thee istsfor manity reader

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

— Sylvia Plath / “Morning Song”

I think women run things better. Women are much more sensible and collaborative—they are life-givers. Even in modern times, when you look at governments—there’s Angela Merkel, Sanna Marin, Jacinda Ardern. That’s why I want a woman President.

— Francis Ford Coppola / “Francis Ford Coppola on Books That Influenced ‘Megalopolis’” / Empire

But for your dollar, your dirty dollar, 
    Your greenish leprosy, 
It’s only hatred you shall get
    From all my folks and me;
So keep your dollar where it belongs 
    And let us be!

— Salomón de la Selva / “A Song for Wall Street”

Upwards of one million Cubans have left the island since 2020, roughly a tenth of the population, in an exodus demographers say has few parallels outside of war . . . “It’s going to kick off again at any moment.”

— Dave Sherwood / “In a migrant exodus to the US, many Cubans are disappearing at sea. They leave a painful void” / Reuters

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner

— Elizabeth Alexander / “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe”

A key region of Antarctica is getting greener with alarming speed — a trend that will spur rapid change of Antarctic ecosystems. Researchers looked at satellite imagery of one of the continent’s fastest-warming regions: the Antarctic Peninsula, which juts north towards the tip of South America. They found that the area covered by plants increased by almost 14 times between 1986 and 2021. “It’s the beginning of dramatic transformation,” says remote-sensing specialist and study co-author Olly Bartlett.

— Alix Soliman / “Believe it or not, this lush landscape is Antarctica” / Nature

Are we here to prepare
for our death, to begin to make our farewells as we
arrive—do we exist to mourn the earth?  

— Sharon Olds / “Blossom Trees”

What I’m Listening To:

I’ve had a hard, hard landing
I really should duck and roll out
Out of my life

— Kim Deal / “Coast”

dazzled bear armistice

an avant-garde plateful / a dazzled bear armistice / computers full of soybean gas screaming soylent green is people / a rubber stamped law / vortex concubines exploring the playtime quartos of lime habits as sculptural embargo

stay at home yogis falter / writing becomes authorless if the author is removed as a potential safety issue / welcome to the unique kitchen of cinematic spasms / shut down freedom and replace it with equivalencies of harsh aleatoric frequencies / lap dissolve / we’re expanding your freedoms to include briar fingertips in runny egg yolks / jump cuts / simmer your moral panic on the back burner / splice here / call me / never

What I’m Reading:

I learned at birth to smile

                        where my teeth are not. And I learned after:

everything that opens is a mouth.

                        Every mouth will spit you right out.

— Aliyah Cotton / “Plastic Bag from Corner Store Laments the Self” 

What I’m Reading:

A study of newer, bigger versions of three major artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots shows that they are more inclined to generate wrong answers than to admit ignorance when compared with previous models. The study also found that people aren’t very good at spotting the bad answers, meaning users are likely to overestimate the abilities of chatbots…

— Nicola Jones / “Bigger AI chatbots more inclined to spew nonsense — and people don’t always realize” / Nature

thee eggman of root vegetables . . .  

. . . he believes in novelettes, not himself / he / thee feta trickster / now a forager of mirrors / unseen in the annals of modern beet milkers / however / at the hello of his notoriety in the late 1980s and early 1990s / his yachtswomen insurance adjusters+espresso sippers were the stutter of niche governments around the sweet potato scraps / how did a quinoa semiconductor transmogrify to an errant joystick+literary poacher

so / rituals to praise today on the winnows of salsa verde / bring in the tyranny / the petty dictators+right-handed fraudsters to reshape the post post post modern world / political lap sitters of a populist forfeit at their first tepid recital

in equal praise of a spaniel hash / let us reminisce / let us fête the purest exterminator of reason / his vitamin mandible controlled by the fateful paws of pawpaw trees / so babble and augur the frightened exertions of a headlamp canary / the ultimate zigzag in the coalmine / drop the tray / soft shoe your way to a life of broken pottery / let us gas+bloat

What I’m Reading:

I, bastard child of the giant chandelier called the blue sky.
No one calls me the sphinx of love.

— Shuzo Takiguchi / “The Fish’s Desire”

What I’m Reading:

In a way, Milton is exactly the type of storm that scientists have been warning could happen; Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California, called it shocking but not surprising. “One of the things we know is that, in a warmer world, the most intense storms are more intense,” he told me. Milton might have been a significant hurricane regardless, but every aspect of the storm that could have been dialed up has been.

