A love for language and its capacity to remind,
to provoke, to destroy, to build—all ways
to make meaning within life’s chaos.
That duality of attraction and repulsion,
to be godlike, to declare a voice,
to make nothing something.
“Absence is harder to accept than death.” —Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog
August is a month of dedication.
Be like the cloud-burning light,
and ask yourself, was it on purpose
or an accident, and then try to decide
which wrong answer is easiest to forgive.
Is your faith in the disembodied voice of unlearning
or the recollections of a still life, untouched?
That’s the kind of sensory deprivation I echo.
You must assume there is truth in this translation.
i.
August kneels before us,
opening like a centerfold.
Somewhere, it is snowing.
ii.
Your boat lacks a lifejacket.
A born-into body, anomaly, karaoke
of the future, we exaggerated.
iii.
So much the same, a state of dissolve
or sentimental consecration? Bloom
reception, on the mouth and in joy.
summer avoidant
sadder than green oranges
—not yet
Diminishing returns on man-made misery:
take drinking water to put out wildfires
then create full-color murals of mercurial martyrs
underneath burnt contrails that suggest messages
of conscriptive curtailment. There is some hope
as we begin the slow pilgrimage towards autumn.
But, last year was a mast year. Abundant loss.
What should we barter for an underdog future?
You have to find your own way of stilling time. —Mary Ruefle
Alchemic wishes and wants, memories
and miracles disintegrate—
muted into mythology of lives lived.
A texture felt both like a shadow
and a daydream or the loss of time found.
It’s ok. A sense of panic is inevitable
when half of this year is behind us.
Please promise me you’ll decorate
for Christmas in July, and in between
all the holiday seasons after I’m gone.
Even machines take time to integrate
their learnings. Make the pause sacred
inside this constant state of readiness.
Summer funerals, holiday funerals, GoFundMe™ funerals
become parades of divinity serving a false purpose:
time progresses. Thrust takes the shape of a noun
and a verb; slow entry
repetition is seduction is violence is compliance.
Mutilated men archive intimacy inside avarice
and finger the crumbs left behind.
We seem to be trending, again.
That familiar sense of ascension,
of a ride. Time given, if we may be honest.
Relentless associations: abortion and rape,
vengeful anger and ketchup-stained walls,
parasocial relationships; unaware and informed.
Is my morning bus late or did it simply not show up?
July arrives. Come, unknowing.
Summer begins like a missing tooth,
a warm hole to sink one’s self into,
an intimate understanding
of the body having layers.
Repeat the shape
of golden hills rolling
and monotonous longing,
a parade of clouds,
gentle light, seizures of faith—
quiet, loud, quiet—ritualized violence
sincerely and with resolution demanding
this world stay on fire.
“Life and death matters, yes. And the question of how to behave in this world, how to go in the face of everything. Time is short and the water is rising.“
—Raymond Carver
That things “just go on” is the catastrophe. — Walter Benjamin
The poppies were still asleep.
Cats, the ones who never let me pet them,
stare past me as the sun migrates west.
It is summer. I am feral, again.
Or maybe this rumor wants to be about withdrawal,
an urge for a substance being withheld. Within,
there can be acceptance, resistance,
and something possessed delicately in between—
unknown, suggestive and loose like spontaneous prayer.
The atmosphere, thick with notes of jasmine and rose,
wanders around my morning shadow. It traces vintage memories
swarming unsolicited and holy: 4th of July rodeos,
tomato sandwiches, shedding cottonwoods, and parental neglect
so pervasive it remains material witness to all those lost summers.
Of course gravity is physical, but who will study its somatics?
“Death is hidden in clocks… in my youth I chose as my motto
the ancient Latin maxim festina lente: make haste slowly.”
— Italo Calvino
In between the gaps
where sunlight reaches—
shades of green extend.
Shawls of fog dampen
the moving silence.
