stack of tsundoku
towers leaning out of time
so much potential
What I’m Reading:
Any chance they get, my dreams unfurl in their allotted small space. They are origami, they are Japanese pod hotels. They fit it all in.
— Megan Hunter / The End We Start From
Tarnish your creativity. Spout rejoinders on repeat and impress your casual acquaintances during cocktail circles. Piddle about in aimless banter. Don’t glow, but please wear your goalkeeper stilettos and your mattock face. Speak in errant arpeggios—say much: mean nothing. You are the epitome 21st century stylist. The earth grows green, without really greening—it’s just a bunch of Cyanobacteria clogging our oceans and waterways: farm run-off, stimulants, depressants, and tinges of lead and mercury addenda for all—and take those nitrogen-fertilizer-carbon-bomb bon-bons for humanity as a chaser. Drink up! Bring scissors and rungs. Climb the ladder of life as you cut the helixes free from your DNA strands. Bring your lighters, goalposts and mattresses. We’ll provide the stillbirths and paradigm mutations. We’ll make all the medical journals! Use this cut-up to center your clergy. They don’t pay much mind anyway—they’ve got the godheads on the payroll. Otptional covenants for those in sequins and lamé. The brighter the better—be an endless go-getter. Get yourself got in the land of plentiful weapons and manifest destiny. Better yet, stay home.
What I’m Reading:
Between the waves of disembowelling wrench the world is shining. I feel like Aldous Huxley on mescaline. I am drenched in is-ness.
— Megan Hunter / The End We Start From
he presents alienation — charities, cleavages, chimeras and ramifications
her winger where the finch was showered and dubbed in the larch that cannot be read today
they receive a seminal matchbox in aubergine and reveries
his revoke and drink — a howler in antipodes upon maelstrom and waltzing matildas
her, artisan, she is subjected to grueling work decentering with white charts foregrounded
the coots, clergymen and ranchers their chips—with abrupt cults—from wide shots to close-ups
outside her winnow is where the fingernail has purchase
she never opens her mud heart — voiceovers dubbed in a deep listening she cannot read
it is wretched, noting that upon its remedy, there is nothing but accounting
and evacuated bomb shelters have the sharpest resonances
What I’m Reading:
“Where does California’s produce go?”
shoppers ask in supermarkets stocked
with Mexican avocados and Chinese garlic.
— Harryette Mullen / Urban Tumbleweed
Traffic outside. Snow and garish colors swirl.
Shattering glass above our heads.
The cat runs from underneath the bed and stands sentry below the window.
Crunching glass at the top of the window behind the blinds.
A squirrel?
No, an otter.
A tree otter? you say.
Errant, from the gnarled oak, I say.
We have a backyard that is simultaneously outside and inside the house.
This otter scurries down the tree and up on the bed.
The otter tunnels below the bed, behind the blinds, and up and out of the house.
The cat, stupefied and seconds late, jumps up swiping at air and catches its claws on the blind — hangs there — nonplussed.
Hey! There’s a hole in Thee Window where the outside world flows in and out.
A tall, lanky man jogs through the edge of our bedroom, out for his morning run with his equally tall and lanky greyhound, and right out through the hall.
We have leaks in the house.
Holes.
The otter is back, but I stand firm and stare it down from the other side of the window.
Now it’s a groundhog.
Now it’s an otter again.
You complain. You don’t want kingdom animalia running through the house.
The otter and I stare each other down.
A standoff.
A walk-off.
What I’m Reading:
I’ve wrestled angelic beings
and the nine lives of pathological compulsion.
I have sworn an oath against the roman calendar
and its derivative mutations.
— Jordan Kapono Nakamura / “Interview”
Do you drool and mouse
In unauthorized likeness?
Do you firebrick, too?
You wisecrack and oscillate
In diacritics and wine.
You have silkworms here:
Dialectics and dashes,
Flashes of white limbs.
What did you bury last fall?
Why does this corpse sprout and bloom?
I have a virus wreaking
My already addled brain.
What I’m Reading:
The sky shatters like a blue shell;
Veins from the back of the right hand pull free,
And float in the air, a tree of dead blood
— Robert Davis / “Daily”
We humans must revere the earth, for it is our
well-being. Always the earth grants us what we
need. If we treat the earth with kindness, it will
treat us kindly. If we give our belief to the earth, it
will believe in us. There is no better blessing than to
be believed in.
— N. Scott Momaday / “One: The Dawn” / Earth Keeper
When the great herds of buffalo drifted like a
vast tide of rainwater over the green plains, it was a
wonderful thing to see. But there came a day when
the land was strewn with the flayed and rotting
remains of those innumerable animals, slain for sport
or for nothing but their hides. The Kiowas grieved
and went hungry, and it was the human spirit that
hungered most. It was a time of profound shame, and
the worst thing of all was that the killers knew no
shame.
