operate upon me with the can opener render me a jagged piece of election meat make my heart a hologram ring festoon my cisgendered sex with ringlets of onion some states eat pets with abandon
(abandon all hope)
my patrimony bleeds like a curlicue fibber let us purge our guts with reaper peppers and flow away on our excreta
deliver us from phonetic elocution (and longshoremen strikes) amen
What I’m Reading:
And all that remains for me is to follow a violet darkness on soil where myths splinter and crack.
Blue poured into summer blue, A hawk broke from his cloudless tower, The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew That part of my life was over.
— Stanley Kunitz / “End of Summer”
As floodwaters coursed through Texas and Taiwan, as mosquito-borne viruses spread across the Americas, as lethal heat struck down children on hikes and grandparents on pilgrimage, the world’s average temperature this summer soared to the highest level in record history, according to new data from Europe’s top climate agency.
— Sarah Kaplan / “Here’s what the hottest summer on Earth looked like” / The Washington Post
Inside the head there lives a lonely dog It is drooling spit digging through a mountain pile of garbage opening and closing an empty house’s windows overturning footprints in the sand and going into the fog
— Kim Hyesoon / “Person Walking Backward”
The desert city of Phoenix, Arizona, suffered a record 113 straight days with temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) this year, leading to hundreds of heat-related deaths and more acres burned by wildfire across the state, officials said.
— Liliana Salgado / “Hottest US city Phoenix smashes heat streak record” / Reuters
It’s funny if you think slavery is funny and I don’t. But I do like to pass along the embarrassment
of the jokester to the famous white person who may or may not have descended from the people who branded my last name.
— Bettina Judd / “New Black”
Industrial civilisation is close to breaching a seventh planetary boundary, and may already have crossed it, according to scientists who have compiled the latest report on the state of the world’s life-support systems … “Ocean acidification is approaching a critical threshold”, particularly in higher-latitude regions, says the latest report on planetary boundaries. “The growing acidification poses an increasing threat to marine ecosystems.
— Damien Gayle / “Earth may have breached seven of nine planetary boundaries, health check shows” / The Guardian
I lived with a man who liked it when men called him boss. They did it when he pumped his gas.
He said it made him feel adequate: right size, right shape. Even the hair on his hands was right.
— Kay Gabriel / “Effete Poem”
What I’m Listening To:
I find it useful To be useless When we’re talking about the future Who’s future My future
I live in a parallel universe of my own devising. I live most of my days in a dank cell, in the bowels of a vast complex of cells. I am allowed to write for fifteen minutes every afternoon, on the refuse recycled from the land beyond the barrens. The pipes on the ceiling here drip at all hours, and the walls are covered in sweat.
On occasion I hear others moaning from distant cells, but never a sound from the cells immediately adjacent to mine. I’ve never seen any of other inmates here, only the gloved hands and truncheons of my captors. They allow me out for a day once a month. On these occasions I visit my childhood home, which is now a pile of muddy detritus and gnarled rebar. I also visit the site of my former school, which is now a massive dung heap. Really, a dung heap. A heap of dung one hundred feet long and thirty feet high now. Cattle wander about freely since they were infected with the plague and deemed holy beings. The inhabitants of this neighborhood have been tasked with building the dung heap into a 100 by 100 foot totem to our shantytown — the last refuge before one enters the barrens.
When I tire I sleep on a patch of rocks where our library once stood. Early the next day I walk back to the complex — to my cell smelling of urine and fear. I love my little hole.
In this parallel world which I inhabit only the objects that become the subject of my consciousness truly exist, everything else is a ghostly simulacrum that plays on unseen film screens in theaters I don’t attend. And that I wouldn’t attend had I the capacity…
And I am a capacious man, even in these lean times.
Imagine that I move through the world inside an untethered bathysphere. My bathysphere is diving bell yellow, something jaunty from an ancient memory, like the Beatles “yellow submarine” if you will. You see, “jaunty” is not a natural predisposition for me, but I try. It’s the “power of positive thinking,” I remember a charlatan repeating. I believe that charlatan was my father — and so I delude myself with repeating this moment after moment. In any case, there is a wheeled hatch in my bathysphere. It’s at my feet, and I choose what and who to allow to inside. And in this manner the things I allow inside become the subject of my consciousness, and only at this point — once inside — does something truly exist.
And don’t fret, stranger. It’s not as if you’ll get flattened or knocked cold by a large metallic orb as I float into a room or walk by you on these desolate streets — no, in this physical dimension we actually inhabit the bathysphere; it allows for immateriality and transparency — you can walk right by me completely unaware of my universe in the bathysphere. But you might feel a slight tug in or near your heart and you’ll surely inhale a few molecules of sadness. Otherwise you’d have no idea of my strangeness. I am as innocuous as any other person from the outskirts of the barrens.
