Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

A poem, while it can expose us to our
imagining selves, can also trick us
     into imagining
ourselves as something beyond our behaviors.

— Prageeta Sharma / “Friendment”

I kept a picture of Stalin by our bed.
My wife set it face down when we made love.
I closed my eyes and thought about the dead
gossiping on the long train to Lvov . . .

— Morri Creech / “The Marriage”

There a clock stands in front of a closed shop,
its hour not late, though the moon has come
early to mirror the white coin of its frozen face.

— Suzanne Matson / “January Poem”

Someone, somewhere, is playing 
the violin in the background 
of violence.

Before all of this, we didn’t think
too often of heaven. We wanted to fly
through clouds, not above them.

— Sara Abou Rashed / “Gaza I”

The future / is where I’m going only because / I have no choice, because time / moves in one direction, dragging / a bit of itself behind like meat.

— Maggie Smith / “The Picture Before”

it’s madness
to hate the visitation
of grackles

— Uche Nduka / “A Green Dream”

all my understanding dribbles down the chin
onto the chest & is summarized as:

life is merely

to ovum and sperm

and where those two meet

and how often and how well

and what dies there.

— Renée Nicole Macklin (Renee Nicole Good) / “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs”

What I’m Listening To:

Like early Abba
I don’t give a fuh
I don’t give a fuh
I don’t give a fuh
I feel resentment in my soul
Maybe it’s time for men to clean for like, five hundred years
I’m not too concerned about that, uh

— Dry Cleaning / “My Soul / Half Pint”

Sojourn

The sign read: Gonorrhoea Biddy Broth Made Naturally.

We didn’t know what that meant. Fascination.

We checked dictionaries, schoolbooks, online encyclopedias. Nothing.

We were the idle ancestors of immoralities.

We had ambient sounds doing our bidding. We snaked and weaved to the tinny bleats.

The presumption was one of mutton minds made accessible. 

We weren’t certain of much, but we were certainly cretins.

A whiskey and a fleshpot nativity manger in fairy lights.

Spinal fluid effluvia whorls in oil.

There were grunts and effete adieus.

We had to content ourselves with the great mysteries of life and the petrochemical smell.

What I’m Reading:

If George W. Bush helped invent the concept of ‘homeland security’ in order to ‘fight the terrorists over there’ rather than here, Trump seeks to bring the war to ‘OUR hemisphere’. From Caracas to Minneapolis, legal authority and institutional power are being redirected toward an overriding end: governing populations as subjects rather than citizens.

— Nikhil Pal Singh / “Homeland Empire” / Equator

Petrichor (23 to 9)

See more ideas about black and white:
the dramatic effect of contrasting areas
pictures taken on January 14th,
when the deus ex machina fell through the trapdoor
into the charnel house.

See deus roll among the flaky
fillets doused in slightly sweet vinegar and finished with a peppery
Caravaggio touch / a tenebrism used only to obtain
a dramatic impact while chiaroscuro psychologically moves
and deus
in Renaissance style, and later in a Godard film says:

I think of buying hand cream to douse the smell of blood.

Oh! O! o! the Principal is waiting for you in his office, there is NO emotion.

Wet Season is a cold, harsh dousing of the realities of city-living
then deus is doused in garlic butter / She
panhandled and chided him all through the reduction.

deus!
dreary dubious dulcet dungeon —
escaped mental patient doused with sulphuric acid…

Viewers are once again ejoined to cover their eyes…
Turn out the lights, douse the lights,
dim the lights, turn off the lights,
switch off the lights —

Topped with sea salt, pepper and fresh thyme,
the black stone paths, the jug and the red grapes,
made by the use of force
deus
relents off-stage…

Centrifugal.

Then the scent of rain-doused pines.

Petrichor.

What I’m Reading:

Perhaps, after all, God is simply a poached egg and a yolk cooked just as it should be. Perhaps God is being fisted by the person you love most in the world, being taken apart one finger at a time until the whole of you is fucked out and pulled like a cord strung tight, white-eyed and waiting for crescendo. Perhaps God is all of that and kissing afterward, kissing most of all, sore-mouthed and messy, half asleep and trying to remember if you locked the door and if you need to set your phone alarm for seven. Perhaps God is all of that and an apology.

