






What I’m Reading:
Each fall the raven leaves me his north country, bad weather and promises, his feathers full of summer air, so green it looks black.
— James Galvin / “Inheritance”







What I’m Reading:
Each fall the raven leaves me his north country, bad weather and promises, his feathers full of summer air, so green it looks black.
— James Galvin / “Inheritance”

don’t know what i’m doing
but i do it just the same
if i don’t
i’ll never do it
i’m fried and looking to rest
but i’m peripatetic deep down
i’ll put some miles on
i’d like to bike 5,000 miles this year
who needs sleep?
i’ll get to it
and so i’m off

What I’m Reading:
On my bike I am a geoglyphic doodler, contouring a life without yet knowing its center.
— Tree Abraham / Cyclettes

Before I arrived to this city, I could feel the depression in my fingertips. It made my fingers tingle. Sadness is the most alive emotion. It gets into your nerves. Its pulses feel like insects at the rim of your skin.
— Victoria Chang / “The Tree, 1964”
… we are heading into the peak of what you might call greenhouse season, when one can be sadly certain of hideous news. Right now we are seeing a heatwave of truly monstrous proportion across Asia—the temperature in New Delhi these past days has topped 120 degrees Fahrenheit for the first time in its recorded history.
— Bill McKibben / “Intensity” / Substack
We are constantly producing the past. We are factories for the past. Living past-making machines, what else? We eat time and produce the past. Even death doesn’t put a stop to this. A person might be gone, but his past remains. Where do all those heaps of personal past go?
— Georgi Gospodinov / Time Shelter
Experts say that by June parts of the city’s central valley could reach “day zero,” when there isn’t enough water to pump out to the city, even if the typical rainy season starts that month… The growing scarcity of water in several parts of Mexico is a bellwether of how worsening climate change may affect cities all over the world, experts say.
— Marina E. Franco / “Mexico City is running out of water, forcing many to ration” / Noticias Telemundo for Axios
In the middle of nightmares: certainly
I have lived too long in an atmosphere of hatred.
Discipline propels me through the arid superstructure
Insisting “stop and think, pick and choose”
— Laurance Wieder / “Water is the Mother of Ice”
… the combination of dropping oxygen levels, rising acidification and soaring ocean heat was also seen at the end of the Permian period about 252m years ago, when Earth experienced the largest known extinction event in its history, known as the Great Dying.
— Oliver Millman / “Oceans face ‘triple threat’ of extreme heat, oxygen loss and acidification” / The Guardian
I used to think depression was all around me, that I was within it. Now I see that it is always ahead of me. That it is in pieces, but it moves in a swarm.
— Victoria Chang / “The Tree, 1964”

What I’m Listening To:
He was a vampire whose time had come
He was a vampire snowman who stayed up
Stayed up to see the sun
— Hannah Marcus / “Vampire Snowman”

We ran riot through the archives—
Harpies, sharpies and scissors
Obliterating collections into piles
Of pages triangular—
Shards and screeds.
(Pursuit of knowledge agnostic)
Accretions of stalagmite letters
Monticule in dead air
We are the whips cometh—
goo goo goojoob!

What I’m Reading:
… if you run a lawnmower, look out — female cicadas are attracted to the noise and will flock to you. And no, the incessant din of the insects — which can be as loud as a jet engine — probably won’t cause temporary psychosis. It could actually help some people by temporarily masking tinnitus.
— Sumeet Kulkarni / “Why cicadas shriek so loudly and more: your questions answered” / Nature

His word, his breath,
Are merely synecdoche —
Ephemeral.
Nothing is true in the true
Sense of the word.
He drifts on the Lethe,
Intoxicated by water that transforms —
A trip into languor —
And never sets foot on the other shore.