— Zoë Schlager / “MILTON IS THE HURRICANE THAT SCIENTISTS WERE DREADING” / The Atlantic

counterculture mudgards

jonesy spins an intermediate dub in the mix
mind-bending parasites gyrate in psychedelic ardor
the postmistress breaks into the varsity rag
all those sprawled out in mouth-breathing stupor
eulogize the pogo in a sundae of sundays
it’s 1965 all over again
but with a dearth of hope
with too many dayglo counterculture mudguards

What I’m Reading:

It seems I have lost the ability to perceive movement. To get a grip on light.
The people in the kitchen. Gangling. Unclear.

— Latif Askia Ba / “6 février”

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Time moves on with its usual nihilism, mows us all down, jaw-droppingly insensate to our preference for living. Guns us down. In another split second millennia will pass and the beings on earth have become exoskeletal-cybernetic-machine-deathless-postbeings who’ve harnessed the energy of some hapless star and are guzzling it dry.

— Samantha Harvey / Orbital

empacho: you ate cactus until you burst open like a rotten fruit

tacos de cabeza: quandaries posed under the spell of an orange moon

un susto: your future ghost twitches in an empty room

— Erika L. Sánchez / “Translation”

… we’re out of margin. We’re now watching the climate crisis play out in real time, week by week, day by day.

— Bill McKibben / “Water Though Not Everywhere” / Substack 

Nobody is saying that these people do not ultimately cease 
    to be. And
Sometimes their passings are even more painful than ours.
It is just that so often they live till their hair is white.
They make excellent corpses, among the expensive 
    flowers …. 

— Gwendolyn Brooks / “Beverley Hills, Chicago”

Sea surface temperatures in the path of Helene were as warm as 89 degrees Fahrenheit — 2 to 4 degrees above normal … These record water temperatures have been made significantly more likely by human-caused climate change, according to Climate Central. The North Atlantic Ocean as a whole has seen record warm temperatures in 2024, storing 90% of the excess heat from climate change produced by greenhouse gas pollution.

— Alex Sundby, Tom Hanson, Brian Dakss, David Yeomans / “Helene death toll tops 100 as Southeast digs out from storm’s devastation” / CBS News 

That is why uprooted fields meandered in the midst of roads
             clay shot up in corollas
             the nodes of telegraph wires showed traces of the trees
             there in the distance moonless skies

— Julien Blaine / “Eighteenth”

We exist now in a fleeting bloom of life and knowing, one finger-snap of frantic being, and this is it. This summery burst of life is more bomb than bud. These fecund times are moving fast.

— Samantha Harvey / Orbital

What I’m Listening To:

You’re gonna laugh
You’re gonna sing
And you’re gonna bring the world down round your ears
While the temperature grows ugly

— The Smile / “The Slip”

red is our color

she respects the tracksuit since july
she yodels kindness+irritation at once

we’re two awesome marxist archers
commies at the bullseye dialectics

i am the third from the ringmaster in the photo
she’s center-right by the red gunner

red is our color
hammers+sickles for bows+arrows

we do two shows nightly
in paducah then kankakee

call ourselves the portables
at the syringe hamper

come enjoy our mutter+census taking
quinces on the quarter hour for all

continental iniquities during intermissions
stay for the flying saucers on a string

What I’m Reading:

señora studies: look, a map in the dirt of your mother’s hurts

— Erika L. Sánchez / “Translation”

withdrawal at creation

haggle haired+heinous in henna
proclaims the belligerent of bemoan

he shackles the liminal stall
on the prowl for a crochet gewgaw

and a quavering bardo
on an anvil toe charter
headed for the underworld

he’s a mangle hack for tag and twister
losing stride the big castrate roller
ass down on the backside of democracy
on the fix for big mac gum drops+plastic sheets

he’s a hotbed radiator ignoramus
a vessel large enough to shackle
to a pedophile priest

or a plotted bed of insurgents
rushing the steps of the capital dome

on a frothy cold morning
full of noxious fumes and thumbscrews

screw them

What I’m Reading:

… five billion years … the sun will run out of fuel, expand to a red dwarf and consume Mercury and Venus. Earth, if it survives, will be scorched and arid, its oceans boiled dry, a cinder stuck in an interminable orbit of a white dwarf black dwarf dying sun until the whole show ends as the orbit decays and the sun eats us up.

— Samantha Harvey / Orbital