the sun of every day.
— Pablo Neruda / “Emerging”
Exposure to air pollution could increase the risk of developing Lewy body dementia(LBD), a term that includes Parkinson’s disease with dementia. An analysis of data from 56 million people suggests there is a clear link between long-term exposure to PM2.5 — particles smaller than 2.5 micrometres in diameter — and the development of LBD. These pollutants don’t necessarily induce the dementia, but “accelerates the development” in people who are already genetically predisposed to it, says clinician–neuroscientist Hui Chen.
— Flora Graham / “Air pollution raises dementia risk” / Nature Briefing
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”
If you want to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does…
— John Windham / The Midwich Cuckoos
What I’m Listening To:
I wanna feel everything
I wanna listen to the idiot sing
Until I can’t feel anything
‘Cause rock ‘n’ roll is dead
But the dead don’t die
The dead don’t die
The dead don’t die
The dead don’t die
The dead don’t die
Whooo!
— Jeff Tweedy / “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter”
What I’m Reading:
in his foothill town we can’t
drink water from the tap
without sickening, we shower quick
before blighted with inexplicable rash
it has been this way so long
we don’t ask questions
— Marissa Davis / “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dead Fish”
of the heated thermals — rising
lifting in the swell
headed south like geese unspooled
unlooosed upon a slough of icebergs
how tall is a dark sky city?
searchlights illuminate the falling snow
no auroras just cracks in the ice
cracks in the ice cracks in the ice — cracks
3am a flat hissing noise
a strange hiatus as giant wind turbines slow
then stop
a breakdown in reciprocity
you suspected it when you saw the foothills
you were certain when you saw the distant mountain ridges
light gray upon white hard to distinguish
sea from sky — there it is
a margin no bigger no longer
than what it reminds us of
it doesnt surprise us what we are
what we’ve become
we are not beautiful objects of contemplation
this is all like a dusty sun bleached diorama
we contain nothing but shadows —
and our shadows are long
What I’m Reading:
Sometimes misadventures are the best adventures. Sometimes a tent is a room of one’s own. And sometimes you don’t know what to do but you do the best you can.
— Laura Killingbeck / “Life in the Yard”
The twelfth day of the month was Copperhead Monday. Serpentine was the look we were going for. Beatific upper register notes is what Maria was reaching for: Ta da la ta da la dao, was what she sang to a supper club of adoring mengeese eyeing a pair of lady rattlesnakes.
Midnight. Tuesday morning. Applause. Thunderous.
Savorous twistings of moonglow hairs into chignons and much dispensing with shoes and underthings. There was nothing like a cobra line dance to make it libertine-free and parsimonious-lite.
(I, the author, heard someone order a chocolate stout. “Not served here,” was the reply.)
Vehement—something akin to buzzards on parade: wing-wide convection current surfing loafers—something free, not imagined, not paid for, not patented and surely made to disappoint.
Asseverations to “live fully and create in the midst of the desert” notwithstanding, Maria went home alone.
What I’m Reading:
… the perennial question of whether the United States still lingered in a pre-fascist twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago and the light they thought they saw was coming only from millions of tubes all showing the same bright colored shadows …
— Thomas Pynchon / Vineland
A negative feedback loop. Petroglyphs and door flips. Petrichor — a savage feedback loop — a savage republic. Put out the fire.
Frying in its own fat. Permafrost melting. The warming leading to fire. Fire and friars with intention — without compunction — never knowing regret.
All portent from here. The dark briars thick with illness.
Without agency — a magnificent disaster — falling and implicated. Smothering never staying. Praying without saying a thing. Prattling.
Sneak a chunk up your pant leg — white hot and abrupt. A life of impunity ends abruptly on a moonless dirt road. This country is vast and vacuous.
What I’m Reading:
Even now, as this vile age comes to a shuddering, bathetic end, we are so polite. We continue to buy things. We write letters. We argue about protocol. We say this or that can’t happen, or won’t. They couldn’t possibly. But it can, and they will.
— Carmen Maria Machado / Introduction to new edition of I Who Have Never Known Men
My knees poke up to grab oxygen — unruly blushings — stripped bushings unclad in naked abeyance to nothing.
Clucking tongues. Sunday night is coming for me and I’m muddy flipping foggy. Some kind of voodoo.
The slipstream whiplash.
Dr Scrip Eyewash attends — like he once said: You are broken. You are stuck. You are nothing.
What I’m Reading:
At midnight the moon is the color of the zero that madly refracts like beautiful glass
— Yaxkin Melchy Ramos / “Capybara Hot Springs”
Electric bedroom
New witch
Add wall next to track
Wedge or arc
Change entry
Too damaged by
Change
We want to keep them at 8 foot height
Close
Metal doors
No change to living hard pain
Change vanity
Apart (we may do this ourselves)
No change to pain
What I’m Reading:
The body
and the spirit are a bicycle
you ride carefully
and uphill
and for how long?
— Sunni Brown Wilkinson / “So Long”
. . . and he looked out to where the grass was running in the wind under the cold starlight as if it were the earth itself hurtling headlong and he said softly before he slept again that the one thing he knew of all things claimed to be known was that there was no certainty to any of it. Not just the coming of war. Anything at all.
— Cormac McCarthy / The Crossing
The last day on earth
will be short. It will be quick. The car engines will suck back their toxic fumes. The shepherds will put down their sticks. The phones will ring all at once and then all at once will stop ringing and no one will pick up. Everyone will be sitting on something. A flat rock. A dirty pavement. The edge of a ruffled bed.
— Rewa Zeinati / “The last day on earth”
Language as medicine? Literature
as ceasefire? Maybe when/if it’s over,
fire from the sky snuffed out, some of the rubble
lifted, and a survivor emerges.
— Marilyn Hacker / “The Returnee”
‘I wonder if a sillier and more ignorant catachresis than “Mother Nature” was ever perpetrated? It is because Nature is ruthless, hideous, and cruel beyond belief that it was necessary to invent civilization. One thinks of wild animals as savage, but the fiercest of them begins to look almost domesticated when one considers the viciousness required of a survivor in the sea; as for the insects, their lives are sustained only by intricate processes of fantastic horror. There is no conception more fallacious than the sense of cosiness implied by “Mother Nature”. Each species must strive to survive, and that it will do, by every means in its power, however foul – unless the instinct to survive is weakened by conflict with another instinct.’
— John Wyndham / The Midwich Cuckoos
somewhere in the shallowest lake
the earth’s change in fate is accumulating
or growing heavier
and withdrawing
— Anna Glazova / “* [1. / it’d be nice to have some recognition by now]”
Small rivulets of MDMA
in the heartland. Beaked men beneath
your window, the lunacy of stars.
I gather it all in my cloak and set off
towards a future we would have wanted
had we known it could be known to us.
Pilgrims strung from the jiggly boughs
of maples, the hounds’ corrupting song.
— Michael Martin Shea / “[Not that it was as it was said to be]”
Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.
— Cormac McCarthy / The Crossing
What I’m Listening To:
The grass is growing
All over town
From the cracks in the sidewalk
Where all the shops shut down
One tiny flower I’m jumping over
One tiny flower I’m jumping over
— Jeff Tweedy / “One Tiny Flower”
thee istsfor manity reader 