The smellfungus among us complains of unpeeled bananas—he doesn’t understand bisecting lines.
He lives in a network of uncluttered pages—waits for the flood and the clutch of the ham-fisted smile.
Read his body language—why don’t you? You haven’t done anything wrong.
I wring my hands of this.
What I’m Reading:
Five iconic Chinese fish species have gone extinct or will be extinct by 2030 — and dams on the Yangtze river are responsible … By the time of the analysis, the paddlefish was already extinct. The Yangtze sturgeons are being kept alive only through captive-breeding programmes. The Chinese sturgeon is critically endangered.
— Xiaoying You / “China’s Yangtze fish-rescue plan is a failure, study says” / Nature
Tragedians are people who belong in ramekins but somehow slipped through the net and live on a Godot-like wasteland, without the gnarled tree, but with plenty of tumbleweeds constantly blowing through the landscape.
Discordant bird chatter is constant as well, yet a single bird is never seen — not the bullet sparrows alighting in bushes or hovering hummingbirds flitting about.
Somehow the tragedians are continually bombarded with bird droppings of every kind — green-white blobs here and there, alternating with a hail pellets on occasion — it’s as if they were marooned on an 18th century guano island.
The deluge never ends.
The tragedians speak in tongues, nothing remotely comprehensible is uttered. One of these tragedians is forever wiping the waste off their jacket and making snacks of it.
Another tragedian conducts an imaginary orchestra, acknowledging an invisible audience that claps every so often as a line of phantom performers present themselves on an unseen stage, before commencing another desultory jag conducting the absent orchestra.
The remaining tragedian sits on a large rounded rock holding on to their pith helmet trying to avoid the worst of the bombardment.
As daylight fades there is one full hour of confusion before “The Internationale” plays at varying, and warped, speeds.
Then the jaundiced sun disappears and the world goes dark.
What I’m Reading:
Water becomes water’s shape in the water, inside the machine we become the image of the machine
| | The summers become hotter & hotter. | | Unbearable & luminous, the refrain of the song of extinction—
—Dante Di Stefano / “Green Burial Unsonnet”
“But the scale of this year’s heat — amplified by human-caused factors and the burning of fossil fuels — is still well beyond what most scientists had thought possible. Some have theorized that planetary warming may be accelerating. Others have said there’s not enough evidence. What they agree upon, though, is that the earth is trending toward more extreme heat.
That means that the experiences of 2023 can seem astonishing in the short-term but will one day look tame.”
— Chico Harlan / “The climate future arrived in 2023. It left scars across the planet” / The Washington Post
The wind is against us and the ash of war covers the earth. We see our spirit flash on a razor blade, a helmet’s curve. The brackish springs of autumn salt our wounds. Doom drags at history’s face—our history needled with terror, a meadow of wild thorns.
— Adonis / “Elegy for the Times”
It’s not just that the planet’s climate is unravelling, though that fact adds to the pressure to act which would be felt by any rational occupant of the White House. April was the eleventh straight hottest month on record, and the consequences of the climate crisis will likely be dominant crises during the next four years.
— Bill McKibben / “It’s a Climate Election Now” / The New Yorker
Crying is inevitable
when headlines read
like requiems.
— Gloria Muñoz / “Llorona”
The last of Venezuela’s glaciers has disappeared, scientists say, despite an unusual government effort to save it.
The demise of La Corona, downgraded to an ice field after shrinking from more than 1,100 acres to less than five, makes this South American nation the only one in the Andes range without a glacier — but it’s unlikely to be the last.
— Matthew Hay Brown / “A mountainous country loses its last glacier” / The Washington Post
My children & my children’s children will inherit the edges of cumulonimbus clouds, the unexpected sunflower blooming from a second-story rain gutter, the gentleness of the marbling sunlight on the fur of a rabbit stilled in a suburban backyard. | | I am in love with the Earth. | | There are still blackberries enough to light the brain with the star charts of a sweetness—
—Dante Di Stefano / “Green Burial Unsonnet”
What I’m Listening To:
how come every time we go to war and march downtown against the war, the people on the other side keep dying anyway
— The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick / “Mr. Settled Score”
two damaged wipers on the locum glimmer compensation onsite we will generate some northward disruption for everyone’s sake, the linear narrative is temporarily closed
renege : renewal
we have placed a few cartoonists outside for easy insertion resolutions will be directed to use the sidestep entry near the mailroom revolutions shall enter at 90 degrees to the left and bulldog expediency
demands : guilders
one buffoon is stationed to flop between reasonable assessments one clown is stationed in the flour between the epic sieves and outside armistice astronomers, gulches, and demons welcome
should you need asylum, please look elsewhere
What I’m Reading:
waves crash against the port side of a battered wooden boat moss blindfolds the rocks perch on the branch of language coffins of war or epidemic take flight shadows in the field dig up potatoes to prepare for winter
The unrooted. The faceless. The darkness without form. Forms without substance. Substrates without purchase. The turmoil throwing her into a state of agitation.
