A shadow holograph lives here
It pulses enigma and gabardine
Hopes to obliterate all
There is no watcher
There is no horizon
There is no is
This is December
What I’m Reading:
“Is a thousand miles far enough to turn darkness into light?”
— Raynor Winn / Landlines
X. Do you want baby gumdrops?
Z. Do you want anything while I’m up?
Y. It’s 72 degrees in here.
Z. No, I don’t want baby gumdrops.
Y. This here says a tree fell on a house. It’s crazy out there.
X. You sang Hall & Oates’ “Private Eyes” in my dream. Then you sang Einstürzende Neubauten’s cover of Lee Hazelwood’s “Sand” in Spanish to me, while our bedroom splintered in the vortex of a tornado.
Z. In the vortex of your libido?
X. A mosquito? An albino? Tragic Mulatto?
Y. Wait, are you talking about the literary trope—or the post-punk band from out west?
Z. You don’t sing “900 Foot Jesus” for me anymore!
X. Wait. Wait. Can we start this r.e.m. cycle over again? It’s gotten out of hand.
Z. You mean like baby gumdrops?
X. Shut up. Stop!
Y. Yes, I’d like to hear Judo for the Blind in its entirety, please.
X. Stop.
Z. Stop it!
What I’m Reading:
“My dreams are peopleless and inhabited by gusts of wind and flattened grasses. Last night the dark was sticking to the walls of the cabin and to the corners of my mattress. The dark stuck to the window in the loft and coated the dirty glass, then the dark straddled my chest. It held me down against the mattress last night with a heavy pressure as it exhaled on my face slowly.”
— Debbie Urbanski / After World: A Novel
“Something remarkable happens when you walk a long-distance path. I think you find an honesty that you don’t see in normal life. It unites those who walk in a sort of trail-induced euphoria that gives you a sense of openness, where normally we’re all so closed. I think that’s the place where trail magic comes from.”
— Raynor Winn / Landlines
“My belief in the fluidity
of the self turns out to mean
my me is a flow of wellwater,
without the well, or the bucket,
a hole dug and seeping.”
— Brenda Shaughnessy / “Liquid Flesh”
“… men pushing themselves as hard as they could push themselves, not exercising, but training, and perhaps not even training, but fighting, fighting the gravity the world exerts on all those who walk upon it, exerts seemingly equally, though in actuality not equally, not equally at all.”
— Moshin Hamid / The Last White Man
“I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.”
— Muriel Rukeyser / “Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)”
“I believe we still have a window of time during which we can start healing the harm we have inflicted on the planet—but that window is closing. If we care about the future of our children and theirs, if we care about the health of the natural world, we must get together and take action. Now before it is too late.”
— Jane Goodall & Douglas Abrams / The Book of Hope
“List of things to banish Can include words, people, theoretical apparatuses Can take the form of a grocery list, a scientific experiment, or a manifesto Can read like a personal ad of unwanting Can summon aid to help with banishing Can be uncertain of what will remain”
— Mia Kang / “Abracadabra”
“Isn’t this the way humanity should approach everything we do on this precious planet? Keeping ourselves to a narrow corridor of use, treading on this one earth lightly and with care.”
— Raynor Winn / Landlines
What I’m Listening To:
“Bunga Bunga or
You’ll
Never work in
Television again”
— The Smile / “You’ll Never Work in Television Again”
Due to recent kitchen sink backups, this is a gentle reminder of what cannot go down the garbage disposal:
Thank you for your cooperation and please contact the Management Office with ointment for any quintuplets.
What I’m Reading:
“This is not planet Earth as we found it. This is a new place — a fire planet we have made, with an atmosphere more conducive to combustion than at any time in the past 3 million years.”
— John Vaillant / Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
bonus awarded—
you get the prize, keep the spoils,
i lose—get nothing
in this manner life unspools—
ouroboros unbroken
What I’m Reading:
“Right-wingers quote Orwell out of context to smear their enemies as fascists, and in the next breath laud Russian President Vladimir Putin. There has always been a fair bit of doublethink involved.”
— Sandra Newman / “Now right-wing, anti-‘woke’ doublethink has come for George Orwell” / The Washington Post
It seemed to her she was always leaving, or someone was leaving her. Her father disappeared one day when she was ten. Her mother disappeared into a fog of alcohol and mental illness the next year—and now it was her turn to leave her hometown for the last time.
She vowed to never return to the southern city or the moribund southern state. She’d had enough of the oppressive memories, ghosts tugging at her, and retrograde autocrats. She was off.
In the rear view she spotted the rag and bone man kicking the St. Jude statue again, a fitting sight in the high-key sunrise that limned the horizon line in golden-red and turquoise. The bay, a vacant dying sea, would soon flood the shoreline.
“This will all be underwater soon,” the man screamed at her exhaust.
“Good riddance,” she said.
She turned the volume up on the stereo and drove north.
“Bye-bye,” she hissed.
What I’m Reading:
“Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution.”
— George Orwell / 1984
Hello All!
I named my nasturtium Christina—thee new respirator bullfrog! I am excited to introduce her. She graduated from Honeymoon Croupier Institute in 2019. And is currently pursuing a Nutcracker Prat, J.D. in Pedantics at U of IHOP. Previously, I tinkered on 3 and 5-yoghurt-olds in NYC. On probation, I worked as a melee instigator at an oilskin asylum in Ocoee, FL.
I have a bronze rascal exponent with chipmunks of all sizes and aides, from newborns to geezers. As a oar-stylist specializing in pedantics, I bring a chipmunk beauty and heart felt diagonalism to all my lines. With witticisms breeding reproach, I am also available for a cheap meet-up. Feel free to reach out to me for a cheddar avocado homicide if need be.
Yours,
Jocosa Jacobite
What I’m Reading:
“She examines the small black letters, conspicuous on the coarse grey paper, the diacritics that resemble insects both curled up and stretching their backs.
A place in shadow, obscured and difficult to tread.”
— Han Kang / Greek Lessons: A Novel
gusts bend a palm tree—
warp it to the breaking point—
strained, the palm abides
What I’m Reading:
“Did I tell you? I come from a people of sculptors
whose masterpiece was rubble.”
— Ocean Vuong / “Almost Human” / Time Is A Mother
when i was 8 they came from hanoi,
in the sweltering heat, women delivering babies into the night.
my mom smiled and said, “the narrow hanoi streets can’t
pronounce ‘hello’ and neon lights laugh at the tiny girl
alone
in front of a small concrete building with the warmth
of a cold night.”
children pointed at me
at the clinic i heard one ask, “why?
disappear.”
i hid my face
replaced my “otherness” with the night.
girls taunted me for relinquishing language
but i hadn’t been able to bond
and i left my mother
in this room.
What I’m Reading:
“In this game that we’re playing, we can’t win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that’s all.”
—George Orwell / 1984
“I used to cry in a genre no one read.”
— Ocean Vuong / “Nothing” / Time Is A Mother
“I met my wife the old-fashioned way: on a dating app. When our now-toddler is older we’ll tell her this story and she’ll look at us like we’re embarrassing dinosaurs and say ‘mums, what’s a dating app?’”
— Arwa Mahdawi / “The Week in Patriarchy” / The Guardian
“He asks her to climb a ladder so that he may see her legs, whether a pig can walk through them.”
— Shelley Wong / “A Marriage at Ancestral Hall in Sun Village”
“‘The Company,’ as it came to be known, was the continent’s first industrial-scale resource extractor, and it pioneered an approach to business, markets, employees, and the natural world that together could be called ‘wildfire economics.’ Using furs as fuel, the European market as fire, and credit as oxygen, the Hudson’s Bay Company burned its way across the North American continent, altering it forever while generating extraordinary wealth for a handful of men an ocean away.”
— John Vaillant / Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
“Silently
time passes.
The only life I have
submits to its power.”
— Hatsui Shizue / “[Silently]”
“Yet America as a subliminal presence remained everywhere, if not more strongly than before. An ideology defined only by what it opposes is doomed to be defined by that exact thing. Even if there were no more KFCs, the CFCs looked pretty much the same. And so America could be felt in the layouts and fluorescent lights of the supermarkets; the familiar, loud graphic designs of billboards, advertisements, product packaging; the gleaming surfaces of malls; housing developments modeled after the suburbs of Orange County; a White House-like building that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a prison.”
— Ling Ma / “Tomorrow” / Bliss Montage
“We were sitting
at the kitchen table before his shift
at the sock factory. His eyes: raindrops
in a nightmare.”
— Ocean Vuong / “American Legend” / Time Is A Mother
What I’m Listening To:
“I don’t look like you
When the sunlight hits me
I’m golden, you’ll see”
— Lucinda Chua / “Golden”
thee istsfor manity reader 