Books i didn't write.

Band on the run.

( via / via )

Summer issue of FGR out now.

Poetics List Reading Editions. Kevin Killian's part.

"The list holds several things side by side, lets them stay unlike, and declines to reduce them to a point. That declining is the whole technique." —Tōan via

"It was clear that nobody believed that anything would ever happen ever again."

( via / )

Mushroom in Seville.

"Wanting to meet a writer because you like their books is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.” — Margaret Atwood via @ianduhig.bsky.social

Spectral Nights in West Virginia.

"The Ruin

Remorseless sun · stunts the dew

Glistening towers · of tainted glass
ignite and blister · in blood-yellow light
recalling the tallest · of crumbling tombs
as humbler graves · harbor their dead
in the clutches of earth · and callous night

The past is draining · through inhuman dreams
no people are packing · backrooms and bars
no pride or empire · rises on ruins
no glance at a face · gleans what is fair

Everyone senses · evil has come

The world we knew · will not be renewed
and gods of technology · are graceless and numb

We call for a hero · but just hear recordings "

—AM Juster via

In the animal kingdom it's known as threat display..
One day we will realize that all the robots are kidding, too. You don't have to be carbon based to have imposter syndrome.

( via / via )

Civilianized Gray Zone.

"the hall of the mountain king"

weekday-unmoored · software glitching
begin the day · one ear stopped up

regime medicinal · injury-avoidant
saving scraps · & losing what you save

never reach · an end to riddles
to the scroll add · inchmeal amscray

The horrors persist but so do i.

"while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy" —@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

The Death of Old Kashgar.

( via / via )

Star Axis. (via mefi)

“ ‘They—we—were betrayed. In our souls we have never been sure by whom. When we feel cheated we are ready to kill; and maybe we feel cheated all the time.’ ” —Gene Wolfe, “Seven American Nights,” in: Best Science Fiction Stories (1980)

Latin Mass.

when wild things are given names
they join the rote sestina
with parallel amens
& never again siesta

they join the rote sestina
a plethora of lush tisanes
& never again siesta
nor in the woods leave stains

a plethora of lush tisanes
when wild things are given names
nor in the woods leave stains
with parallel amens

(2024)

"For 1/28, the one-year anniversary of World War III, Rachel’s editor asks her to write a piece on 'internet humor at the end of the world'."

( via / me )

"Some people don’t care if their Cowichan sweater was made by a machine or a little old Native woman clicking her knitting needles. Other people care."

"White House Dungeon Synth"

cruel supernal candy
costs-ev'rything treethirl
thirsty Nosferatu
whose nuzzle grants answers
unending crave eventide

"She was subsequently encouraged to join a feminist book club by a group of academics. 'I learned, and I’ve continued to learn,' she says. They’re still meeting every month now; Barfoot says her members are among 'the people who will come to my funeral'."

"The fact that we call smartphones phones is such a mass linguistic spell. It’s like calling the nuclear bomb a microwave because it can warm up a burrito" —@somethingishappening

"It’s far from the most important way our lives have gotten worse, but it might be the most pointless – which makes it useful for understanding so much else about a moment in history defined by breathtaking self-sabotage."

( via / via )

"As a translator, I see my work as having most affinity with Iris, the divine messenger goddess..."

"Just when we have the green tech available at scale to fully transition from fossil fuels, an anti-human technology has been forcibly integrated into every aspect of our daily lives, increasing our (already frantic) economic precarity while making us dependent on it for our every (mediocre) thought as it gobbles up resources at a rate that would make it a plausible alien invader from a comic if it had just done us the favor of presenting with tentacles, or a flaming eye." —Alaya Dawn Johnson via

"Is there not something evil in the act of blocking all future generations of mathematicians from the experience of discovery?"

      "To an old philosopher

The 'old philosopher' of the title is George Santayana, under whom Stevens studied briefly at Harvard, and who died in Rome at a hospital run by nuns.