What I’m Reading:
Once a dying woman said goodbye on Twitter right before she died. Sometimes I go onto the accounts of dead people and read their final posts. I listen to music while scrolling. The people singing in my ears are also dead. It is getting harder to be born and to vanish at once. Isn’t this what we all wanted anyway?
— Victoria Chang / “Buds, 1959”

the quatrain alchemist squalls—
sound and texts complete—
cracks the whip alcoholic

What I’m Reading:
… I have been living in a sort of twilight for months, waiting for night to fall.
— Franz Kafka / “The Rescue Will Begin in Its Own Time”

contralto teamsters
intermittent jackhammers
consular teapots
right-wing deathbed bikinis
radiographs and lemons

What I’m Reading:
The problem with depression is that someone else made it, but that person never existed.
— Victoria Chang / “Friendship, 1963”

1
A hot wattle thing of the new wave—a heel trestle tactician of new sex.
2
A treble tabernacle template … condolences!
3
Heathen tree table temple—tinplated condom.
4
The hot new textile and treetop heating tableau concluded. (normal tempos at operettas not included)
5
The necessary texture of watermarks and towropes. A trek of heaved temptation. (opiate condor fashion forward)
6
The advised necessary heaven tenancy. (refill the tablespoon of conclusion)
7
The hot heavyweight tremolo of the opossum conductor.
8
Thatcher and heckler tremor of the tablet conjectured and textured. (tendencies normalized going forward)
9 (a. – e.)
Your waterspout trachea. Your tender tabloid resignation. Your conclusive and necessary thaw. Your hectare trench. Thee conduit opportunist.
10
A tendon that should be taboo.
11
Hedge proctor trend-setter, tendril tabulator, theatregoer waterspout in the guise of a chancellor of the exchequer.
12
Hedgehog trespasser—tenement confessor at default opposition.
13
As hot tether and heater treaty—a tempest as scheduled maintenance.
This transmission has concluded.

What I’m Reading:
When I put the moon in a poem, it quivers like a strobe light nearly out of batteries.
— Victoria Chang / “Buds, 1959”

plastic shovel in hand
shots whizz by my head
it’s hard to breathe and bike this fast
i strike a saintly pose
i’m a pin cushion / i’m a pineapple
i’m a porcupine undone
arrows are an occupational hazard
tied up waiting for the rainy season
in a parched and rocky land
call me on monday
i’ll be out by wednesday

What I’m Reading:
Depression is a group of parallel lines that want to
touch, but never can.
— Victoria Chang / “Untitled, 1961”

This year I turned my back to the world. I let language face / the front. The parting felt like a death. The first person ran / away like a horse.
— Victoria Chang / “With My Back to the World, 1997”
I’ve gone to nature again and again to study what it feels like to be fully human.
— Laura Killingbeck / “A Woman Who Left Society to Live with Bears Weighs in on ‘Man or Bear’” / Bikepacking.com
The possibility that the zero gave birth to the universe,
that all our somethings come from nothing, the fear
of being alone like that, children of chance, orphans down to our atoms, is mother to the idea of god.
— Bill Hicok / “The Call to Worship”
A new study out today shows that heat waves have tripled since the 1960s in this country, and that deaths from those hot spells are up 800%. Even more ominously, the water offshore in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico is preposterously hot, which is why forecasters are predicting a record hurricane season. (Bring back memories of Trump trying to divert storms with his Sharpie.)
— Bill McKibben / “Memo to Joe: Fight a Climate Election” / Substack
I once wanted to be like this, like a tuft waving in the breeze.
— Tree Abraham / Cyclettes
Microplastics have been found in human testicles, with researchers saying the discovery might be linked to declining sperm counts in men.
The scientists tested 23 human testes, as well as 47 testes from pet dogs. They found microplastic pollution in every sample.
— Damian Carrington / “Microplastics found in every human testicle in study” / The Guardian
Today my 80-year-old neighbor told me, Everything hurts…
you’ll see. I wanted to tell him that I already see.
— Victoria Chang / “Untitled 10, 2002”

What I’m Listening To:
I’m dropping promises like H-bombs
But keep calm
— St. Vincent / “So Many Planets”