Explicit signs. Signs without meaning. Warning signs. All—a mass of confusion she wallows in—nascent hours at home. An unmoored city.
Cities that will soon drown under surging water. Analogues to the distant cities in dust. Something has to give.
What I’m Reading:
Now a new study shows that that summer in the Northern Hemisphere was the hottest in the past 2,000 years—a marker of how much the world has already warmed and how urgently we need to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions
— Andrea Thompson / “The Summer of 2023 Was the Hottest in 2,000 Years” / Scientific American
first, there is the blood of the chicken— then the effigy doll, blindfolded with hands tied behind its back— attempts at wordly accretions to follow, but it doesn’t look right, this is worse, every trip a strand of its own producing its own unique hole— an interstice in her soul— & a burr in my sole
it’s the journey not the destination (says she)
so i write about this rite right? this ritual— how ten minutes elapse so quickly—
look here: it’s already mid-may 2024!
blood of the chicken elapses too soon
What I’m Reading:
How hard it was to fit the last crayon into the bulging box; like the last person who pushes onto the elevator and is resented by the insiders.
All Non-Programme Artisanal Orifices (found dada missive)
Hello All,
Feel free to reach out to me at the campfire girls cookout.
I’ll be a semiquaver through most of my incompatibilities from my two beefburgers. The purpose of this is a few thistles for your penny farthings.
I will be making a few other jabs with additional contexts like jackasses, like mats of flower lava, like mischances, destinies, landfalls, and a penguin billet-doux.
I will be around in the drains and weirdly un-coriolis effected — so feel free to stop by to check for thistles on your furry bits or just to say “hi!” (heigh, high, or hie).
Definitely going to mistreat your comparatively rare rumble sticks—or was that Rumble Fish?—Don’t box me in!
I have some lovely artisan bookmarks that my monetarist has passed onto me. She is soon to be 101 and cannot enjoy them as she has in the past. We’d like them to find new families in abstemious homilies.
They cower and crane in the cranium arcade.
And apropos of nothing: I don’t really want these tyrant bookmarks since they take up a lounge in my rosary and they are kinsman to a nightcap oboe.
They are very good conductors of “pleasant vibes, man.”
I am not charging but I will collect modest doorbells to contribute to all non-programme artisanal orifices. Please check all your holes and we can arrange for you and the tourists to see them.
All is well.
Carry on.
What I’m Reading:
Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.
I’m hot with fleas, gravid with scabies lice I have a multitude of filo and corona Viruses are best when deflected with oil Impregnated chausibles or warm leatherette On your burning flesh underneath your hair shirt Wear your bird mask filled with with aromatic tips Of posies juniper berries and popcorn jelly bellies…
I place the copper florins on your eyes Penniless and you trimming your pencil Thin mustache graying from so much vaginal Yeast, so much discharge, so sebaceous Cyst of unknown origin, benign and sanguine Pluck that rosy orb of pleasure-pain…
Au boncadavre exquis Birdhouse and Bildungsroman fretful Fret on the E flat note, on the plagued D train Box-scarred, a doleful G man out of a botched C-section with a bloody DialM for Murder mug…
These, and other afflictions, are yours for the chaining Yourself to the balcony railing 16 floors up (Mostly) out of the elements counting how many Filo and corona fit on the head of a pin…
And how many pins it takes to blow your mind Ballooning and arcing on its drunk ecliptic Across the darkening sky…
Go figure when the envoi misses the last train On a line out of service to nowhere…
With perdition as its terminus…
What I’m Reading:
Can the bees be saved? How many ways can you say genocide? I don’t know. I think you’re swell. I don’t know. I think you’ve killed me a few times.
thee istsfor manity reader 