I Painted You

Several days of tempest,
Drifting to the north on unanswered orisons,
The datura oriented at the sun’s appearance.
Partial to impuissant seasons,
Speakers shorten their imprecations —
Ancients their divagations.
There I painted you
As a spot on the dimming sun.

What I’m Reading:

where can we put all this fire?
there is more fire than warmth
there are more walls than doors

will you teach me the language of walls?

— Anna Malihon / “[I’ve wanted to ask for a long time…]”

The Mopes

I.

Something like a true depressive’s day. Cold, cloudy, dark by 4pm. An elaborate torpor that caffeine won’t derail. Eating meals with your fingers. Eating cookies. Wear your pajamas all day. Walk 840 steps by 8:30pm … that’s the equivalent of one circuit around the apartment. Calls not made. Calls not answered. The maples denuded and bending in the wind outside. The mopes. The doom scrolls. The writing relegated to this you see before you. What gives? Shake this. (Shake this not).

II.

Scrounge not. Plod not. Spend the day and night in bed. Lower the blinds. Keep the sun at bay tomorrow. Press play. Press repeat. Turn down the volume. Read a book backward & upside-down. Close said book. Close (unsaid) eyes. Tomorrow. Cleanse. Fold. Manipulate. To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow … 

III.

She made an unusual, exciting discovery—rosary narrations with warbling wooers at the center of earplug spaces—messages in the marmalades, esoteric concatenations, erotic liberations, scratched phonographs. Her observational arched eyebrow and nuanced approach to clam ranching led to further explorations with molting morphs, sunken oars, and sedative promiscuities. Her life was now plunger ready. She continued drafting, something was bound to make sense to her piquant sensibility someday. And that day was December 3, 2025 — the day of the coded codex.

What I’m Reading:

It was worse than having a sinking feeling; I was a sinking feeling, an unplayable adagio for strings; internal distances expanded and collapsed when I breathed. It was like failing to have awoken at the right point in a nightmare; now you had to live in it, make yourself at home.

— Ben Lerner / Leaving the Atocha Station

Multivariables (redux)

She delivered a dead man aboard pretending he was drunk. Otherwise, she delivered groceries ordered through an app. Though it must be said that she sometimes delivered blows to the head. The unsuspecting victims then became the next batch of sailors to be delivered up for impressment. She didn’t do any of the processing herself—she merely dropped off the victims, and on occasion delivered arithmetic books to various regional libraries.

One day she struck an unsuspecting Calculus book (like it was 1812) and sent a number of differential and multivariable maths skittering across the highway. She knew an opportunity when she struck one.

Upon exiting her impressment mobile she herself was struck, in the most integral of manners, by an errant British man-o’-war—three hundred miles off course from a breadfruit processing plant. It goes to show that calculus and impressment aren’t complementary.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled life. . .

Thank you.

What I’m Reading:

CEO-to-worker pay ratio in 1965: 20-1

CEO-to-worker pay ratio in 1990: 75-1

CEO-to-worker pay ratio today: 280-to-1 

Trickle-down economics was always a sham.

Nothing has ever trickled down.

— Robert Reich / Bluesky post

a violence kinetic

you have never seen me
yet it feels like remembering
maybe this is all there is

i believe so
it feels alarmingly short

i am translating from the spanish now
i am projecting from the post-modern

now you believe i am lying
i am lying

blood here
a violence kinetic

What I’m Reading:

Who needs imagination when the dystopia is right in front of you? 

— Vann R. Newkirk II / “What Climate Change Will Do To America By Mid-Century” / The Atlantic

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Democracy collapses when humiliation becomes the organizing principle of politics, when revenge feels more righteous than inclusion.

— Richard A. Greenwald / “The Politics of Humiliation” / The Baffler

Friction is inevitable in human relationships. It can be uncomfortable, even maddening. Yet friction can be meaningful—as a check on selfish behavior or inflated self-regard; as a spur to look more closely at other people; as a way to better understand the foibles and fears we all share.

Neither Ani nor any other chatbot will ever tell you it’s bored or glance at its phone while you’re talking or tell you to stop being so stupid and self-righteous. They will never ask you to pet-sit or help them move, or demand anything at all from you. They provide some facsimile of companionship while allowing users to avoid uncomfortable interactions or reciprocity. “In the extreme, it can become this hall of mirrors where your worldview is never challenged . . . And so, although chatbots may be built on the familiar architecture of engagement, they enable something new: They allow you to talk forever to no one other than yourself.

