What I’m Reading:
“How seldom nowadays a floating fleet of ships is, too few are tempests of blood,
crosses, snakes & fishes; our end times reveal themselves as nuclear cataclysm, flood & drought, pandemic. Once a week you pull off your dead skin & eat it. I get it.”
— Flower Conroy / “Frog”
you’re the needle in the groove
on the shaggs foot foot—
meteors streak the dark sky
What I’m Reading:
“Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.”
— Blake Crouch / Recursion
your risk—
no pain / only impact
stop—
disorientation / disconnect
replicate instead—
practice good / do not reply
transcend
What I’m Reading:
“I hate them as I hate sex,
the man’s mouth
sealing my mouth, the man’s
paralyzing body—“
— Louise Glück / “Mock Orange”
What if I show you what this mob made?
She said: I was also an English-American malady.
I’ll be doing airgun charades at the breakwater in a court of backwater sorbets.
She said: You mean you recorded yourself talking?
She said she drummed a homily like a chimera beneath an overpass after a stabbing. She sang the wean there all night long without stopping.
She said what if birthrights aren’t about screaming and becoming unhinged?
I jumped the drowsy chalets like a target on a tangent.
How impractical is that, huh?
This is how you fur your hilt?
“Huh?”
“Nuthin’…”
She said: Yeah, I was the wife of daredevil flotation eddying light-years in rotating ecliptics.
I rubbed the cruise of my headlamp — the softy sprawl where a small dispatch-sized sharpener of skyline had been removed — pressing “SNOOZE” on the sprawl became something of an erotic ritual.
She said: Look, your faction is creeping me out, mandible man. Buffalo, don’t act like themselves anymore.
So this is how you fur your hilt!
She said: Are you judging me?
No, look, don’t get defensive. I’m just surprised. I’ve been doing this for a bicentenary partisan for the better part of a decade, and I’ve never encountered anything like this.
She said: Just don’t fucking jugular me. Don’t patronize!
No, look, don’t get defensive. You caught me mid-guffaw. I’m not offended. Your offer came out of oblivion. It was the last thistle on my set of miniatures. I’m on edge.
She said: Don’t give me those hothouse motions. I’ve got the notion to motor to a default position if you can get past the natural Puritanism.
Look, I said firmly, I am a “multidisciplinary aside” at a workstation of theoretical pianists and theatrical interlocutors—spare me the quarries and thistles.
At this she was flummoxed, but managed: My peevish parkas and monetarist Dad will fuck you up!
You sound like William Blake, I said. Move to Nashville and put it in song. You’ll be miserable if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do.
The fever dream broke and we drove in silence for 33 days.
What I’m Reading:
“The words pooled like raindrops in her hair
His last breath became a storm
And she wept miracles”
— Shinique Smith / “Continuous Poem”
My alms / my own
Recast myself as repast
In a swirl of discord
My poisons / my own
What I’m Reading:
“The light is a grinder of knives jangling his bells
For seven in the morning.”
— Allen Grossman / “The Householder Awakes”
“now the parts in our hair and our soles wither and the fairies lie half-charred at the stake”
— Hans Arp / “The Swallow’s Testicle”
“According to Albrecht, those suffering solastalgia feel a sense of dislocation from their home environment, a melancholia; it is, he said, ‘the homesickness you have when you are still at home’. People interviewed by Albrecht spoke of their distress not only at the destruction of the land around them, but its effect on their physical and mental health, and their frustration at their powerlessness to stop it.”
— Damien Gayle / “That grief or longing you feel for a time before climate crisis? There’s a word for that” / The Guardian
“From between stars are the words we now refuse;
loneliness, longing, whatever suffering
might follow your life into the sky.
Once those are gone, the life you had
against your own will, the hope, even the prayers
take you one more bend around the river of sky.”
— Linda Hogan / “Lost in the Milky Way”
“I’m always reading many books at once. Some I finish, some I come back to later. I order books through my local second-hand bookstore, both new and second-hand. Sometimes I dive right into the latest one to come into the house. Other times I scan my own bookshelves to see which one I might want to go on with, or start.”
— Lydia Davis / “If Lydia Davis Wasn’t a Writer, She’d Devote Herself to Climate Activism” / Lithub
“I too keep rewinding this mixtape
of the plague years until I can hear it snap like a tendon
or a tent pole.”
— Jenny Browne / “I Am Trying to Love the Whole World”
“‘The fact that we’re seeing this record hot year means record human suffering,’ said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. ‘Within this year, extreme heatwaves and droughts made much worse by these extreme temperatures have caused thousands of deaths, people losing their livelihoods, being displaced etc. These are the records that matter.’”
— Ajit Noranjan / “2023 on track to be the hottest year on record, say scientists” / The Guardian
“Strange fall. Trees drop ballots into the yard without fear of our tampering”
— J. Estanislao Lopez / “The Systemic”
What I’m Listening To:
“There’s a flavor to the sound of walking
No one ever noticed before”
— Julia Holter / “In the Green Wild”
What I’m Reading:
“… My eye drifts
to the buff belly of a hawk wheeling,
as they do, in a late fall light that melts
against the turning oak and smelts
its leaves bronze.”
— Donika Kelly / “I love you. I miss you.
Please get out of my house.”
It is she who lost her hydrogen and must fetishize herself in denial. She has an uneasy remand with her lunchbox: objection, objection! The most remarkable assertion is the dialectic of finger traps, wholly without precedent.
Wholly holy in the warp and woof of latter day unrhymed couplets.
Her prominent mother’s tensions are depicted as completely natural. The ministerial portfolio constantly hovers around her resentment. She commands an imminent dissolve and eminent crosscut, though she prefers the term lap dissolve.
She feels no remorse for the 400 earthquakes plotted around Mt. St. Helens recently.
Nothing saintly there. Not remotely.
She wants to riot in the snow. She wants to dollop a bristle benchmark of freshly ground … round or peanut butter?
The grapefruit navigators are mustered. Snowblowers are scrambled. Then one full minute of delusion leads to a break with policy, an unremitting appeal to unreason, and personal harm.
What I’m Reading:
“The time of year has grown indifferent.
Mildew of summer and the deepening snow
Are both alike in the routine I know.
I am too dumbly in my being pent.”
— Wallace Stevens / “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad”
i nest in myself—
this atomization an
obsessive pursuit—
then i step out of myself
my many husks slough yellow
What I’m Reading:
“I didn’t know what I was waiting for, but something told me to wait. Another army of sluggish minutes dragged by.”
— Raymond Chandler / The Big Sleep
i am fanatical + cartoonish
i plot hack attacks + duende kidnaps
gazing at my navel / sinking in quicksand
i am a monstrous clown
appropriating a farcical othering of myself
ive outgrown my clown shoes
a couplet spewer of ill repute
ive become my own a.i.
ay ya ya
yai
i sing + cry
simultaneously
i am a biohazard
to myself
i am a dislocation
What I’m Reading:
“Fathers often use too much force”
— Jenny Holzer / “Truisms, 1977-79”
thee istsfor manity reader 