( via / via )

"It’s shadowed in anguish and literal fires, as in, both Hughes and Plath admitted to setting one another’s work on fire, which is an image I can’t escape."

"A survival-manual has killed everybody
With a single misprint"

--Bill Knott

This pattern appears to wave.

Cicalatide, trees full of loud erasure
briefly arrest, before they reach extinction
these drivers hurrying clad in fugitive purpose.
I don't know when they started or their fading
though foreordained as most defeats in nature;
among us humans, nothing reeks like failure
& we think we're so wise when we disdain it.
The ice of a hundred thousand years is gone now
without so much as one complete farewell;
i watch things wither i had thought would save
here in the autumn of my self conceit
& i cannot prognosticate one falling
or one survival where the jabber falters
except that we raise voices to drown cicadas.

"Prymachenko’s life was marked by adversity and grief: She suffered from polio throughout her childhood, lost close family during World War II, experienced poverty and famine on a kolkhoz, and lived in a region directly impacted by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster."