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"But there’s always money for bombs."

"Like a ship, offshore, with shattered masts,
Battered and betrayed, the island of Britain,
Through the thickening dusk of a third Dark Age,
Drifted into dimness in a tedious decline,
With two rival crews of contending rats."

--Artorius

"In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually."

"Flourish

Clematis, sweet pea, sweet alyssum,
sweet asylum,

adornment’s adamant
heaven scent

to bed an arbor’s
ardor,

trellis’s
yes this

reaching toward
its own reward,

sweet re-aching might redeem
what seems

a frail unfurling to refuge
instead, re-fugue

played in contrapuntal context
shows some pragmatist’s thanks

thriving
not only as noun and verb, but stem, climbing

aster and hydrangea, honeysuckle,
wisteria, twine and tendril

reaching skyward
toward

as if to pick
a warden’s lock,

as if jazz hands, spirit fingers,
fireworks, as our shared shards glitter

on this floodlit stage left empty and the river rising like ovation
out of whose rush and rake and raze and refuse grows again

these petals, pleats, sequins,
pirouettes, curtsies, and klieg-eyed bowers, sure-fired lines

run to sun’s stunning
statement piece, peals on which an hour slips under

the higher wire
and over

the big top we make
of what’s at stake,

tensile
tendrils

corkscrewing up to pour more sunlight,
celebrate

the act
we make of the temporary fact of us."

--Dora Malech in the Iowa Review

Three body system.