   On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street
Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement
Of men growing small in the distances of space,
Singing, with smaller and still smaller sound,
Unintelligible absolution and an end—

   The threshold, Rome, and that more merciful Rome
Beyond, the two alike in the make of the mind.
It is as if in a human dignity
Two parallels become one, a perspective, of which
Men are part both in the inch and in the mile.

   How easily the blown banners change to wings . . .
Things dark on the horizons of perception,
Become accompaniments of fortune, but
Of the fortune of the spirit, beyond the eye,
Not of its sphere, and yet not far beyond,

   The human end in the spirit’s greatest reach,
The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme
Of the unknown. The newsboys’ muttering
Becomes another murmuring; the smell
Of medicine, a fragrantness not to be spoiled . . .

   The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns,
The candle as it evades the sight, these are
The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome,
A shape within the ancient circles of shapes,
And these beneath the shadow of a shape
In a confusion on bed and books, a portent
On the chair, a moving transparence on the nuns,
A light on the candle tearing against the wick
To join a hovering excellence, to escape
From fire and be part only of that which

   Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible.
Speak to your pillow as if it was yourself.
Be orator but with an accurate tongue
And without eloquence, O, half-asleep,
Of the pity that is the memorial of this room,

   So that we feel, in this illumined large,
The veritable small, so that each of us
Beholds himself in you, and hears his voice
In yours, master and commiserable man,
Intent on your particles of nether-do,

   Your dozing in the depths of wakefulness,
In the warmth of your bed, at the edge of your chair, alive
Yet living in two worlds, impenitent
As to one, and, as to one, most penitent,
Impatient for the grandeur that you need

   In so much misery; and yet finding it
Only in misery, the afflatus of ruin,
Profound poetry of the poor and of the dead,
As in the last drop of the deepest blood,
As it falls from the heart and lies there to be seen,
Even as the blood of an empire, it might be,
For a citizen of heaven though still of Rome.
It is poverty’s speech that seeks us out the most.
It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.
This is the tragic accent of the scene.

   And you—it is you that speak it, without speech,
The loftiest syllable among loftiest things,
The one invulnerable man among
Crude captains, the naked majesty, if you like,
Of bird-nest arches and of rain-stained-vaults.

   The sounds drift in. The buildings are remembered.
The life of the city never lets go, nor do you
Ever want it to. It is part of the life in your room.
Its domes are the architecture of your bed.
The bells keep on repeating solemn names

   In choruses and choirs of choruses,
Unwilling that mercy should be a mystery
Of silence, that any solitude of sense
Should give you more than their peculiar chords
And reverberations clinging to whisper still.

   It is a kind of total grandeur at the end,
With every visible thing enlarged and yet
No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns,
The immensest theatre, and pillared porch,
The book and candle in your ambered room,
Total grandeur of a total edifice,
Chosen by an inquisitor of structures
For himself. He stops upon this threshold,
As if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized."

—Wallace Stevens via

"Whether phenomenology, hermeneutics, linguistics, cinematography, literature; whether the trees outside or the scar on one’s forearm or nothing at all—pure absence—there is in this universe an overabundance of how to provide the Being with a glimpse into the self. ."

( via / via )

The story of unleaded gas.

"Jimothy sortilege"

moth wrangler, Komodo
dragon wrangler
car seats patched with duct tape
the shadow of books i read
diff'rent when i read again
dead soldiers
on a leaning table

same tilt as the earth

summoned by hand-drawn lines
cannot say
& it stays where captured
fractionated light
a sidewalk made of measured steps

The Unsleeving.

"Here is a bitter yearly winnowing
of what’s to come from what is in decline"

—Jane Greer via

"Once I explained to him that I’d expected a door there, I stood there for a moment in the dark and thought: I am the ghost here."

( me / via )

"Instantly touches the spot.

I’ll never be a great photographer because for me everything looks equally good through a viewfinder.

