thee istsfor manity reader

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

cross-wired (redux)

the morality of it doesn’t enter in to any of this

we can hold two mutually contradictory ideas
in mind at the same time

fritillary
herbaceous
& compromised as a corpus callosum
that no longer holds
a mind together

cross-wired and twisted beyond reproach
a mother shakes her baby ‘til it passes
out

by proxy
in the flesh
or via smite of gilgamesh

we may as well drown
in the euphrates
tomorrow or 5000 years ago

we all make our way into shadows

What I’m Reading:

I’m writing 
a love poem 
even with 
an American 
boot to 
my throat. 

— C. Russell Price / “I Decide to Tell Ghost Cowboy My Intentions”

Sense / Relatives (redux)

Then there was my uncle Mao. His own generational AI—his Little Red Bookworm in the rainstorm and no one left wanting his worn pouffy sieges. But that’s exactly what my underage blackguard aunt wore on her spectacles so it seemed as if half the day was a courtroom of wisecracks—retainers jutting out of her headgear. Not a good look in anyone’s book or on anyone’s Delphic oracle aunty.

My, my…how sense is relative.

What I’m Reading:

Part of me is always about to turn
in a direction I will never go. Trucks roar
filled with things people need. Sometimes I sound
to myself like a robot.

— Matthew Zapruder / “The Pained Desert”

What I’m Reading:

This is war
so all the birds would flee

— Irma Pineda / “This is war”

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

I gotta tell
the truth—sometimes,
people are not born, some of us

fall into this world

— Hílda Davis / “Pilate ponders where she belongs”

The thing that makes life interesting is that it ends. The thing that makes love worthwhile is that it’s all we’ve got.

— Rumaan Alam / Entitlement

I can’t wait to take you home and rob you
Break your chaste and taste it with masa
To get a piece of your galore
Show up out of the woods at like 1000 AM…

— Zan de Parry / “Barn Door”

People, it turned out, were mostly fine with being victimized in small doses. In fact, they seemed to expect a certain amount of deception, allowed for a tolerable margin of manipulation in their relationships.

— Emma Cline / The Guest

You send a video: lizards rushing into limestone
which remind you of being a kid in Florida.  

In Florida we memorized sonnets
while leaping around green anoles. 

— Kaveh Akbar / “Love Poem with Tumor and Petrified Dog”

… your mother, your uncle, none of you get that you’re living on credit accrued at other people’s expense, at the expense of the kind of people who still aren’t allowed past your front hall…

— Anton Chekhov / The Cherry Orchard

I’m not sure
of much, except it’s hard to say
what’s true. We suspect the higher-ups

have hidden motives for telling us
so. The feds, my parents, their Catholic
god, AI, this sense, despite all I know
of marrow, of wind in my bones.

— Jen DeGregorio / “No Isms Except Neologism”

What I’m Listening To:

There is no west, the sun doesn’t rise
No, the sun never rests
As the Earth leans into its forever pirouette

— U.S. Girls / “Pay Streak”

Stalagmite Letters

We ran riot through the archives—

Harpies with sharpies and scissors
Obliterating collections into piles

Of pages triangular—
Shards and screeds.

(Pursuit of knowledge agnostic)

Accretions of stalagmite letters
Monticules in dead air

We are the whips cometh—
goo goo goojoob!

What I’m Reading:

What was more annoying than want of something? A reminder that the world was unreliable, that even valuable things went missing.

— Emma Cline / The Guest