— N. Scott Momaday / “Two: The Dusk” / Earth Keeper
The earth is not impervious to the presence of
man. We humans have inflicted terrible wounds
upon the earth. The scars are everywhere visible,
even here where Dragonfly brought up the sun and
where I was given my sacred name. The arbor is
now a ruin, for it came into the hands of uncaring
and visionless people.
— N. Scott Momaday / “Two: The Dusk” / Earth Keeper
The planet is warming, and the northern ice is
melting. Fires and floods wreak irresistible havoc.
The forests are diminished and waste piles upon us.
Thousands of species have been destroyed. Our own
is at imminent risk. The earth and its inhabitants are
in crisis, and at the center it is a moral crisis. Man
stands to repudiate his humanity.
— N. Scott Momaday / “Two: The Dusk” / Earth Keeper
But it is the present and
the possibilities of a future that must concern us.
Ours is a damaged world. We humans have done
the damage, and we must be held to account. We
have suffered a poverty of the imagination, a loss of
innocence.
— N. Scott Momaday / “Two: The Dusk” / Earth Keeper
How many lifeless things
are placed each day between us and the living earth?
A friend in Brooklyn told me that his little son had
gone out to watch workmen breaking up a sidewalk.
He was fascinated to see earth under the cement. He
had never seen it before.
— N. Scott Momaday / “Two: The Dusk” / Earth Keeper
Are we
to witness the eclipse of our civilization? Or are we
to take the chance?
— N. Scott Momaday / “Two: The Dusk” / Earth Keeper
What I’m Listening To:
I’m going to the soul hole, and I’m never coming back
Never coming back
— @ / “Soul Hole”
Clowns and claustrophobes both. Masters of microbes and microbiomes—and bonhomie. Too much probiotic nonsense squelching their wheelhouse one day, and they took to fisticuffs.
Oh, what a dastardly day for all! The day the two friends took to whinging, winging and knuckles. The magpies alighted on the witch alder to watch. The eastern cottontail hare trained their mysterious obsidian eyes on the row. The red efts and copperheads ignored each other in utter transfixion—neologisms were created for the event—so rare it was.
Rostay Toonany landed sharp jabs, but Chemo Destrapè eager to be done with the punch-out threw a barrage of roundhouse lefts and uppercuts and dinged Rostay’s temporal lobe—bumping about in his skull—trebly charged, in a timbre of orange and reds.
The bestiary cackled, hissed, and meeped.
It was bitter-cold day that—the day of the bust-up. But Chemo’s arms were raised forevermore in victory and infamy—the day the protozoan roared.
What I’m Reading:
A man disguised as a baggy cow
steals twenty-six gallons of milk from Walmart,
then gives it all to strangers outside the store.
— Harryette Mullen / Urban Tumbleweed
Pretend you’d been traveling on a business trip …
(All I can say is… stop now. Stop!)
Convinced you’re lost, laying there in that Amazonian outpost — covered by a mosquito net — the masses of mosquitoes, a deluge through the open windows. All that keeps you from complete ruination is the scrim of heavenly white fabric — as shear as your head feels, as empty of answers on how to get back. Your stomach roils with an invasion that can’t be stopped.
The stomach virus eats away at you from the inside, gnawing at the stuff of life within — at the hole in your heart glued over with spit and spent cartridges.
The siege inside lays waste to you, filling you up with legions of your own dead cells that are conscripted and committed to the front as fast the virus can kill them. And it kills them.
It kills them all.
A malarial waft, an unseen hand spreads hot unguent on your forehead.
Then a thick fetid smell: a melange of upturned earth with carcass of marmoset, and capybara.
(All I can say is… stop. Stop!)
Your time nears conclusion.
What I’m Reading:
You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
— Adam Zagajewski / “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”
You are someone who can entertain themselves. You don’t need a TV. You don’t need other people.
Years ago, when I was very young, I was married to an architect . . .
Good morning, boss, what can i get you?
That’s just doctors offices, they want everyone to be quiet.
Where were you the other day? You didn’t show up . . .
Can you listen to your books through the hearing aids or just the headphones?
Where did you go, AAA?
There’s nothing worse than that. I thought they only allowed service animals in here.
. . . and the labor was $100 . . .
I told him: this is not what i signed up for!
Are they all aging graduate students?
I get tired of washing all those towels when they’re not really dirty.
I’m happy, you now. I really love myself.
It was an elegy. A requiem . . .
I want it to go.
What I’m Reading:
“Especially the deep, post-holiday extremes of late January and February, when, no longer buoyed by festivities and merriments, you’re confronted with the empty expanse of a new year, discarded resolutions in your wake, resigned to your own inability to change.”
— Ling Ma / “Returning” / Bliss Montage
as the sun expands—
and jupiter spins faster—
mother moon contracts
in five billion years (or so)
none of this will matter much
when the fiery giant eats
all in its path out to mars
What I’m Reading:
“The moon’s shrinking has been measurable, but small. It has contracted about 150 feet in diameter over the last few hundred million years.”
— Kasha Patel / “Why scientists are starting to worry about the moon shrinking” / Washington Post
thee istsfor manity reader 