8 Literary Horror Books That I Love.

"sleeping almost to five"

desk corner free, frisking
for the mortal lulz
dark out & no Oort surplus

articles drop, swapped out
in a room drawn random
chub drifts & choppy rafters

inches away from saying
desk corner casketry
calibrates burnt malice

"Alto saxophonist John Handy, who was on the stand, said Mingus dropped without warning into 'a very slow, mournful blues in C minor.' By the end of the set the core of the song existed."

( via / via )

Wittgenstein's Ladder.

      "Witchfinder's holiday"

None but ashes makes this bridge so stern.
I followed, at a distance, till i lost
      in hazy waves of thirst
   some outcome in the pinkblue dawn.

Say they were friends, who might or might not thrive:
propinquity & gibberish as much,
      blown across the heights.
   These, among the jests of love.

None but ashes makes this bridge so stern.

"Cutchin posits that when humans experience high strangeness—such as a UFO or cryptid encounter—a literal 'metaleptic shatter' occurs."

"A few months later it was pointed out by the BBC staffer and Elizabethan scholar Mary Edmond that Forman had actually written “brave in her youth” and that the husband’s name was Alfonso. But Rowse persisted to his dying day in the belief that he alone had solved the great literary mystery." —Jonathan Bate via

"Kugelberg likens Corvo to Joni Mitchell who turned her heartbreaks into songs and also to Lester Bangs who wrote music reviews that were really about Lester Bangs."

( via / via )

Smile.

"...the French, whose venerable monarchy saddled them with a fair number of incompetent rulers, have an expression for feckless kings: rois fainéants." —Arthur Goldhammer via

My current thoughts on recent geopolitical events.

"Baruch Spinoza

Hazy gold, the Occident lights up
The windowpane. The manuscript assiduous
Awaits, laden with infinitude.
Somebody is building God in twilight.
A man engendering God. He is a Jew
With sorrowful eyes and sallow skin;
Time bears him as the river bears
A leaf on its declining water.
No matter. Insistently the wizard works
On God with delicate geometry;
From his infirmity, his nothingness,
He manufactures God with stintless word.
Prodigious was the love presented him,
The hopeless love of ever being loved."

—Borges (tr Christopher Mulrooney via, via Also this. )

Le Grande Palindrome again. (Option to translate in the last link.)

( via / via )

Minotaur.

"iridium layer of art oddness"

1.
i sing the ending of the world
& its continuance
waspniche siren's call
mud castle shivered to dust
at the touch of a screwdriver

2.
those who belong to the land
are gladdest when the clamor goes
they'll still be digging up coins
when no one knows the emperor

3.
my people
even before

have seen extermination
they were rightly named

but there was room
before the process

in which to hide
was perfected

4.
you want fuckin' epic?

" I continue to ponder the significance of this."

"Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries." —@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

"Relinquishment would dissolve the name of the child and replace it with a number and a new name."

( via / via )

This is my Sister.

"This month is the 36th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act and it reminds me that the ADA could not be passed today. It probably couldn’t get a vote in committee today."
—@ericmgarcia.bsky.social

Fantastic Genealogy.

"The Return of Absence

And the early summer
returned to your eyes,
and the old songs
returned to
the yellowed land,
the peasants to the hills,
the prophets to God,
the women to the mirrors,
the men to the road,
and memories
to the narrow alleys.
But your voice is gone,
and your face is gone.
If only I had never soared
in the sky of your nothingness."

—Mohammed Moussa

"...yet some other crystal..."

( via / oil painting by me )

The Hundred Dresses of Audrey Trotter.

"the crooked-built house"

matutinal blue rose
ruse vertigo lifting
panopticon dimness
damp shoe shuffle, movie
about the making of a movie
ev'rywhere food & the shadows of food

Tanka.

"I try to pet the cat. My fingers multiply, fracture, recrystallize—they are spatulas, cables, berries hanging in clusters off a stem, rippling plasma; they are orange fur interlocking with orange fur" —@ctrlcreep

Recovery.