— Julia Armfield / Private Rites

reluctance + rigmarole

a welfare check on my chickpeas
bankruptcy pulls me from a restraint on my stoop
a clue found in my miniature espresso

my neurons are frayed
there’s a peanut in my membrane
the hangout heavy airguns are hard to beat

silt screws cut like cymbals
weaned from reluctance + rigmarole
it’s the threat of the enema that never threatens

a glob of hornet + a flicker of worm
a channel for my undesirable tendencies
i eat the burglary of my own unmediated terms

What I’m Reading:

Inside us live innumerable others;
If I think or feel, I do not know
Who is thinking or feeling.
I am only the place
Where feeling and thinking happen.

— Ricardo Reis / “219”

White Elephants (Nightmare 7a)

So he goes on this monologue telling me why I want to avoid becoming the white elephant at the company. 

He said,  “it was too revered to be a beast of burden: the white elephant earned a reputation as a burdensome beast — one that required constant care and feeding and never brought a single cent to its owner.”  He came around his desk sat in the chair next to me and placed his hand on my forearm.  “Remember,” he said, “one story has it that the kings of Siam gave white elephants as gifts to those they wished to ruin, hoping that the cost of maintaining the sacred but voracious animal would drive its new owner to the poorhouse.”  He stood up and hovered over me, and with a trace of menace said, “you don’t want to ruin me, do you?  Because I’ll turn a white elephant into a sacrificial cow.” 

I should have left then.

What I’m Reading:

Time is running out for other things, too. Already the mountain summer is hot and acrid and dangerous. There will be years in which the waterfalls roar with ample snowmelt after a flooded winter and years in which they dry to a trickle-and, maybe, years when the winter snows never arrive at all. I believe that we will be able to head off the worst-case scenarios by concerted and difficult action . . . Even I can’t deny that terrible things are coming.

— Kate Marvel / Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Thinks The world is fucking ending, swiftly followed by God, stop being a twat.

— Julia Armfield / Private Rites

But there is nothing up here. There is nothing more in the sea. We’ve taken it all. 

— Ethan Rutherford / North Sun or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther

Flint is what it is.
Knowingly to force the poor to purchase and use toxic water
isn’t a form of chemical warfare, isn’t a form of genocide?

— Lawrence Joseph / “Is What It Is”

Yet executing ten-year-olds seemed beyond the pale. Even Funston did not endorse killing children. Balangiga changed that: one can make the case that this is the pivotal moment, not only in the war itself but in the American way of making war. Jake Smith’s statement echoed Phil Sheridan’s call for total annihilation of the enemy in the Civil and Indian wars. The easy success of the Splendid War transformed America into a martial society, and Smith’s template appears over the next two centuries in conflicts in which an entrenched enemy, of a different race, turns to guerrilla tactics; it informs “police actions” in the many “Banana Republics,” Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq’s Abu Ghraib. The Philippine War was the first time Sheridan’s dictates spread beyond America, during our premier attempt to “civilize the world.” There is no great difference between Smith’s command to Waller and Captain Ernest Medina’s nearly identical March 16, 1968, briefing before the My Lai Massacre. “Our job is to go in rapidly, and to neutralize everything,” he allegedly told Charlie Company. “To kill everything.” After Balangiga, the American public accepted the fatal logic of “pacification”: it becomes a “necessity” lodged inside American memory that refuses to disappear.

— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire

I stole the yellow bird
That lives in the devil’s sex

— Joyce Mansour / “I stole the yellow bird …”

. . . This vast city
open to invaders & vagrants for centuries
now small for two.
A few things became clear to me then.
The body itself has no use for hope.
It hardens in grief to live beyond hope.
And the only real use of narrative is to cheat
that ancient urge inside us, pale animal
with its face resembling the inside of our death
masks, its long unheeded, persistent murmur
clearing into a deafening verdict: Leave.

— Rohan Chhetri / “New Delhi in Winter”

There is little the imagination can do with an ending that is already assured.

— Julia Armfield / Private Rites

What I’m Listening To:

It’s a horrorland
Destruction
Don’t give up
On being sweet
Joy, we’ll build
A cute harmless world
Don’t want one from you, cult
Don’t want one from you, cult

— Dry Cleaning / “Joy”

I Find Erasures

I can’t find the right words when you’re all “good-morning!” with the naps.

I listen to the wisp and the donkey.

I answer the phone to induce a “hello.”

I touch the wires of domesticity — dead cold.

I hear the monstrous pabulum of rusted weathervanes.

I, the compass diver.
I, the newscaster wherryman.

I continue to search for sense in this world.

I find artifacts, letterings and saleability.

I don’t find sense.

I find erasures.

What I’m Reading:

Then you realize the horror is existence itself.

— Dave Eggers / Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?