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
its faint deception feint tall taunt greater aid to nub octopus pulpo plinth plinker sculpture book champ exterminator of clams lob oscillator camouflage thingamajig conveyor o undersea expletive bound humblebrags
Relevance was not his strong suit. Assonance was a mildly strong point. Dissonance was his power alley. So he detuned his lyre and randomly plucked strings. He tuned his dulcimer to F sharp and struck it with claw hammers which were more appropriate for sheet rock installation. He retrieved his banjo from a dusty corner in the basement and pulled on the strings hard enough to feel them loosen. He opened a can of stale tennis balls and threw them at the banjo head and strings. He then found his ukulele in the closet and tore out the E and C strings and went mad strumming at the speed of Johnny Ramone on the G and A strings. He even shouted, “gabba, gabba, hey” once for nostalgia sake. In the office he took his electric guitar off its stand, plugged it in, and maximized the fuzz box and with drumsticks he did a ratamacue on the fretboard until there was a maelstrom of skronk filling the room. After a minute of this, his heart racing and the incipient pangs of a migraine squeezing the sides of his neocortex, he raised the guitar over his head and smashed his acoustic guitar to splinters in its stand — and then started on the walls. In this manner his 3/2 with 2 car became a massive heap of refuse. He was proud to take out his home before the weather got the best of him. “Hurricane that! Fire that! Flood that! Tornado that! Glacier melt that! Sea level rise that! Earthquake that! Virus that! Gas explosion that! Take that! I’m in control!
What I’m Reading:
It is hard to believe the quality of blackness that is the entirety of space around a day-lit earth, where the earth absorbs all the light – yet hard to believe in anything but that blackness…
oilcan receives transmissions / bluefin bulletins from fungi fishtown / ska+rock steady on the 45 / blam blam fever+phoenix city+wrong emboyo / oilcan loves the blam blam blam / loves when old time hoods call each other you dirty this+that / oilcan standing like a wet tree now / dreadnoughts gyring in his roiling mind / rusted spanners in the coiling works / creaking in his knees+a pop in his ankle when he steps just so
an asteroid malady to his days now / he claws a day panegyric from his memory / silver bullet days with silver plated handguns cocked just so
olicans oilfields full of insomniacs walking ovular laps around bottleneck tracks
this is the ballad of oilcan blue / the bluest blewits head there ever was
What I’m Reading:
any body can read the threadbare clock its second hand proclamation succumbs to all twelve hours
im a dream creep having bug dinner / making errant presentations in the round / converting pathological crab kids in love to arthritic husks / i tease a sickle / a cudgel / all show of course / i aint no aggro-chaperone hypnotist / overnight lows will drop to antiquarian simmer / please wear protective eyewear+sling your colostomy bag over your shoulder for quick escape / im having bullet pie / as everyone these days insists on carrying guns / i insist on forearms / have a quiver full of them / they get me thru the lean times / im a maladjusted tassel in a 1960’s burlesque / please dont touch the asterisks
the sickness doyenne suggests: mindfulness based stress reduction+meditation / bittersweet nightshades / bathing in great excremental deposits / thanks / ill pass / ill start the purgatotrial convolutions instead / the yellow-green resonances like gnashing teeth
im changing my insoles+increasing my fiber intake / im sorta hooked on imported guano / so maybe the occasional quaff / ill find a tendinitis sweetheart who spits monosyllabic love-tee-dums in basque / become a long-rapier foreman / hedge fund my way thru thee anthropocene / every dream creep for themselves
What I’m Reading:
Every swirling neon or red algal bloom in the polluted, warming, overfished Atlantic is crafted in large part by the hand of politics and human choices.
the mandrake sage transmits an incantation / inserts the bulldog queen in heavyweight cream / we have monologue lift-off / the long-rap foreign diplomatic corp spy daylight / the court of weightlifters have protein shakes in hand / teenagers hide in hedges beyond the lecture hall / on-sizzle we be watching the tear-jerker scene playing thru zoetrope eyes / on-off on-off on-off on-off on-off superfast / colorfast dreams abjuring and running fast / we stay monolith watch thru fading vision / spaniel hecklers chip concrete into ohm wafers
please write soon as im going foreleg gimpy and best-daze inane / ill wait for the courtesan of weirs if you dont respond / daytime tendencies will be tendentious+strident on alternate nights / await your witticisms / or at least your hedgehog face soon / my suppurating sutures weep+await you / all best
What I’m Reading:
Startled eyes of nurses swish by noiselessly, Orderlies with cropped heads swagger like murderers; And three surgeons, robed and masked mysteriously, Lounge gossiping of guts, and wish it were lunch-time.
The impact of climate change has been felt in earlier than ever heat warnings and 46 days of heat index topping 100 degrees, a record set last summer.
— Ashley Minazi / “Why does South Florida feel so damn hot? It’s not just the temperature that is rising” / Miami Herald
No, the mother thinks. No, she is not losing it. And, yes, it is normal to feel abnormal, after a body has left your body.
— Tess Gunty / The Rabbit Hutch
— Meghie Rodrigues / “Who will protect us from seeing the world’s largest rainforest burn?’ The mental exhaustion faced by climate scientists” / Nature
Many climate scientists and professionals face eco-anxiety in their daily work — an issue that is on the rise and is worsening mental-health disorders in the general population. Young adults are particularly affected. In a 2021 survey of 10,000 people aged between 16 and 25 years old in 10 countries, almost half said that climate distress affected their ability to sleep and work.
I think that you think that I think too much about grief It’s not only mine—we’re in the same current
— Carolina Ebeid / “Assume the Role of Cassandra, Wearing a Mask, Speaking into the Camera”
Humidity is why medical experts say that South Florida’s climate can be harder on the health and body than a dry climate like Arizona, where a 90 degree temperature doesn’t feel all that oppressive. Sweat is supposed to cool us off when it evaporates from our skin. But when it’s extremely humid, the sweat sticks and the body can’t cool itself off as well, raising the risks of heat exhaustion or stroke.
— Ashley Minazi / “Why does South Florida feel so damn hot? It’s not just the temperature that is rising” / Miami Herald
I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in, but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.
— Ada Limón / “Calling Things What They Are”
Go: get on your bike, slip out into the yawning morning traffic, find your groove, and get there. It’s the start of a new day for so many of us, all around the world-in forward-thinking cities like Amsterdam, bicycles already account for 35 percent of all trips taken. In Groningen, a Swedish city of 180,000, it’s 60 percent.
— Sam Tracy / Bicycle!: A Repair & Maintenance Manifesto
What I’m Listening To:
All the things he couldn’t have All the things he couldn’t see Little man with a gun in his hand
— The Minutemen / “Little Man With Gun In His Hand”
thee istsfor manity reader 