I surrendered to Time
as the backsides of towns
and tranquil boredom took me
closer to you and then back
home. Somewhere past the darkness
where distressed light of forests spill
into borders of thriving attraction,
I dreamt bravely. I named it joy.
“Nearly everyone in the world has appetites and impulses, trigger emotions, islands of selfishness, lusts just beneath the surface.” —John Steinbeck, East of Eden
If you read the daily news,
you are told to be afraid.
If you read the poets,
you see why the sun sings.
If you measure that gap,
slightly more oblivious than
upholding divine rights of kings,
you will find yourself.
If you are quiet, enough,
your erasure will light the way.
We drown out,
floods of thoughts
and prayers—desperate gasps.
///
Obsessively tracking
celestial bodies:
full, new, eclipsing.
^^
Making meaning, semantic as memories,
plumbed from cult-like sacrifice
and stolen, inverted landscapes.
#
This prelude is redemptive work.
I.
Canaries, the kind designed to warn, died
years ago and the audience pretended
not to hear their zero-sum absence.
II.
Did you see the etched spells
carved into downtown bus windows?
A cluster of worldbuilding signs—
anti-collections of gilded relativity.
III.
It is that time of day. Straight-ahead stare.
The inside lights have been turned on.
Fallow fields lie open, subjugated for influence.
IV.
Recently, a bluejay has become a surrogate rooster.
Declaring another day or scouting for tenderness?
Forget-me-nots in bloom, and our heads full-on empty.
A physics of being spooned, jammed, grazed.
V.
Summertime eyes, dry mouth holes, dots to be connected.
Hyperfixation as daydream, musical as chairs.
Blue fading pink light transitions the sun’s nightly disappearance as a star.
Earlier the concentrated sunlight, setting late, hit a distant window—
just right. The bright reflection took shape of an ordinary reminder.
A reminder that temporal sequence as closure is felt, a sense.
What if we are actually expanding instead of contracting?
Hours as measured by:
clouds slipping by
exhaust pipes
glaciers melting
street pigeon’s stuttered coos
gossip economy news cycles
a flock of geese in V formation
rivers carving out gorges
indigent centers
exhale
Can we claim survival as the measured depth of a body of water?
An ending does not always need to follow a chain of events.
Duality alters thresholds, choices, interpretation.
These ongoing attempts become accumulations, layers,
a structure of ongoing being. There’s worship and fetish.
A complete world.
Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology…because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.” —James Baldwin interview with Julius Lester, May 1984
The surge is back.
We are hosts, again.
Feeling nothing but empty.
A physical sensation.
I am left wanting, again.
Never not forgotten urges.
Restraint is an evocative need.
Its own stimulation.
Free will is in the news, again.
When the wave comes, go deep.
Be a seed, insistent as memory.
In a Christian context, responsibility of discernment
makes meaning a gambler’s holdout. I mean that literally.
It is the same mechanics when a moment can be a monument,
dramatic affect to overactive nervous systems—tense:
a knowing. Which indicators of such deception are most valid?
The idea is: what you saw isn’t always accurate.
Are we simply machines preprogrammed to make complexity
out of the simplest of ideas, like wanting to be loved
unconditionally and without remorse?
A bitter taste lingers—
stringent, punchy
mouth feel—tongue maps.
Rebound special—
I dreamt, again, of moving.
A task of packing things
you forgot still exist.
We lay in bed, innocent
until forced to engage
with the world under a sky
quiet, grey milky light.
In America, I regret to be informed
war and rising gas prices
are equally traumatic. There’s panic
at that trigger-shaped pump.
Some reread biblical stories—
extracted citations of plagues, sin,
and salt. Fear finds us hungry.
Evacuation trails of refugees are littered
with what is no longer essential. Left behind;
rapture. Calculations shape bitter mouths,
reactions and policy becomes oracle.
In America, I regret to be informed
speculative fantasy and prosperity, a state,
are the gospel. Instead, I demand nothing exists.
