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December 4, 2023
HOW CAN PEOPLE SAY a person is washed up when just getting to shore is a victory? 
 
November 29, 2023
The greens—myriad, viridescent: 
every one of them alive.
November 22, 2023
HE WENT DOWN THE STREET, his old street, on a whim, and then the whim birthed another and he turned [...]
November 15, 2023
    Curious spirits, Eleanor says. I cannot discern that these spirits around you have a personal connection to you, by which I mean, I cannot discern the emotions common to relations and loved ones, like love or concern. These are spirits who you do not know. I don't know why they are gathered around you. Maybe they are just passing through and something about you has detained them for the hour, for the day.
November 8, 2023
UP AT THE PASS   On either side drops a waste of plain scrub   And [...]
November 1, 2023
I’ll relate to you the order of occasions:       1.  I explain the [...]
October 25, 2023
Tiergarten   1.   One evening I had to admit to myself that I had long since [...]
October 18, 2023
The world makes little sense, which is to say that it constantly exceeds understanding.
October 11, 2023
The grass has that sandpapered look
and by it you know it is no longer summer.
October 4, 2023
who put these angles in us
yes angles
we attend to their impossibilities that they become

if not possible, light-legible, which bear load
September 27, 2023
Precisely a week ago, a stop sign at the intersection of Jefferson and Polk was painted green.

The crime was not a case of simple vandalism. Rather, it was part of an experiment by the person who called it in, a local amateur psychologist who is exploring the nature of incongruity.
September 20, 2023
The Rachel stands tuned  
            to multiplicities, 
aslant in a territory of longing,
            where she becomes foreign.

            What has she found?
She listens, acknowledges another sound,
            diffuse, multiple,  
pulsing thought, oscillations, whisperings,
            never only one.
September 13, 2023
I had yet to discover the source of that star, it came and it passed but from where it sprang and then fell to fading remained a mystery. In cycling its light lent its powers to coloring my tablecloth a lighter shade, relieving pigment from its duty to darken, except for those spots where I placed my bottles and cups, shielding only parts of the piece from fading, threads left closer to their original hues hewed to others abandoned as wraiths to their fates, a darker ring the mark of those who stayed behind.
September 6, 2023
Where the trees blackened, I saw,

Quickly, three deer lean into goldenness.

It seems, although wildfires rage

Out of control, this world remembers

Some portion of its first purposes:

Superfluous beauty
August 9, 2023
In Memoriam (1932–2023)
Keith Waldrop will long be remembered for his kindness as a man, for his generosity of spirit, for the nuanced beauty and disarming simplicity/complexity of his poetry and translations, for his tireless work with Rosmarie Waldrop at their influential Burning Deck Press, and for his inspiring and magical (for Keith was purest magic) presence in the lives of his friends, fellow writers, students, anybody who was lucky enough to know him.
July 26, 2023
The postmortem simulations are designed to prep the soul in the art of travel. The goal here is to navigate certain archetypal features that serve as doorways between worlds. Rivers, tunnels, bridges, stairs, tubes, pits, warrens, graves, and environments that resemble sewers all recur in multiple iterations.
        
... “The Egyptians were aware of how disorienting the underworld is,” Quarrington says. “According to some of their fables, the deities created it like this to eliminate souls who are not properly initiated. It’s not enough to survive into the realm beyond death. We want to bring our consciousness with us.”
July 19, 2023
Early mint. Intimate. Lace of now
leaves now in spirit. As infinite
as if. In spirit within. Is now.

New. Is new glorious. Daylight
embracing that shade of late

morning. Your every last minor design
for which. Only

let therefore eternal loss offer.
Ecstatic decline.
July 12, 2023
The plan was simple: to get from here to there.

But there were obstacles. The first was that he had two children, two daughters, six- and nine-year-olds, to get into the car—which he supposed wasn’t so much an obstacle as the plan he’d been planning for nine years and nine months. There were other obstacles like traffic, and specific needs for specific caffeine delivery systems, and a nine-tenths empty tank of gas he’d intended to fill. And yet none of those obstacles were the obstacle.

The obstacle was that he was 44 years old and a little before midnight he’d eaten way too big a gummy, and now he couldn’t feel his toes or tongue.
July 5, 2023
A Collage from the Archive of Edward Gorey, Including Unpublished Texts and Images
 
Edward Gorey to Consuelo Joerns:
 
Our behaviour to one another is most of the time venemous and peculiar, and, infrequently, overly kind and considerate but still peculiar.


From “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense” by Stephen Schiff, The New Yorker, 1992:
 
“I thought I was in love a couple of times, but I rather think it was only infatuation. It bothered me briefly, but I always got over it…. I realized I was accident-prone in that direction anyway, so the hell with it.”
June 28, 2023
Sometimes there’s a secret room—
my daughter is one, I think. 

She is infinitely regressive. 
Every night she says I love 

you even more until 
I stop saying it back. 

The idea that we 
are not our own 

is as old as words 
allow us to think it.