Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

. . . your world totters upon an unspoken labyrinth of questions. And we will devour you, my friend. You and all your pale empire.

— Cormac McCarthy / Cities of the Plain

I have taken to photographing
my every moment
in an attempt to locate
the place where I lost myself.

— Cynthia Cruz / “Phosphorescence”

Humans are by far the planet’s most destructive species, but we’re also the only species that has ever worked together to ensure other forms of life don’t go extinct.

— Connor Knighton / Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia to Zion Journey Through America’s  National Parks 

Make me dirt. 
Gone are the days of serenity. 
Guns are the words of humanity. 
I have no food but a thorn, 
No sport but a sigh. 

— Refaat Alareer / “O Earth (Land Day Poem)”

The Indian Empire is a despotism—benevolent, no doubt, but still a despotism with theft as its final object.

— George Orwell / Burmese Days 

The signs pointing to doing something right
and failing. Educated and I lost
my job. Bipolar and I cannot lose
my mind.

— Erica Dawson / “The Month When I Watch Joker Everyday”

Colonialism demands history begin past the point of colonization precisely because, under those narrative conditions, the colonist’s every action is necessarily one of self-defense. The story begins not when the wagons arrive, but only after they are circled. In this telling, fear is the exclusive property of only one people, and the notion that the occupied might fear the doing of their occupier is as fantastical as the notion that barbarians might be afraid of the gate.

— Omar El Akkad / One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

What I’m Listening To:

A man wants to smell like a man
To crumple a can in the palm of his hand
This is a man . . .

— Reverend Fred Lane / “The Man with the Foldback Ears”

conflate

•pond-seeking sir what sadness do you heap upon my eyes / the weariness sinks into my bones / oblate & undone / repeated ingestions of your misery elide / have driven me to stress / suicide your stockbroker gig / conflate your delusions into one great drunken indifference / your shadow has overtaken me / my gannet’s billet is done for / drink of the datura thorn apple / forget•

What I’m Reading:

Let the fog’s calls
go to voicemail. Tell the fog
to eat shit, burn the fog’s letters.

— Ruth Madievsky / “Fog”

Slightly Dirty (redux)

His fragrance remained in the room when he left, and she picked up notes of Ambien and gin.

He turned into a dragon and blew smoke up his own ass: in this manner he floated away on convection currents over the next county into the tri-state area.

She was disputatious. She said she loved living in Bwana Johnny Time — the epoch of real mealy mouthed crying. She said she had cramps. The walls cared nothing of it. She insisted and sang “Silent Night.”

He was tall with small joints and thick limbs. His hair, tufted, was buffeted by the winds which were strong and cool this high in the atmosphere. Before he blew smoke up his ass he washed windows without panes, and took pains in his assiduousness. (His father once digested him during a midday snack — and since then he felt as if he were covered in a film.) He felt slightly dirty and smelled worse.

She was small with oblong limbs, and royally blonde-haired down to her quadriceps. She analyzed the filigree in the milliner’s shears and chose “deckle” as the word of the day; and cellophane was “thee” fabric. She smelled of Lithium and a life roughly lived. She ate only the crusts.

His name was Funty. Her name was Frenta. He blessed his goldfish. She fried hers. “Orange Poppers!” she proclaimed. His favorite animal was the Pileated Woodpecker. She peeled his navels.

She was obsessed with the texture of his body. His tortured male narcissism despaired. He happily fathered a wonderful future in Hades. He wanted to write a skeezy text in the underworld.

What I’m Reading:

Tragedy lurks like a wounded lynx.
Like the sea, tragedy
knows no fatigue, there is no rest in its mysteries.

— José Mármol / “The Sad Ballad of Wyckoff”

What I’m Reading:

Expect society to be defective.
Then weep when you find that it is far
more defective than you imagined.

— Ron Padgett / “How to be Perfect”

Old Residence Roe (redux)

Venn diagrammer,

Put-down fleshpot-bitten particulars, play me the warped Uriah bluffs. Shadow and hiss.

Triumph pad,

Draw me a Cossack and hatchway bursary embryos in and out on sternum ridges. Bring me the bluffs.

White taboo clown,

Password me the caviar spotlight of that old residence roe. Handbill and plumb,

Sinner ‘74 brazier,

Bring a Peckinpah rough cut, a splatter and blush. Bring me, please, the headlamp of A. Garcia. That mud don’t play until ten after four.

Mud don’t play.

Mud don’t.

What I’m Reading:

The sound of quiet. The sky
indigo, steeping
deeper from the top, like tea.
In the absence
of anything else, my own
breathing became obscene.

— Leila Chatti / “I Went Out to Hear”

A Lap Dissolve

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. 

— Rivka Galchen / “Unreasonable” / The New Yorker

What I’m Reading:

I sharpened knives
All night.
To welcome you
In the brilliance of their blades . . .

— Ladmila Lazić / “Love”

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

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”

— Tom Waits / “Eyeball Kid”

What I’m Reading:

Our bodies carry everything that has ever happened to us, the way the land carries everything of humanity.

— Lidia Yuknavitch / “Unearthed”

What I’m Reading:

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. 

— Henry David Thoreau / Journal, August 14, 1854