Some claim emerging trends tell the story,
not knowing all data expires. The disconnect
of what has been with what is becoming unravels—
desperate inflations to make sugar from light.
“Reading criticism clogs conduits through which one gets new ideas: cultural cholesterol.” —Susan Sontag, 1964 journal entry
A handful of ranunculus, yellow, swell open.
Morning showers pass through. I make a wish
when the sun breaks free from its shroud.
A temporary proscenium of light forms. I see
motes and ghosts in gestured choreography.
A possessed experience of gods or a trip
of light god-shaped? In rapid succession,
I am mouth-to-mouth lucidity. I breach a crown
of paper tigers. Inside this current occupation,
I surrender in ecstatic objection to a language,
blue, that takes from lust and sells back violence.
“I dream too much, and I don’t write enough, and I’m trying to find God everywhere.”
—Anis Mojgani
Pussy willows bloom. Predictive seasons
filter a fuzz of sunlight; valedictory
transitions hold onto their return maps.
This prayer is a practice of communicating.
A form of knowledge or disciplinary violence?
Experts debate experts into echoes.
Meaningless noise fills sacred silence.
Our bodies desire ancient patterns,
a narrator’s reticence; sublime observations.
Tender twilight skies and creamy clouds slant
the light of morning’s dedicated return. Birdsong opens
with the begging calls of fledgling Pacific Wrens.
Waking, we scroll through images of liminal threat so often
it’s either propaganda or the truth. The state says
don’t worry, control is what will save us.
I wish I could explain it better—it’s not about them.
Offering reconciliation, two halves of a whole,
agreement, I give you the keys to open your own cage.
Dangerous, but careful. Wanting everything, I tamed my anger, smiling wide and innocently. —Dorothy Allison, from “Steal Away,” Trash: Stories
An old man carries two oranges,
the size of his fists,
in a red see-through plastic bag.
The oranges swing inside its corners.
I know I need to throw away
your wilted memorial flowers.
The moon is in its last quarter.
Yesterday slipped past me
like a stranger. These artificial
gaps of light both score inner life
and the sounds of meaning.
In war, mourning the loss of art, be it actual or anticipated, is not separate from mourning for the senseless disruption and destruction of human life. To live is to build, to repair, to illuminate, to leave traces in the fabric of time and space. Until an empire’s fist hits it all and smashes it to smithereens. In the face of its onslaught, human life is as fragile as the glass that bears humanity’s loving traces. —Yuliya Komska, A Stained Glass in Lviv (emphasis mine)
Officially, it is spring. Wars are an endless reality behind opaque glass screens. We are learning to feel non-solid things in the hype. The sound of analog reflected in a digital world hits different. Open your mouth away me. Climb out from underneath those emotional thumbs. There’s overtime to be made fabricating virtual systems. Memory tracers betray our line of sight. Some rooftops grow trees and some of us are proficient in the logistics of nostalgia. Do your fantasies prepare you or scare you? Tongues are cut to remove coherent confessions; supplemental augmentations will cost extra. Always cultivate a feeling of waiting for the next disruption. Faith’s orientation requires an artifice, requite deprivation. It’s really like that. Geography as corral, gathered. A rotunda of light. The curtains hung themselves outside the cracked window. This dramatic neglect obscures strategic purpose and tides are never mentioned in the Bible. Its promises another proxy of obscene revenge.
That the forests grow back with patience, not rage;
—Tony Hoagland, “Peaceful Transition”
Digitally speaking, I’ve trained myself to feel distracted.
I’m occupied. As numbed witness, in muted sound and fury,
today’s testimony dissolves into lyrical indirection.
Sharp, warm shadows of morning light strike a blooming spring.
From formalized fragilities of fear, from the perceived aggressor
in endless wars, or from slants of perimenopausal sales pitches
as rumor and pre-emptive threats, it’s all terrifying.
My daily diversions upsold. Propaganda is climax!
The psyops of weak kings is an advanced state of dissolution.
I imagine a moment that lasts so long everyone craves
its optimized chorus—it has been like this forever.
This is the loop, an exquisite incantation, that never deviates.
Teach me mortality, frighten me
into the present. Help me to find
the heft of these days. That the nights
will be full enough and my heart feral.
Jack Gilbert, “I Imagine the Gods”
For most of the morning,
a banner declaring I LOVE YOU
hung visible from the hotel window
until housekeeping removed it—
to keep the room unsentimental.
Blue sky so bright, a harbor
to distract my voyeurism. Later,
a business man made a phone call.
Tie, no suit. Shadows from behind the curtain
portend drama breaking beneath the horizon.
Cherry blossoms explode on scene.
The trees have begun their spring planning.
Extending their grace & hope forward,
it would be wise for us to start doing the same.
We are well over 900,000 dead & barely counting anymore.
It’s the last week of February.
Angled rooftops, a single pane of glass
holds my wandering perspective.
I’m probably not telling you the right story.
Sun-marked rooms were the sentient witness.
They made you pay for bread
For sky earth water sleep
And for the poverty
Of your lives.
—Paul Eluard, from “Victory for Guernica”, Selected Poems (bilingual ed. trans. Gilbert Bowen)
In the museum of modern art,
we wanted to see the details—
up close. Moving inches
past the official stand-here line,
we needed to know
how exactly did the artist
capture the depth of pure fear
in the subject’s hyperrealistic eyes.
We knew that fear, frequent and embodied,
from our own ensnared lives
as daughters born from violent men.
The movement of color showing,
with excruciating precision,
how endlessly hollow
the projective space is for deception
like transparent fingers, pointed and sharp,
foolishly optimistic that escalation
is a proven strategy for peace.
I’m begging you. Please don’t use this time wisely.
I want you to waste every swollen second
as your breath catches inside your abandoned throat.
I’m sure you’ve felt this ineffable pleasure before?
Being unwanted, unseen, silenced: useless reputations.
What these words leave inside you matter to me.
“Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed.
You will never be lovelier than you are now.
We will never be here again.”
— Homer, The Iliad
Approaching the beginning of an end
is a crossover event. Convergence is likely.
Getting past, moving beyond, over it.
This consistency drowns its own promises.
At frequency, invention pretends tenderness
and, if lucky, courage. A day’s combined darkness.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
“The Waste Land: III. The Fire Sermon”, T. S. Eliot, 1922
Denying greed’s influence on our myths
means we are buried in tragedy.
Obsession of scale has left us wading
in the sheer depravity of accurate detail.
All the morning newspapers land on the same headline.
Near future is the sound of a volcano exploding
five thousand miles away. Ripe tomatoes hang on the vine.
Children swing in the blue fading black darkness.
Like a good ride, it takes you somewhere.
Show proof that you’ve lived.
Do habits (routine) flourish inside sunk cost?
Maybe normalization is radicalism?
Have you tried being more passive?
Don’t betray your stray background.
Don’t deny changing constantly isn’t boring.
Don’t forget the true believers.
Secrecy waits for something to happen.
We all have unreliable narrator fears.
“When it’s your turn to live through a war, you’ll see, you don’t have time to feel anything.” —Colette Marin Catherine
It’s all random chaotic vigilance these days.
Day number: “unknown”. Secret selves will be revealed
in the times to come. They know desperation
influences choices. Which illusions may end up real?
II.
This “new normal” hangs like a loose shirt,
an odor, a swallow. We are promised a brighter future.
III.
Philosophers and preachers’ predictions,
unproven claims, betray their nostalgia.
Doubts to the contrary raise suspicions,
an emotion of imagination and subjectivity.
IIII.
Uncertain and curious how permanent this now
will be is one way to recognize the game.
Loss, grief, time are the same measurement,
which requires comparison in some form.
IIIII.
The rich, and their need for luxuries, buy ready made.
Some beauty is unimaginable, a pang. Sharp vanishing
click bait. Possession was an emanation: source.
