broaster chicken on speed dial fans oscillating from every corner dust devils gyring in the living room the fridge texts — low on oat milk
house heaves a sigh of desperation wants to set upon squarely on a witch but they’re far and few
seventeen year cicadas unleash the chainsaw torrent at once the air is electrified a sharp tang on the tongue-tip
welcome home
What I’m Reading:
I’d been looking for the “right” place to sleep each night, as if not finding it would leave us stranded. But now I thought, wherever we are at the end of the day, we’ll be somewhere, and we can sleep there. It might not be comfortable and safe, but it will still be somewhere.
— Emily Buehler / Somewhere & Nowhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America
If God is a man, he could never understand the mundane threats women experience every single day of our lives.
— Bora Chung / “Maria, Gratia Plena” / Your Utopia
When the warming ocean does not allow for sea ice, ice we need for hunting ugruk, I wonder about her mood. When the waves, loud, high, and strong, eat at our shores—even in winter—I wonder what Papa would tell us. When it rains and rains and rains in July and the air is too muggy to dry salmon, I feel the shift. When in the fall, after the ground freezes, the mice have not yet put masru away in their caches, I wonder. About her signals. Her abrupt change. Her unpredictability.
— Laureli Ivanoff / “Weather Report” / Orion
. . . we in the United States are part of a global system in which our comfort and privilege are based on the exploitation of people and nature. And part of our privilege is that we don’t even have to know about it.
We think we can use our privileged position to “help” people who are “less fortunate” than ourselves, but we are blind to the workings of the system that creates our fortune and their misfortune, and how the two are mutually dependent. In a way, it was the same argument that the Mothers of Matagalpa were making.
— Aviva Chomsky / Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration
Anyhow, Makina had neither been naive nor lost any sleep blaming herself for the invention of politics; carrying messages was her way of having a hand in the world.
— Yuri Herrera / Signs Preceding the End of the World
Recent science has shown how trauma can change our brain chemistry and our DNA. I wonder now if my lifelong obsession with stories of mass murder is tied to my father’s memory of that moment, and others that exposed him to the violence of empire, poverty, and dictatorship in the years before I was born. The brain stores information for its own survival, and it finds a way to pass on its lessons from generation to generation. Perhaps my curiosity about organized, official violence is a biological signal sent by the survivors and the perpetrators of atrocities from a distant and unwritten history. From the Spanish Inquisition, the Middle Passage, the conquest of the Americas. Unremembered for many generations, those horrors may still be alive, in me, and in many people like me, in our instinctual desire to stare into, and to understand, the dark and bloody recesses of human history.
— Héctor Tobar / Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”
Come, let us be friends, you and I, / E’en though the world doth hate at this hour . . . Come, let us be friends, you and I, / The world hath her surplus of hatred today . . .
— Sarah Lee Brown Fleming / “Come Let Us Be Friends”
Maybe hope exists just because we think it to existence, and meaning is something you create on your own. But that’s just an individual’s subjective experience of faith. There’s no guarantee that such subjective faith will be supported by the objective situation. Why should the myriad ways of the universe conspire to realize the will of a mere individual?
I’m not trying to be cynical. I’m simply saying, by pointing out how small and insignificant I am, that whatever I do is also small and insignificant and makes no difference in this universe.
— Bora Chung / “The End of the Voyage” / Your Utopia
What I’m Listening To:
I don’t miss my mind Doctors and nurses, tingling eye Bleeding inside, touch me there (That’s a modern pose)
Cold in my tent last night— Moved away from the creek Closer to the fire. I heated up the plastic Jesus— Placed it soft and hot On my abdomen. Cold again this morning— I bit into the messiah— No sign of life.
What I’m Reading:
mothers of lost habitats, mothers of fallout, mothers of extinction — pray for us — because even tomorrow will be haunted
— Craig Santos Perez / “Halloween in the Anthropocene, 2015”
Deception became an instructor. I’ve an iconic hare that stands sentinel and immediately cups my hair as it sheds. I shed often.
I’ve a silky laconic manner about me. I once subcontracted a zoo and turned it into a pop-up delicatessen. Bactrian camel and mozzarella sub, anyone? Crispy pan-fried capybara on ciabatta? No?
I’ve turned largely nocturnal. I’m wound tightly. I’m short on straitjackets and spending late nights on deathbeds—and even though I’m young at heart, I drowse during every family homily.
Homonculi melancholia . . . I’m set to stare straight into the eclipse for the duration. I’m going coronal!
I’m full of desolate masterworks in the potential and praying for a sequined dictator to institute austerity measures from above.
You might say I’m distilled from the epiglottis up.
I’ve got the dada poofa proofs to prove it!
