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
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
stepped out of the fire straight into the frying pan the earth a cinder
image: wcvb
What I’m Reading:
We have known for more than a century about the climate consequences of burning fossil fuels. And it wasn’t just the scientists who knew. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson was warned, as have been many presidents after him. By 1977, Exxon (now ExxonMobil) not only knew that decades of burning fossil fuels would heat up the atmosphere, but developed in-house climate models that projected those changes with remarkable accuracy. Despite that knowledge, we have not only continued burning fossil fuels, we have continued burning them with reckless abandon. In a sense, you could say we have built a heat-fueled rocketship that is taking us, for better or worse, on a trip beyond the Goldilocks Zone.
— Jeff Goodell / The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet
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.
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
The hibiscus were impartial but patricide was the topic of conversation, not the usual coacktail party banter. A dragonfly drained a pistil daiquiri, while a croo of white ibis pecked at some takeaway boxes, and Lagartija Ron watched silently in blitzkrieg formation from the tree line.
I was on a two week jag to the past—in the shape of Florida—in the key of Spanglish. My ancestral forelocks were trapped in a cowlick, all mortise and tenon-like, as if we were on an all-inclusive at a Bahamas resort, specifically Eleuthera—but full of temperate zone tchotchkes and such.
It was an altogether vertiginous and humid afternoon. The wet bulb temperature was nearly 95° F—deadly, you see—so the impartial hibiscus were decidedly on a manatee fissure, fig banyan, sorta tip—and I was, like, sure! Aha! I second that!
But I really had no conception of where I was or what I was going on about. See, that’s the thing about Florida. . .
Don’t.
It didn’t work out for Ponce de Leon. It definitely went sour for Hernando de Soto. And now… well… just…
Don’t.
What I’m Reading:
My books remain on the shelves as I left them last year but all the words have died. I search for my favorite book, Out of Place.