( via / via )

A Stoic Prayer.

"In the same way that Knausgaard reclaimed My Struggle as title, my life’s work will be to reclaim If I Did It." —@rmhaines

Headcanon.

"the impossible map"

another day lost without saying it
broken pavement · a parlous footing
desaparecidos · companions
   in the shadowy realms
fat crescent · maybe a third full

The Man Who Discovered Uranus.

( via / via )

Tunga.

“Full Moon (Santa Barbara)

I listened, there was not a sound to hear
In the great rain of moonlight pouring down,
The eucalyptus trees were carved in silver,
And a light mist of silver lulled the town.

I saw far off the grey Pacific bearing
A broad white disk of flame,
And on the garden-walk a snail beside me
Tracing in crystal the slow way he came.”

—Sara Teasdale

The Man Who Laughs.

"Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn" —Tennyson

Tanka.

( via / still from La Notte )

"On the occasion of his departure from Yugoslavia, after his first expedition in 1933, he even became the subject of a heroic song composed by the singer (guslar) Milovan Vojičić and fully ornamented with traditional formulas: 'Professor Milman Parry the glorious,' the 'gray falcon,' who 'flew from the beautiful land of America,' 'to our heroic fatherland,' to 'gather songs of heroes'."

"when I feel down about my weight I like to look up how much I would be worth if I were a tuna" —@taramcgowanross.bsky.social

"I’m trying to find a way to tie myself to the mast, but in ballet, you’re also, and always, the siren and the rocks."

when we close down
the department of trumpology
& some of us can reopen
our feeds without trepidation
all the other sep'rate crimes
can frolic without authors
all the cruelty of nature
can rest
unvied with

Only Alchemies.

( via / via )

"...even when books do make it into English, they often do so through fragile, improvised, underfunded channels rather than through any stable literary infrastructure."

"Snail Paces

As I pry beneath crumbling bricks they come
to light, pale embryos unfolding. Slim
wands question space

touch-tentative. They lift small frills
to glide and teeter, balancing their shells
like the family china.
Or brace

on the hawser of themselves; the load stirs
and follows like a shadow. Each shoulders
his small world like a sack

and strains towards his half-an-inch horizon.
We are less to them than clouds across the sun.
Beneath the thrush’s block

we find them threshed out, littering our grass,
mute violated husks. Bend closer . . . Pass
down empty corridors,

intimate windings, moulded by the sheer
day-in-day-out of flesh. Mother-of-pearled,
the inner chamber of the ear."

—Philip Gross via

"The combination of fountain pens and paper embodies a balance that has been worked out over a long span of time by people who write a lot. This phenomenon is called 'tooth' by aficionados."

There was a time when i did all this & i will say, the very best thing about using a fountain pen is you can blend your own color of ink. I like a very dark red, almost black, or blue-green anything that’s down from bright. These affect the voice that emerges when you write with them.

"I toyed with withholding this, frankly, but the story did happen, witnessed by Saul Bellow and told to Berryman, who waited a decade to use it and sent the Song to Bellow with this dedication: ‘For Saul – excusez mon vol – but I warned you 10 years ago that if by some point you hadn't used this, I would'."

( via / via )

"When we finished, everyone applauded, even the string players. And that's saying something. They never applaud for anything."

"To get a better pension, many people would leave their familiar spots and resettle in Siberia, the Far North, or the Far East before their retirement because, in those places, with extreme climates or other calamities, salaries were much higher and paid according to geographical zones." —Larisa Rimerman via

"The philological patience of attending to each sign and an essay published in a university newspaper that holds open the possibility of letting different opinions and standpoints coexist without resolving into one: both are ways of carrying rather than losing."

   the wasp swing
when does it cease to trail
a lashing out
across generations carried
nest might be dead
but i have prayed again
poison
poison
poison

"Tired in a way that is not about today."

( via / via )

Listening to the Billionaire.