— Damon Beres / “The Age of Anti-Social Media is Here” / The Atlantic

I don’t want to be a farmer but my mother was right
I should never have tried to rise out of the proletariat
Unless I can convince myself as Satan argues with Eve
That we are among a proletariat of poets of all the classes
Each ill-paid and surviving on nothing
Or on as little as one needs to survive
Steadfast as any farmer and fixed as the stars
Tenants of a vision we rent out endlessly

— Bernadette Mayer / “Essay”

And all that burgeoning physicality is held within yourself as a sort of secret, even as it is also the actual surface that you present to the world, so that you’re left absurdly exposed, unsure whether the world knows everything about you or nothing, because you have no way of knowing whether these experiences that you’re having are universal or entirely specific to you.

Perhaps it’s at that age, he thinks, that you first have the sense that you and your body are not entirely identical, that you occupy the same space without being quite the same thing, because some part of you seems to lag the transformation of your body, and to be surprised by it in the way that an outside observer might be, so that you no longer feel entirely at one with your body as you always had until then, and it starts to make sense to talk about it as if it was something slightly separate from yourself, even while you seem more powerless than ever to deny it whatever it wants. Although actually at first there seems to be no reason to deny it what it wants, whenever it wants it.

— David Szalay / Flesh

A violence exiting is still a violence.
After the genocide, the genocide.

— Fady Joudah / “After The Genocide”

Chatbots are like a wormhole into your own head. They always talk and never disagree. 

— Damon Beres / “The Age of Anti-Social Media is Here” / The Atlantic

The MAGA capture of the GOP signals the weakness of the institutional guardrails required to support democracy. Trump might not be exceptional, but the party’s embrace of illiberalism is. In fact, Trump built a movement through a carnival of humiliation and revenge that captured half the country and one of the two major parties.

— Richard A. Greenwald / “The Politics of Humiliation” / The Baffler

What I’m Listening To:

I must look like a dork
Me, naked with textbook poems, spout fountain against the Nazis
With a weird kind of sex symbol
In speeches that are big dance thumps, if we heard mortar shells
We’d cuss more in our songs
And cut down on guitar solos

— The Minutemen / “Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing”

Sometimes a Fugue

Sometimes I have the ocean roaring in my ears, in my head, not the intermittent breaks and ebbs of waves on the shore — but only the crashes: crashes, crashes, crashes — on an endless loop for minutes, hours sometimes. A stream of white noise. Vision strained, as if I were only seeing clearly through the spaces in a chain link fence. But much of this is going on without my awareness — and only when it becomes suddenly silent and my vision resolves, refocuses completely, do I become aware of what just happened. Where did those minutes or hours go? What was I doing? Was I here all along in my room, in my car, in my office, this museum — or did I go somewhere else and do other things: unconscionable things, while I was out on the waves?

Then:

Together we will read and disinfect literature and curate arguments about the purity of intention. We will wreck work that is not up to our values of purity. We will be attentive to the hobgoblins of human imperfection we must strive toward purity. Always. We will burn the offending works and strive to drive out the poison mentality. We are the tornados of righteousness. Honor always, gentlemen. Honor always wins. Honor trumps love and understanding. We are the quicksand that will swallow them up and suffocate them. The human mind is a wound that needs triage. We are the arbiters by virtue of human declension. We are the chosen. Let us pray upon this and devise a way to suppress the fallible. We are the weapon. We are the smiting hand of the all-mighty.

Then:

Silence.

What I’m Reading:

I find myself standing each new day
shoulder to shoulder with a sadness that
permeates the walls
turns a key in my head
and plays havoc with the beat of time

— Mariam Meetra / “Shadow”

house unstable (redux)

drift the globe on a pickaxe
annotate your work with carcasses
all palpitation and courthouses

your peroration had the lithograph
tenderness of tenterhooks

you play the gamelan tuned
to the seventh tone and fifty
clichés overlong

you gave thanks to the wrong
ideology / corporation / government

this old house unstable
somewhere between disdain
and excommunication

button down your diatribes
put down that axe
and relax

youre one good whack
from
oblivion

What I’m Reading:

sometimes race means run
in the loop around
THE RIGHT TO FEAR
I think I need better camouflage

— Giancarlo Huapaya / [39] from “Ley de la Feria/Law of the Fair”

Pockmarked (redux)

… later I get flashes of grandpa with his old runners all rolled up into one giant sticky mess—balled and held together with tape…

He’d talk about the high school girls he’d “teach” Bible Study to.