What I’m Reading:
Behind her, the sun is going out fighting with all its rays. We are sitting in the dining room and she is cutting a fat round loaf of bread. Absently, she puts a slice onto my plate. I tear it apart with my fingers, gently. A human ear drops out. Her look cuts her finger on the bread knife and the rain seethes.
i am a conclave of addictions in for a nipper of revival
i am a theremin player from obscurity counting my rosary adjournments
i am a respite of ill repute cycling through the burbs of burblements
here’s a blurb — siphon your securities expeditiously
and call your mutilation theologian i’ll be here all week
What I’m Reading:
Here, streets lined with fresh refugees, straggler homeless, cardboard box men, prostitutes, pimps, beautiful neighborhood people who teach me you can get a great meal for $2 on this block. How to eat with chopsticks, which store gives free bread if you don’t have $.
I want you to root the violence out of the system, but you delay and acquiesce — this is the heavy-o-sity of our case. There are no life preservers to pass out—only anvils and 50 lb. kettlebells—on this sinking ship. No one about to make the problem commensurate with the premise. I predicate all action on entropy and numbness. Dire warnings and sirens go unheeded . . . while a singular burnt, chainsaw segmented, sequoia lies on the blackened forest floor.
Your charge is lobbed. Disorderly conduct on the Junior Prom floor: enervated dates stare at other people dancing; others are blind sullen-staring into cellphone flashlights; some couples herd listless at the punch. A punch or two meted out — uncertain if they are in liquid form or at the knuckle end of a fist.
We’re in a fugue — too many discordant notes — a fug of fanciful boredom. Did you drop that dollar bill? Did you drop the tiny purple microdots? The yellow sunshine?
Have you ever felt like a fatherless waif in the presence of your father?
I’m in need of a case of blues, you say, because a mere carton won’t do.
I’m in need of a reset, I say, in need of a pass, in need of a decade’s worth of do-overs — in need of a full-out pardon!
You say: why proselytize for your lost cause?
I got nothing, I say . . . Sonic Youth is broken up, Morrissey’s a fascist now, and Mark E. Smith is dead. I have no desire to be effusive anymore. I’m changing my middle name to Ennui . . .
Furthermore, aren’t we too old to be at a prom?
What I’m Reading:
WHEN SOMEONE SEEKS TO QUESTION THEIR GENDER, THEY might stand before a closet filled with clothes, or in a thrift store or a department store. They have come to realize that gender is a performance. We are taught as children to put on this shirt, that dress, this lipstick, those boots, and in so doing we define ourselves as male, female, or something else. But we can choose to change our wardrobe, try on something different, something unexpected. Race is a performance, too.
— Héctor Tobar / Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”
I’m having issues. Last Friday March 8 th if anyone employs 2 cleaning ladies doing laundry please call me. Missing laxatives! And they took my white pinafore casinos, sundry toxins, and knighthood tracts. Then they watched my clothes out of the dryer, fold it and mix it with the dark clothes and took it away in a dark color mesh laundry bag.
Then Amazon shows up on demand of a tootle boyfriend on Tuesday 3/12/24.
Never received him, and may have been picked up by someone with greasy mitts.
Phrases of Lacerations on delivered jackasses are not visible. Mailroom checked. Not there. Photo shows paddies on sherry adjacent to destiny’s children and to the rim of the doorway to the stallion. Please return.
Handwritten cupholders no.on pkg. might have been unclear or just misread. Dimensions of boyfriend not exact but approx. 10x13x2″.
Just leave it at the destiny and tell them its for me.
I would be very grateful for your help.
Also on Wednesday, March 13, two mainframes folding laxatives took my pimp cashews and mutts.
Please let me know of anyone who had laxatives done by 2 mainframes.
I miss my shepherdess.
Thank you all.
Happy Spring,
Canet Jody / C.J. #1280
What I’m Reading:
Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping.
Modern racism feeds off self-interest and individualism.
Prejudice is an argument that explains why some live in comfort and others do not. Mass consumerism is an empty, soulless utopia of more, more, and more, of everything-supplied by a global stream of sacrifice and sweat. But a life centered on consumption for its own sake is unrewarding and unviable. Both in a purely mathematical sense, and in the ecological sense, the planet and our brown, laboring bodies cannot sustain the way of life that racism has helped bring into being. Collectively, as a species, we are destroying ourselves with fleets of bloated sport utility vehicles, and with plaster palaces that fill the plains and hillsides of many continents with thirsty lawns and coal-fed power grids. Our grand, utopian visions need to be grounded in a critique of this world. In the disciplined, precise study of the history that brought it into being, and of the contradictions of the present. From this understanding, new movements and new stories will be born. Tales and theories to bring down an empire, setting in motion a true-life epic of human resistance and liberation.