It is necessary to permit error because information is not simply making the correct responses.
—Silvan Tomkins, from Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader; “What Are Affects?”
What wildness still remains to be explored
and why haven’t I moved in that direction?
The horizon to the south cracks light.
It rained fish in Texarkana, Texas—
during the last days of December
and no one is afraid.
Imagine being actively denied
of embodied experiences.
That sense of knowing.
A clause (particular and separate).
“Peach blossom has a beautiful sensual pink, far from vulgar, most rare and private.”
—D.H. Lawrence, from Sketches of Etruscan Places; “Flowery Tuscany”
What is positive about fragmentation?
||
The rest of the trees stand naked, unashamed, claiming a brighter future.
|||
When is it ok to stop remembering?
IIII
Crisis as a series, predictable, and, if you believe, a trick.
Should I accept the end is near? Or deny the possibility in the swaying shadows?
A list, after all, is an incantation.
—Lia Purpura, from the essay “Sugar Eggs: A Reverie”
I almost paid attention every day this just past year. There might not be an instant memory to pull from but I remember:
23 February, Tuesday, 2021 — we reached that unimaginable 500,000 deaths yesterday
By April, languishing was declared 2021’s dominant emotion. The experts were specific—we are languishing, a residual and continuously active tense.
But we are extraordinary now, more so than the before-times. Those of us who survived have an understanding, a swallow of temporary obedience, having squeezed through another dimension. In the same way Cliff Swallows, federally protected migratory songbirds, continue to build their nests on overvalued condos built on top of their well-known migration paths, we can claim we too are still living.
What’s next will be found in the ordinary, beyond the cleaved repetition.
Traveling at the speed of days per hour.
Is it okay to celebrate survival?
(All this death. It’s inevitable.)
Arranging for false openings—second endings.
What marrow should we salvage?
Oblivion becomes subjugation
when aesthetics have agendas.
Only at the very beginning
did the freeway quiet.
Now, faint signals of endearment muted
as claw marks or socialized hope.
(All this death. It’s inevitable.)
At this point in time, there might be enough
to carry the rest of us curiously forward
full from holding unanswerable questions
in all this cropped light.
If we do not forget, what is there to remember? —Mary Ruefle from “On Secrets”
Suspension is a type of prayer
in the same way hard luck is still luck
or how clicking clocks make meaning.
Ending another year with reconstituted rituals:
unwrap an orange, warm the house with lights,
leave no trace and lament the echoes.
Interiors become accomplices
in a cascading culture of closures.
Reminding me the moon makes no light
of its own, and I don’t know
is the most honest answer I have to give.
This response to an unknown call,
how deeply personal an endeavor.
That moment when the word incarnates, finds its skin: yes.
— Lia Purpura, from the essay “Sugar Eggs: A Reverie”
I’m gnawing off my own survival
and feeling full at the end of another year.
That any private emotion can still be felt
feels victorious. Sure, sensationalism
feels good, but only for so long.
Invisible patterns, an intentional result,
form this temporality, which may be also be
averse pacification. It’s not even midwinter
and yet we want—phantom abundance.
The way marginalia signals scarcity.
That kind of resourceful:
our aggregate bodies immersed in attention.
Pasteurized sameness. But wait—
there’s still anticipation—
a specific kind of waiting.
What clouds teach us.
God’s own calmness is a sign of God.
The surprisingly cold smell of potatoes or money.
Solid pieces of silence.
— Anne Carson, excerpt from “God’s Work”
The preacher leaned into salvation’s promise at the very end.
It was a funeral, no better time to coerce eternal life.
Another soul claimed and sweetly celebrated as taken.
The rest of us will just have to wait our turn.
How death gathers us together—memories of memories.
Grief a double-edged fascination, overactive,
a disorder of obsession. Not here, anymore.
But on this side of heaven we must find a way.
