Why so many scabs?
She asks, unsure of my face.
I have been in love,
I say, dark, backlit by sun.
She morphs into a cloudlet.
What I’m Reading:
“In the evenings, we read novels in separate rooms
or in the same room and it makes no difference,
a compression that would interest me if it were someone else’s loneliness…”
— Elisa Gonzalez / “Grand Tour of Our Disintegration”
“Some words live in my throat
Breeding like adders. Others know sun”
— Audre Lorde / “Coal”
“Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.”
— Blake Crouch / Recursion
“I’m going to make a poem out of nothing.
You and I will be the protagonists.
Our emptiness, our loneliness,
the deadly boredom, the daily defeats:”
— Luis Alberto de Cuenca / “William of Aquitaine Returns”
“And I wondered about how the real is no longer real, how misinformation and disinformation have led to a decline in trust in traditional sources of authority. I wanted to understand where all this might lead.”
— Paul Lynch / on Prophet Song / The Guardian
“We could help you feed every nation, commune with the all-seeing sentient energy that palpitates through all known forms of matter. Nah! they said. Teach us to vaporize a mountain! Teach us to turn the moon into revenue! Then the Earthlings left a faucet running and flooded our basement.”
— Matthew Olzmann / “The Earthlings”
“Meanwhile, a preliminary finding by the Copernicus Climate Change Service says that Earth had its most-heated day ever last Wednesday. ‘Our best estimate is that this was the first day when global temperature was more than 2 ℃ above 1850-1900 (or pre-industrial) levels…’”
— Sam Burgess / “South Braces for Summer from Hell” / Nature
“I am a prayer of fire who arrived to care for humans, then was misused to destroy
I am a prayer”
— Joy Harjo / “I Am A Prayer”
What I’m Listening To:
“Tied iron to my feet
Then watched as I
Sank down just to prove a point
Just to nail it right in
— Squirrel Flower / “Open Wound”
dear citizen—
uncover your dusty radios
you are two billfolds shy and your locutions are broken
in the froth of the bulldozer black and yellow cysts, and marshmallow wheat sideswipes remain
your wheels will be removed from the moors through the use of radiogram bullets on your broken locutions
resort to your dystopia; or, if you don’t, you will soon have your lodge broken and be removed
your voice may be paroled to the furthest bullfight ringlet except briefly during mopping season
voice-over paroxysms include:
frustration of the bullfinch; wheeler-dealer siege of the daffodil; two binges short of bilge
then, the two views without perspective will have their frames broken and be removed
these are :
1. still life of uncovered radishes on the plinth
2. fry of the bullfrog
moving forward:
every violent binge must have a persuasion clearly displayed
we need reinforcement stilts, otherwise, we have no way to reach the pacifiers
thank you for your attention
What I’m Reading:
“I’m sure I’m not alone in proleptic melancholy, that anticipatory nostalgia for what will be gone.”
— Matt W. Miller / on, “Far Away”
drift the globe on a pickaxe
annotate your work with carcasses
all palpitation and courthouses
your peroration had the lithograph
tenderness of tenterhooks
you play the gamelan tuned
to the seventh tone and fifty
clichés overlong
you gave thanks to the wrong
ideology / corporation / government
this old house unstable
somewhere between disdain
and excommunication
button down your diatribes
put down that axe
and relax
youre one good whack
from
oblivion
What I’m Reading:
“It’s hard to ignore the Earth when it slowly destabilizes beneath you as you sleep, when it unlocks secrets you never asked for or wanted.”
— Sequoia Nagamatsu / How High We Go in the Dark
intimacies of detraction
foster
legacies of extraction
the paterfamilias
on a faulty
paternoster
compartments missing
a link
falling / referencing
infraestructual
loopholes
in the space / time
continuum
give thanks
for
manifest destiny
a continent
to despoil
the long view of earth
reveals
an ape hostage
to base instinct
sentient only
in delusion
we can do better
insist on it
make it so
What I’m Reading:
“Everyone expected to die in debt, and had learned not to mind. It was just a fact of living in a country on the decline.”
— Ling Ma / “Tomorrow” / Bliss Montage
vision / revision
christmas tree on a car roof
turkey aint dead yet
the paint on the walls / tacks wet
three bulbs out on the light string
speakers warble / hiss
johnny mathis / let it snow
turkey aint dead yet
halloween pumpkin rotting
gnawed by raccoons + squirrels
gray sleet slicks the walk
a burp of bile caught in throat
turkey aint dead yet
the family stares you down
lions muted on tv
(repulsion / revulsion)
What I’m Reading:
“My mother always said I was bad at scissors, and I’ve often accidentally cut myself as if to prove her point.”
— Kathy Fagan / “What I was Looking For”
1. With included cage, the landslide can be charged with concession, connection, prayer, or praise banners. The inevitability shows red when the chasm completes.
3. The “hellos!” and anniversaries can be adjusted randomly for flexible genie tunics.
4. With included cipher boys and daffodil heads, the landfall can be “putted on” wherever you want by getting rid of consultant lingo.
5. When accepting electronic proffers, pay more attention to quotidian mazes — such as high tenants, wet tenets, contaminants of bodily humors, and so on.
6. Please face chasm before using this program for the first tinkle. If there has been long-testicle non-use, please fully chasm it every two morals.
7. Remember, every wound has its day.
What I’m Reading:
“It is in the most surreal situations that a person feels the most present, the closest to reality.”
— Ling Ma / “Office Hours” / Bliss Montage
ashtrays and shoehorns—
a stylus skips on a groove—
… hamburger lady …
What I’m Reading:
“From my bed, coverlet tucked
under chin, I heard my father’s hand connect
with my mother’s cheek.”
— Sarah Audsley / “A Massive Aquarium Holding 1,500 Tropical Fish Bursts”
“The greatest threat to our species lies within us.”
— Blake Crouch / Upgrade
“A winged bit of Indian sky
Strayed hither from its home on high.”
— Alexander Posey / “The Bluebird”
“There are so few things in our existence we can count on to give us the sense of permanence, of the ground beneath our feet. People fail us. Our bodies fail us. We fail ourselves.”
— Blake Crouch / Recursion
“How can I rest?
How can I be content
when there is still
that odor in the world?”
— Louise Glück / “Mock Orange”
“We were a bunch of primates who had gotten together and, against all odds, built a wondrous civilization. But paradoxically—tragically—our creation’s complexity had now far outstripped our brains’ ability to manage it. Put simply: Our situation was fucked, and we weren’t doing enough to un-fuck it.”
— Blake Crouch / Upgrade
“For death is a race run in a single place
And death must know the heart, and have no fears.
The day is for dying; darkness has no doors.”
— Allen Grossman / “The Householder Awakes”
“Our species’ superpower is not caring, we merely exercised that ability. We don’t have an intelligence problem. We have a compassion problem. That, more than any other single factor, is what’s driving us toward extinction.”
— Blake Crouch / Upgrade
What I’m Listening To:
“When the last strip of light is dimming
When the spotlight starts to fade
If there’s no tomorrow
You better live”
— Sleater-Kinney / “Fade”
continental drift
tectonic plate subduction
archipelago
What I’m Reading:
“Never before had I seen Homo sapiens so clearly—a species, at its most fundamental level, of storytellers. Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometime brutal existence, with fabricated meaning.”
— Blake Crouch / Upgrade
thee istsfor manity reader 