What I’m Reading:
In Key West, the living surround the dead,
who are the best neighbors
silent and agreeable as well-swept porches.
— Jacqueline Allen Trimble / “Walking Beside the Cemetery, Olivia Street, Key West”
any quintuplets?
another colloquium?
bring scissors and fluff.
gnu stiffeners and goatherds—
it’s a party, tape your fall.
What I’m Reading:
I wasn’t used to being a confused person, but that was how life was. Sometimes the events of the world were clear, and at other times they rearranged themselves in such a way that nothing made sense, and even if they did make sense to other people, they made no discernible sense to you. Either that, or I was jet-lagged, which was another possible explanation.
— Maya Binyam / Hangman
A monocle in the 1970s was as prideful as a pince nez. Today we wear neoliberal coke bottle-bottom horn rims. . .
These ideas are drawn from a particularly short-sighted cilia’s lamentations entitled: Perky Monoliths and Other Deceptive Codpieces, which radically reshape our units of perception by oilskinned feet and acorned meters. I argue that VISION—especially inner-mind vision is both an artistic forte and also the seat of nascent oboe skronk and aleatory stress—and that filial-cilial moment emerged as a consignment of periwinkle-specific aphids.
The decorators (exterior types) saw a rapidly expanding sexy-eel consort marinade as a new obsession. Ascetics they ain’t! Among them lived felons, peso-pushers, and a variety of malcontents intent on mandrake visions. (Banish me! before I speak again—before I make sense!)
To make scents: I smell a distinct artistic foul and the accomplishment of nothing (in spades!) emergent from a peroration of desperation . . . Waiter! Check please!
Apostolic apostrophes for after-dinner drinkage / Oblations about the legibility of affective labor in the birthing rooms. Here are the assessments of the granulations upon the spindle-bearer’s back / Ablutions and absolutions of contortionist social prodigies bearing their brands as sexual appendages.
What! I say: What! are we doing here? I ain’t nobody’s blank slate.
What I’m Reading:
I closed the huge doors behind me and walked softly towards the altar. I was in the opium of the people. The huge cross dangled from chains fixed to the roof. I stood looking at the crucified Christ. He looked like He needed a stiff drink . . . He looked like I felt.
— Dambudzo Marechera / Black Sunlight
What I’m Reading:
. . . for in Mumbai, as in Miami and many other coastal cities, these are often the very areas in which expensive new construction projects are located. Property values would almost certainly decline if residents were to be warned of possible risks which is why builders and developers are sure to resist efforts to disseminate disaster-related information.
— Amitav Ghosh / The Great Derangement
California banned slavery in 1849. California law allowed
Native people to be enslaved in 1910.
— Allison Adelle Hedge Coke / Look at This Blue
. . . I have been haunted by the human capacity to use creativity and imagination to such deadly ends. I would like to think that we are better off in the United States, but when you look at what was done in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, we are only wealthy enough to keep it offshore. In the United States, we have the money to create weaponry that removes us from the violence we enact. By contrast, in the Congo, the mixture of poverty and war is a lethal combination. Due to a lack of money, the human body becomes the weapon, the teenage boy the terror, and a woman’s womb “the battleground.”
— Kate Whoriskey / “Introduction” to Lynn Nottage’s Ruined
O god of guayaba’s split red belly
O god of the soldier taking your wedding ring
O god of young cursing teeth
O god of the baseball stadium where,
in 1966, a soldier stood on third base
and sent hundreds of men to work
the sugarcane fields.
— Jordan Pérez / “O God of Cuba”
CHRISTIAN: But we have to pretend that all this ugliness means nothing. We wash the blood off with buckets of frigid water, and whitewash our walls. Our leaders tell us: “Follow my rules, your life will be better,” their doctors say, “Take this pill, your life will be better,” “Plant these seeds, your life will better,” “Read this book, your life will be better,” “Kill your neighbor, your life will be better—“
— Lynn Nottage / Ruined
If every bomb
Appeared in the sky a dove
Shrapnel into rain
If vengeance vanquished
From the cursed lips of weak men
An idea never taking root
— Tony Medina / “Seven Steps to Heaven Haiku”
“White” was invented five hundred years ago to describe the privilege enjoyed by one group of people, and to justify the exploitation of “Black” people. In the words of James Baldwin, “White is a metaphor for power.” And today, it remains both an assertion of racial superiority and a declaration of a twisted notion of freedom. To be white is to have entered a world free of the pain of history, an abstract space where opportunity and individualism rule. The racial and ethnic labels of the United States are old and imprecise and illogical; and yet they dominate our lives in the present.
