we linger in the liminal
we linger in thought
we hunger for peace
we glut on war and waste
we strive
we survive
we fail
we fail again and fail better
that won’t always be the case
that is nature’s guarantee
What I’m Reading:
i don’t dream in languages / only in prophecies / & whale songs
— Ae Hee Lee / “Conversation with Immigration Officer”
What I’m Reading:
“We need to get angry. We need to get very angry at really the planetary vandalism that these companies have done.”
—Matt Simon / “Microplastics are everywhere. Here’s what that means for your health.” / Apple News In Conversation
“I don’t believe in the therapeutic effects of writing … I really think that the only healing possible will be through justice … “
— Cristina Rivera Garza, to Lillian Perlmutter / “‘The only healing will be through justice’: Pulitzer winner Cristina Rivera Garza on femicide in Mexico” / The Guardian
How can I feel lonely when I am submerged
in catastrophe? In the constant reminder that someday
this island could be gone.
But that’s not the official messaging—is it?
Instead, we say we will exist
indefinitely. Rooted against the tides,
rooted against trillion-dollar industries. We will,
we will. Exist. Exist.
— Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner / “Kaōnōn”
… around 390 years ago, B. germanica began to spread east from South Asia, with the rise of European colonialism and the emergence of international trading companies such as the Dutch and British East India Companies. Around a century later, the German cockroach hitched a ride into Europe, and conquered the world from there.
— Nature / “How cockroaches took over the world”
It is not that we’ll have to stop flying, or planes will start falling out of the sky . . . I’m just saying that for every 10 minutes you’ve spent in severe turbulence in the past, it could be 20 or 30 minutes in the future.
— Paul Williams / “Singapore Airlines turbulence: why climate change is making flights rougher” / Nature
No matter where I went, even if I went somewhere I felt I could stay forever, it would be only one stop on my journey, a journey with its own specific and predetermined chronology, which would override my individual choices, even if I wished my life and the various forces orchestrating it to be otherwise.
— Maya Binyam / Hangman
To love myself in patriarchy, I’ve often had to put a lot of distance between myself and men . . . But when men are socialized to identify their humanness as masculinity and to associate masculinity with power, we get some real problems. These are the problems of patriarchy.
— Laura Killingbeck / “A Woman Who Left Society to Live with Bears Weighs in on ‘Man or Bear’” / Bikepacking.com
We are not speaking of gender violence as something extraordinary that happens for unknown reasons. We’re talking about a violence that is structural, that we can identify … And of course, the powers that be are not going to be welcoming of this language.
— Cristina Rivera Garza, to Lillian Perlmutter / “‘The only healing will be through justice’: Pulitzer winner Cristina Rivera Garza on femicide in Mexico” / The Guardian
What I’m Listening To:
Something here isn’t right
Something feels out of place
Who’s that man there in the mirror
‘Cause I don’t recognize his face
— pigbaby / “Meep Meep Said the Rat”
the royal poinciana are ablaze
the studio apartment bare — save
a thin mattress on the floor near the bathroom
a hot plate boils lettuce near the door
a new twist in his veganism
he still has his wits about him
in this humble place i last saw him
What I’m Reading:
Grief is the end of loneliness
— Cristina Rivera Garza / Liliana’s Invincible Summer
What I’m Reading:
We are all bodies of change.
— Laura Killingbeck / “A Woman Who Left Society to Live with Bears Weighs in on ‘Man or Bear’” / Bikepacking.com
my head in a vise
seventeen electroshocks
a peppery taste
What I’m Reading:
For liberty is a capacious term
A jettisoned framework . . .
. . . Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition
Of a deeply rooted right, full of hydras and crocodile
— Jena Osman / “Dissent and the Hydra”
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
Donkey Fandango
a renowned musket
from Mexico
Compact Lifeguards
vibrant explosions
Traffic masterpieces
teacup mussels
potluck gauntlets and stoves
Sundry Doodahs
Dandelion Traffickers
Tear away wraps on gavel stowaways and stragglers
Doom suggested : $10.00
mastiff tragicomedy
mutant salves
Join a vibrant matador of teapots in worshipper straitjackets
expose your canine teeth
Your ligaments torn wantonly — daily!
geezer strangleholds
on samovars & scimitars
tear-jerker doorsteps : $1.00
apropos of
gelatine stratagems:
Win the gelding lottery!
Request more Competence in Lighting
I protest
I demand compensation for my wayward and wasted reading time.
What I’m Reading:
We weren’t making product.
We were making information.
— Genesis P-Orridge / Binary: A Memoir
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
— Zheng Xiaoqiong / “Water Becomes Water”
| | 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”
thee istsfor manity reader 