Not wanting to arrive too late for the inevitable call
to forgive what has been left behind, and its remainder—
the sky laid open in exonerated glory and surrendered
its filtered light to be just as definitive as belief in faith.
You can go home again…so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been. —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Winter constellations hang low in the blue-black night sky,
Gemini returns. Add homemade cherry strudel to the list
of memories unforgotten, folds and folds of circumstances
harmonizing with the grace of effort. Repeat the sounding joy.
Decades pass into desire for acclamation but are instead
filled with humble enthusiasm. Hard luck made this base.
Conceptually, all archived reality shapes heartfelt elegies.
Not even God knows all our translations whispered
into twisted defenses. Hope is the last to die.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
repeat the sounding joy is a verse from “Joy to the World”
hope is the last to die is a fragment from A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector, tr. Johnny Lorenz
Radiator hisses fill the space left between
a bright sun in an empty blue sky.
Expressive clouds reclaim their territory.
Rain and miso ramen for lunch.
Downtown buses trail each other like snails
as layers of buildings are held together by math.
The remaining oak leaves hang like ornaments.
This week, scientists proved birds sing in their sleep
but most of us already know how the body tries to protect.
Are you the audience? Have you been disciplined?
If not, pay attention to how the slow accommodation
of western light adds to the rapidly sharpening darkness.
Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.
—May Sarton, “Now I Become Myself”
I’ve traveled far enough to remain the narrator.
The beautiful distortion of reflection,
time arrested. Star gravity.
Symbiotic or parasite? It’s both
and there’s only one answer. Details,
I need to add details. Salt air stains.
I am not doing anything wrong,
which is where we disagree. What does it mean
when the middle ground is now the high ground?
Sometimes the only place to start is right here.
It’s the same kind of living that believes
challenges are opportunities. Experts predict
the rapture will happen in the early morning
during the hours of softening darkness.
Show a smile; brave a tooth.
Imagine this as it is—a holy exposure.
Stimulate me, please.
Saturn, it says, devours his children.
Yes, it’s true, I know it.
An ordinary man, though, a man like me
eats and is full.
Only God is never satisfied.
Ai, “The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981”, from Sin, 1986
How we all get busy in not believing
in ourselves despite mixing in mantras
that repeat with each breath—
I am enough
and you in absence,
no more next year.
A week’s worth of grind makes edges
so soft they can’t be felt, just yet—
like observing shadows’ length and depth
and distant clouds thick as mountain ranges.
Day skies still hold starlight.
That kind of worth fighting for.
They walk like cowboys, recently dismounted. He eats slowly out of a Trader Joe’s bag, the one that has the laughing donkey on it. We wander to find new ways of understanding old ideas. Innocent babies continue to be born into privilege. Ordinary trauma is a slow build—swinging from want to need, and back to want to be taken. The multitudes of being consumed becomes a careful process of discernment like knowing the addictive taste of dispossession. Although sometimes, with frequency, the loop closes on you. Don’t worry. There is space here, stored as evergreen desires, located between patterns of waves formed from swallowing knowledge by association. It’s been recommended we might feel at the edges for faint annotations of alchemic personality. In the same way, men have learned to cross their legs at their ankles and global fantasies of catastrophe make us proficient in technology. Ritual is perfected suspense. It has already taken place. Events such as these are mere dreams; a tiger, white and mangy, tries to eat my hands from taking up too much space. A way to show how time is wasteless.
Praise in the sense that it is an embracing of emerging experience. —William Stafford
A cloudless sky, mostly blue,
held remnants of peach
at its opening edges.
This longing permeates, resisting
a horizon—a working class assumption
of completeness.
Our culture is from men who recorded tides
before gravity from the moon was proved
by future men.
And we must keep living
in that absence.
The past beats inside me like a second heart. —John Banville, The Sea
From football to cult rallies on glacial plains,
America excels at strategies of deterrence.
There is generational learning behind knowing
the difference between submission and giving.
Release is forbidden.
Americans’ reflective accolades penetrate the best
as fervent belief converts to trembling devotion.