— Héctor Tobar / Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”
What (Else) I’m Reading:
Do not talk to me of love and understanding. I am sick of blandishments. I want the rock to be met by a rock.
The only rule of travel is, Don’t come back the way you went. Come a new way … There is no question I am someone starving. There is no question I am making this journey to find out what that appetite is.
—Anne Carson / Plainwater: Essays and Poetry
“LATINOS” ARE ONLY THE LATEST GROUP TO LIVE AND WORK in intimate contact with “whites,” and to be assigned a legal and social status that separates them from the protections of whiteness. Before the arrival of African people, the principal terms of ethnic division in English North America were between “Christians” and “non-Christians” (i.e., Europeans and Native peoples). “White” became a legal category in seventeenth-century North America after the arrival of enslaved people from Africa.
— Héctor Tobar / Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”
If the fracturing of our once stable climate doesn’t terrify you, then you don’t fully understand it. The reality is that, as far as we know, and in the natural course of events, our world has never — in its entire history — heated up as rapidly as it is doing now. Nor have greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere ever seen such a precipitous hike.
Think about that for a moment. We’re experiencing, in our lifetimes, a heating episode that is probably unique in the last 4.6 billion years.
— Bill McGuire / “I’m a climate scientist. If you knew what I know, you’d be terrified too” / CNN.com
Whereas the people who employ us enter their perfect, mortgaged spaces and practice an act of self-delusion every day; because in erasing us from their minds they deny how interdependent we are. As individuals, we are disposable to them; but we know that, as a collectivity, as a class of people, we are irreplaceable. Without us, without the labor of people of color, without our farmworkers and our mechanics, the citizens of the United States would wallow in their own filth and their cars would not run and their toilets would not flush.
We, as “darker” people, as outsiders and newcomers, are forced to study white people, as people of color have since the idea of whiteness and color were invented.
— Héctor Tobar / Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”
i mean when we do go careening into the sun, i’ll miss crossing guards ushering the grown folks too, like ducklings and the lifeguards at the community pool and men who yelled out the window that they’d fix the dent in my car
— Eve Ewing / “eschatology”
The ideologues of whiteness have long told white people that their true, natural state is to live in an Eden of order and purity, emotionally and culturally separate from the Negroes, Puerto Ricans, aliens, and the other dark people who feed them, who clean up after them, and who build things for them. In the slave system, the contradictions inherent in this way of thinking began to tear at the nation’s conscience and its ethical fabric. The country’s moral conflict over slavery sparked more laws and rulings trying to enforce race discipline, culminating with the infamous Dred Scott decision, in which the chief justice of the Supreme Court boiled down the race thinking of white supremacy to its essence: Black people were not citizens and “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
— Héctor Tobar / Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”
it’s madness to hate the visitation of grackles
— Uche Nduka / “A Green Dream”
What I’m Listening To:
Time, there isn’t much time now What’s the fear, well, I like it here With the ones I love so near Maybe there’s just some way Dear god I can stay
“I suffered from a severe case of leopard spotting, it led to a loss of jobs, family, and friends. Reading the thee istsfor manity reader every morning was directly responsible for my adding 20 lbs. of muscle and losing 2 inches off my waistline. I recommend the thee istsfor manity reader to everyone I meet. Granted, I’m still spotted and alone, but I’m now full of vim and vigor and look forward to each daily installment of the thee istsfor manity reader.”
— Frank Relish, author of The Submariners: The Leaky Years, 1887-1902
“I don’t understand a lick of it. I just drop by occasionally for the nudie pics.”
— Jean-Jacques Perdefue, former cruiserweight champion
“Despite the lacerations and the poorly done stitches, I read it daily for the Frankenstein-ish aspect of it. It’s got abnormal reasoning, it’s put together on the slap-dash, and it runs away from fire. Nowadays, one can’t experience that much underachievement, in such a concentrated form, from a single blogsite. It’s blatherskite. Uniquely trashy and crass.”
— Abby Feldman, editor of The Journal of Psychiatric Dissociation and Acute Bacterial Prostatitis
“I fled communism nearly 60 years ago. I know unvarnished shit when I smell it. The thee istsfor manity reader STINKS! — like a totalitarian turd.”
— Dr. Panfilo Sobrenada, Psychiatrist and Family Counselor
“I have flown under the power of my own wings, without setting foot on land — nonstop — from Alaska to New Zeland in 8 days. I would gladly crash and burn upon my next take-off if I were subjected to another post from the thee istsfor manity reader. Please stop it!”
— E7, the Legendary Godwit
What I’m Reading:
Unable to come to terms with what is happening to their country, the American people lose themselves in odd beliefs. In wacky conspiracy theories and fairy tales about the “simple” and dangerous folk who have come to live among them.
— Héctor Tobar / Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”
thee istsfor manity reader 