thee istsfor manity reader

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”

a moment like this

eggs on a sympathetic aging patriarch
spirit of murder reveal yourself gradually
the flesh about his wrists in vengeful orbit

a businessman who lived his speculation
estranged in the department of the loveless
a confession — the only shock neglected

control consummate — a coda
observer of human behavior
and chairmen to the unspoken

son — toll harsh and neglectful
a trunk of kind bacon in the boot
in the soot and eventually his own dinner

worked the dramatic machinations of the flesh
stayed largely within the confines of the order where he gently pried younger employees

from his sentences
from his pilgrim crescendos
from his mistress

from his glazed doughnuts
from his latent thighs
from the click narrative

ironic
staged
humiliation

corners

dark

What I’m Reading:

My eye is a planet with another motion,
with its orbits and burials;
each dawn I forget
where I came from.

— John Tarrant / “Flute”

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)”

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

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”

What I’m Reading:

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

I touched every doorknob and saw myself magnified.

— Callie Siskel / “Echo”

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”

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