The point being none of this is supposed to make sense.
As true as death, reality always fades.
blush bottomed
persimmons
coming
crescent moon
new goal
fail better
your logic
my misunderstanding
this claiming
its own
make believe
This feels influenced…
in the same way as
believing in tomorrow
is a predictive narrative.
Futures become quid pro quo
throbbing, mid-life lust.
Fog pushes inland, offshore swells.
Well-earned suspicions form furious
visceral optimized expectations,
soaked in publicly circulating emotions
from day-trading warlocks and wardens.
Waste is fantasy. Plastic generations
replace curiosity with optimism, a commodity.
Hoarding ironically creates emptiness.
Ask any aspiring millionaire.
Habitual behavior now discounted reward.
one hundred hours spent
+ one hundred hours taken
= affectual transactions
a certain level of suffering
is required to earn a dollar
I put enough here to fill that hole
“These are my Confessions and if I say nothing in them it’s because I have nothing to say.” —Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
is to know where the bones are buried.
Synonym: institutional allegiance.
Why is risk so often in your mouth?
Your answer, “That’s where the desire swells.”
It’s true the end of a river is also a mouth.
Waves form unnoticed. We tell each other stories—
unanswered questions worth more conceptually.
Wanting words that hold their form
both as concrete nouns and confluent verbs.
No subject is stable you often tell me.
Following the principle of least astonishment
is probably how we got here.
The living room pictures hang crooked
from the last noticeable earthquake.
Lesson: survival is a false dichotomy.
“What use having a great depth of field, if there is not an adequate depth of feeling?”
—W. Eugene Smith
The park’s grass is ankle deep,
again. Promises of everlasting life
continue to hold their sway.
It’s 2021, and I just learned
gold seeks gold.
Bounty hunters still scheming.
When will the rich suffer equally?
Is that even the right question?
Forests burn to their crowns
while babies drown in basement apartments.
What frequency will you hear
the trees screaming? Repeat yourself.
The neighborhood birds continue to sing
their morning songs. We must still be ok,
for now? Surrender—then acceptance—or
is it the other away around?
Certainty needs urgency
to keep it potent.
Embody your devotion.
Watch the ocean replicate.
All those Sunday sermons
soaked deep within.
Knowing, that convinced feeling.
Accuracy a worthy reliquary.
Be an animal, again.
personal screen shot from the film “Utuqaq” by Iva Radivojević. Text reads: “There is a time/space interval between thought and fear.”≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡
“To imagine that turmoil is in the past and somehow we are now in a more stable time seems to be a psychological need.” —John McPhee, Assembling California
≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡
In Audre Lorde’s 1984 Creative Writing Workshop in Berlin, she had two requirements:
≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡
In claiming this emotional space every week, anchors of memory and experience structure a highly unstable body of work. I arrive inhabiting this swath of living, or as Lauren Berlant said in her essay Cruel Optimism, “deflating the symbolic into the somatic”.
After all, islands are the tops of mountains. Perception as slant, signaling both perspective and insight. That sweet trigger of embodied habit. Writing from an ascetic life.
What earned reward lays in wait? Is it focus as illumination? Maybe the reward is endurance inside an anxious limbic system. Simply, a need gets satisfied. A temperance of honesty that there is no final outcome to this effort. That this predictive text, and its energy, may be read as art. That this is worthless.
≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡
“If I resisted, I was lost. If I gave in, I was saved.” —Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims
Everything is just enough to be the same—
delusional observation—everything except
for the unwelcome return of an orangered sun.
The sky is no longer a place to look up to.
Wednesday news: 34 wildfires
have started in the last 24 hours.
Have started is an example
of present perfect tense.
As in, trees of all types and ages
have started screaming.
So many remain illiterate
about events they claim
have never happened—to them.
Blind to the sound of yellow. Deaf
to exploding blues and facile ghosts.
Forgive me, you wanted this memory to be precise.
Cache Culture 