      "Jimothy"

Zoom ringing rhymeless
aroma plunged dungeon
      of Lockdown
   show the doctor
miserably boxed · in the windowshuttered

brushing chimes to chastise
chains invisible tisma
      —the lurgy
   out there looming—
still though a shot · is half shelter

Zoom ringing rhymeless
rune perilous Fillmore

Read a New Poem Alone in Gaza.

"During the Cultural Revolution in China, rival Red Guards units would attack each other with clubs and guns, both sides screaming 'Long live Chairman Mao!' In the West, we do things differently. Here, we have politically motivated firefights between two non-white people, both of them devoted to Adolf Hitler." —Sam Kriss via

"Having only been able to make it 60 pages in: I do not believe that Strieber believes his own story—even as a good lie." (Which makes me wonder if Roxy's claim to have also been at that famous mass shooting...was plagiarized from Streiber?? That's a kind of joke on all of us for even listening to him.)

( via / via )

Here’s how many people have lost food assistance so far.

"Do we spend a seventh of our lives on each day of the week?" —Mark Scott via

No. Mondays are half.

Ristitamtsi.

   a cure too late—thugs
break into the lab, smashing—
   a hundred & four

with this picture perfect sky
ev'ryone in steel capsules

"...the only runic inscription from Anglo-Saxon England which declares itself to have been made by a woman."

( via / via )

Peat Cutting.

      "LETTER IV.

Hatched in a rasping darkness of dry sand
   The child cicada some brave root discovers:
Sucks with dumb mouth while his long climb is planned
   That high must tunnel through the silt that smothers..."

—William Empson via

"I think of Melville as a New York writer, even though he's talking about whales."

"Pope, who was never known to laugh, was a great wit..." --John Dennis, The Age of Pope (1896)

"This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps."

( via / via )

The "dog" behind Dog Day Afternoon. (via @sardonicus.eu)

"*'The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st Century's frontier'

*The Gray Zone's not very sustainable. It costs a lot to maintain all those smart flying bombs, they need fuel, batteries, chips, cameras

*So what does the Post-Gray-Zone look like

*Chernobyl, maybe. 'Involuntary Park' "

—Bruce Sterling via

Talk of the Town.

       shards falling
   never from night's
& that myth-rendered · burg excavates
as storms worsen stabsong
astute bards break timebread

       these pavements
   full of victims
these screens shine · no ripe shelter
i no-clip pinched parkswards
pullulating great wormforms

       ancient caste
   leper king built

The Age of Pope.

( via / via )

Success.

best magic is old magic
a thousand years of repair
tall hats in dim corridors
calcspar box & hacksaw

calcspar box & hacksaw
Habsburg jaw on Liberty
DDT spiral
night without stars
nidor of sagas for Odin

Stanley Crouch, for & against. Much fun is had by all.

"there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue"
—@mobydickatsea.bsky.social

Untouchable.

( via / via )

PSA.

"Magnolia flowers are pollinated by beetles because the species is so ancient. They appeared on Earth before bees." —@mfcarter.bsky.social

The Darkness.

"Basra"

a wall of all alibis
umber floor, siege dumbshow
fizzogmany naughahyde
anon ponders
the sky's secrets, skulkshorn
skullface Epstein klepto
umber floor, flayed sideshow
flattens into dream-minted

the Furies chortle

Golden Brown.

( via / via )

this really is THE WORST TIMELINE.

      "old magazine"

wraith recompense · so long lapsing
      waterfall
   whose tide stands still
fragments afloat noggin
forcefed stilbs of rare bedlam

verse carrying casement
      pumpydoor
calcspar box hacksaw
   of dark inklings
cerulean road · rattletrap quokka

crank windows are coming back

"I once went to Vancouver, and asked a pharmacist how much a vial of insulin costs, they said $35. Then I called my pharmacy in the states, and they said $360."

"The most terrifying shipwreck would be to save ourselves" —@poemakontsa.bsky.social

Perfect.