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”
A feint, then a faint.
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.
— Dambudzo Marechera / Black Sunlight
i lunge at your venerable prize
at your demise
i am a partition
a parvenu of adhesives
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 $.
— Allison Adelle Hedge Coke / Look at This Blue
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.
— Tommy Orange / There There
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.
— Martha Baird / “Do Not Make Things Too Easy”
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
— Eels / “Time”
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— 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
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— Dr. Panfilo Sobrenada, Psychiatrist and Family Counselor
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— 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”
. . . do not use the toilet and flush with the reserve water held in the tank or water that has been saved in a bucket or nearby tub no flushing UNT5IL the end of the water . . .
. . . i have a haven’t received the part from persons bike shop for the for the him install whenever you get a chance we can install you a good one bye . . .
. . . good afternoon um Laura this is Carmen Sandiego I’m calling from Easter national bank we need to have a new updates on them you might be account please ice mommy Malone polls can you answer me that you received the email so I can send you the information that I need in order to update the file OK please call me back . . .
. . . the level of the repair buckets of water has been placed near each of those bathrooms once complete you can use one of the buckets of water to force flush the toilet gentlemen urinals are available in the men’s room off of the treadmill fitness . . .
. . . restaurants near… Going to say if it’ll say good afternoon my name is Anna iPhone contact with this Siri program my phone to deciding on Bana you could please call me back if I thank you . . .
. . . happy birthday sister happy birthday I’m on the boat thing with the Roto boiler line them up for happy birthday talk to you later . . .
What I’m Reading:
His mind again was a tabula rasa, except that now nothing more could be printed upon it. The film had been exposed.
— Georgi Gospodinov / Time Shelter
Eye control mama in the least astounding ways by belly up singing or Billie Holiday braying by the light of the moon nothing remains diatonic or dismorphic if it’s not recreational I pass the strangest man on the subway he was going interstellar and I waited all day to infiltrate the bus depot with chromatic meaning especially as your soporific was hibiscus fruit juice out of a triangle spigot it was sometimes in the chirring of those large cicadas which aspired to paid fellowships and residencies that I dreamt of playing pool at Pedro’s house as “Chevy Van” trilled from an AM radio then it cut to a few years earlier as Martin was building bunkers and lecturing me about nuclear war in the year 2000 and its millennial certainty as he claimed and I went on droning in the back of my own head in the depth of my sorrow in the shadow of a psychotic episode.
It’s all so lily pad hermetic. So how could you possibly know? But I remember these things.
What I’m Reading:
A raging river of gurgling snowmelt churned in the ravine far below where I squatted, and as I scanned upward I saw the sun was cutting a shaft of light over the monstrous Andes mountains.
What a breathtaking place to take a shit.
— Kristen Jokinen / Joy Ride: A Bike Odyssey from Alaska to Argentina
thee istsfor manity reader 