They: all spouting the traumatized truths of teen-age diarists with red or pink manicured nails chipping or chewed off at the ends.

He entoning: “these sorbriquets of the new generation means what to me?” He’d say in frustration, sounding the bad imitation of counterculture nomenclature, “none of those young blondes or brunettes would get it.” 

An inch long ferrule of ash growing from the nub of his Kent 100 planted in the crevice of his forefinger.

“What in tarnation?” he’d say. “They’d look at me with dilated eyes ready for something once the drugs took effect.”

Grandpa says he went to college to become a critical thinker, but he ended up doing things he didn’t think he’d do.

I, personally, don’t know what to do, playing with the jalousie window handle—spinning it this way and that—slats open, slats close, slats open, slats, close, slats open … you get the drift, and think the girls got the best of him.

Then I think: thanks for shopping at low hanging scrotum mart, and what am I supposed to do but open the front door, sheepish-like, and offer grandma a coke and a smile, ready for her comeback from gallstones and such … come again now, ya’ hear.

I hear things. I see. I hear, and don’t report a thing.

There are airs and wispy memories of foul and forced love—that isn’t love—all over this house. Which is now my house too.

So I go to my new room and I put the Runaways “Cherry Bomb” on the turntable and “Doctor Love” by Kiss on the cassette player, and play them simultaneously, and hiss obscenities at the walls—bare and pockmarked with fist and knuckle markings.

And the neighbor woman sings something in the backyard. Her rasp scratching through the jalousie slats and dusty screen.

She sings: “I don’t care what you’re talking about, noooo!” And it ain’t good, there ain’t no way to parse it—it’s pained. And she continues: “don’t shoot for craters, no…” and then it sounds like she sings: “don’t shoot the the prattles of my menstrual age…” and I don’t understand a thing now.

And I don’t think I ever did. Nothing in my life makes sense. So I expect the unexpected—and expect pain. I live those rules now. Good rules. The only rules, I realize, I’ve ever known.

I learn to argue from a point of syllogistic logic and scream at my grandfather often. His bristly hands this way and that.

Grandpa’s off his rocker, for sure. I go and find Brillo pad puffs and stuff them in his loafers. I glue Brillo pads as afro puffs on his bald head when he sleeps in his recliner—three Kent 100 butts deep in his smoky whiskey glass; and I stick a fork, as if it were an afro pick, into the fold of his wallet on the chifferobe; and I magic marker a bottle of his Aqua Velva into a bottle of Afro Sheen and leave it on his nightstand. 

I want to remake him into Stevie Wonder, my favorite. I like “Living for the City” and “Don’t You Worry Bout A Thing,” all of Innervisions, really. Grandpa thinks it stinks.

I hate it here. I hate my room. I hate my house. Dare I say, I hate grandpa.

He’s always making me go buy him cartons of Kent 100’s, and insisting that I write 100-words just to round myself out, but I don’t enjoy the rounding out—especially when he grabs my backside and rubs it all soft, and the like; or when he sticks his hand in my underwear and jiggles me and says I’m becoming a big boy now.

I get a bad gassy feeling in my stomach and hardness there below, and I don’t understand none of it, other than I don’t like it at all. I understand he’s a man, and he knows the world and all, especially from the war—but it feels strange, wrong, to feel that way.

But he’ll buy me a Whaler from Burger King or get me a Hamburgler glass from Mc Donald’s and it sorta’ makes me feel better.

For a while, anyway.

What I’m Reading:

Maybe this will be the day the ocean rises up and cleans their town off the face of the earth. She doesn’t hope for it, so much as she’s grown up expecting it: Grandma carried off by a wave, still in her chair with a blanket over her lap and her eyebrows bent in rage, Carmen treading water, lecturing everyone about how they should have prepared better for this.

— Yume Kitasei / Saltcrop

0

a fata morgana on the desert horizon
to catch a falling knife
a future murk
an opacity
so dense
void
0

What I’m Reading:

Amandeep Gill, the United Nations special envoy for digital and emerging technologies, warns against a “slow death” in which “we slip, step by step, into a space where we lose our human agency, we lose human creativity, and the joy we derive from some of our human interactions”.

— Flora Graham / “What the people steering AI really think” / Nature Briefing