Thank you for stopping to listen.
Be on your way.
image: wikimedia commons / in public domain
What I’m Reading:
Already the iron door of the north Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows Order their populations forth, And a cruel wind blows.
thee first wound his intermediary exploration of synesthesiac particularity akin to visual music or graphic scourges from apparent cellular shavings hanging a pendulous doctorate drawn directly from squints +luminous winkles+leaflets of color pawpaws made into astonishing compotes
scripture filled with soaks skims +sneezes +eyewitness darkrooms tarot caribous+ thee trespasser of ligaments
all moving momentum spanners +viscous fly muddles puddle me this puzzle me mutilated
What I’m Reading:
My share of the people is the transit of their ghosts.
Maria says posthaste when she means post-punk. It has something to do with the wiring in her head.
I have a box full of letters, and she has a box full of coca leaves from her trip to Peru. She bought them from a Quechua woman wearing a bowler hat in Cuzco. An alpaca stood a few feet away saddled with a dozen large plastic garbage bags filled with coca leaves. I should know, I saw the vacation photos. Maria chews the leaves with a propulsion that seems superhuman, as if her mandible might detach and break out of its hinges and tear through her face.
She can’t stop chewing the leaves. I make tea out of them. She adds them to dishes which she invariably doesn’t eat because her appetite is suppressed from all the coca leaves she chews.
I’m just a writer that had a pocket full of wrens this morning. They were spry then. Now they’re a clump of feathers — limp bodies — a dead pocket o’ blues, with the divine exception of the aggregate lump of parasites that abandoned the birds when they went cold.
Now, I tell Maria, “with this pocketful of cavorting beasties, I thee wed, and honor and cherish and vow to infest thee with said beasties (of a cavorting nature) and then nurse in sickness after you contract a rare blood-borne illness from said beasties.”
She says this thing between us will never work. “Let’s forget this all altogether and just get down to the sex,” she says.
“Wha—?”
“Put on that Dead Kennedy’s record and let’s get to it,” she says.
“Which one,” I say, “Plastic Surgery Disasters or Fresh Fruit for Rotting— ”
“The one that starts with ‘Kill the Poor!”
What I’m Reading:
We all roll on, each with our little tragedies, our shrunken attentions.
139 / times up / first fall tang on the tongue / our fingers vaseline stained / cant forget the clock canting facewise facefirst / damocles like / on a wretched afternoon late holocene / sure feels late
violence prevention / and such / flailing at air / failing / falling like so many leaves / guns
hegottagun shegottagun theygottagun / what about us who do without
thick impastos of blood / what
sure feels late
is late
What I’m Reading:
It takes a calendar one damp day to declare fall, weeks of dying mums to second the motion.
… I’d like to write a children’s book called everybody dies. Upbeat, of course, and pragmatic. You only got so many days. Don’t think about death; when you’re ready, death will think about you.
— D. A. Powell / “Positivity”
The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.
— Samantha Harvey / Orbital
I am a thimble of O blood cells bluffing each time to let other objects through me it is possible for the tender wish to become a bone to beckon to tend the animal and temper it
— Asiya Wadud / “number four”
We know that Earth, if it’s not destroyed by us or an errant asteroid first, will likely be incinerated when the Sun expands into a red giant. Luckily, that probably won’t happen for at least another five billion years.
— Dr. Alastair Gunn / “Here’s how our Universe will (probably) end” / BBC Science Focus
To think there was a time I thought birds were kind of boring. Brown bird. Gray bird. Black bird. Blah blah blah bird. Then, I started to learn their names by the ocean, and the person I was dating said, That’s the problem with you, Limón, you’re all fauna and no flora.
— Ada Limón / “Calling Things What They Are”
Researchers are anxiously awaiting data from the midwestern state about a mysterious bird flu infection in a person who had no known contact with potential animal carriers of the disease. The data could reveal whether the ongoing US bird flu outbreak in dairy cattle has reached a dreaded turning point: the emergence of a virus capable of spreading from human to human.
— Heidi Ledford / “Is bird flu spreading among people? Data gaps leave researchers in the dark” / Nature
Yes, love was time, and it too splintered and cracked like the face of our country.
— Najwan Darwish / “A Violet Darkness”
image: Eye of Science/Science Photo Library
What I’m Listening To:
Did you read the news? I’m a bit confused The gun fever is back, the gun fever Rudeness and gun is the talk of this town The gun fever is back, the gun fever
thee istsfor manity reader 