— Hector Tobar / Our Migrant Souls
We don’t have to be rapacious. That is not who we necessarily are. We have built an economy that is relentless in its consumption and does not conform to natural law, but we don’t have to do it that way.
— Robin Wall-Kimmerer, to Andrew Boyd / I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor
What I’m Listening To:
Bright every day, I wake up
Look at my travels, they’re scuffed up
Ring goes the telly, which I pick up
Turn on the news as it screws up
— De La Soul / “Freedom of Speak (We Got Three Minutes)”
a tongue that withers—
my native tongue sent packing—
hegemonic curse.
What I’m Reading:
the walls of my voice, pronounce me
Ashamed
so I bury my native tongue
beneath a borrowed one
— Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner / “On the Couch with Būbū Neien” / Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter
the two avant-gardes
gardens of impassioned afterimages
two claps for toe taps and mushroom caps
i propose sieves for dinner
i propose we clamber on gravestones
there are captious eucalyptus there rescinding
next year’s ready to wear line
i’ve seen the theoretical theologian trailing
pages of canted kant—
imagine schopenhauer happy
i can’t—
so i propose a modern palpitation
let’s reduce the population
by exactly one, an exacting choice
u must make—
choose
What I’m Reading:
The relationship of Latino people to North American ideas about race is one more chapter in this country’s convoluted and contradictory race story. Latino people can think of themselves as white, and many of our unenlightened relatives believe lighter skin makes them superior human beings.
— Hector Tobar / Our Migrant Souls
Blindly devote yourself to formulary Z-074. Make triplicate copies send one to me, one to Human Resources, and one to the Department of Repressive Operations. Sing, glory be! Gloriole and halo benders and everything is ordinary until it is not. Then we’ll have to consider how I melt multiphasic multiplying the meaning of nothing this is something unseen… what doesn’t kill you makes you spastic and ekphrastic. Please don’t embarrass me in front of my secular pilgrims, they’re in a hurry and flying fast. They’re fasting at the speed of light, grasping at the site of blight. Remember the feeling you had when your teeth were removed with a mallet. Remember the pity you felt at shaving your beard with a hatchet? The nicks and the deep lacerations from running in place with shaving cream in your eye sockets and one hand in your pocket? Well, that’s what I’m feeling now.
What I’m Reading:
“… choose a place where you won’t do very much harm and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.”
— E. M. Forster / A Room with a View
magical thinking—
the vegetation is thick
the smoke is thicker
heat appears like a cougar
there is no air—no escape
What I’m Reading:
Like a blind dolphin, the night of the new moon silently drew near.
— Haruki Murakami / The Strange Library
He produced phosphenes that smelled of mandarin oranges — a strange synesthetic effect that followed the orange-rimmed yellow spots that exploded in his closed-eye vision.
He thought this was an improvement on the phosphenes of his youth that smelt of rotting meats and animal carcasses, and filled his nights with monstrous nightmares.
He finally felt like an adult. He thought he’d arrived at the happiest point of his life, but he felt his brand was in peril. Only the whip smartest YouTubers and TikTok’ers could make the scene, and his phosphenes were falling behind.
So he really pressed down hard on his eyes this time and they fell into the center of his head, down his sinuses, and mysteriously into his esophagus, and through his digestive tract.
His vision was something spectacular now — 12K Supreme! It was like a Haight Ashbury psychedelic oil light show at a Grateful Dead concert, c. 1966 — every time another enzyme, bile, or gastric acid washed over his eyes making their way through this world of gastrointestinal wonder — phosphenes like he’d never seen before exploded through his eyeless head — sending bright yellow sparks out of his vacant eyeholes.
Man, it blew him away.
And when the peristalsis finally evacuated his eyes into the depths of his own rectum— the time was now! Now he knew he’d be the supreme influencer to all mankind.
He tapped out a telegraph to his mother: “Success, Mother! I’m finally in my own rectum and about to be born again!
What I’m Reading:
Synapses are electrical messages, didn’t they say. Crackling colours like northern lights or deep-sea creatures, floating miles below and right inside us.
— Megan Hunter / The End We Start From
