End of the World in the Big Lots Parking Lot

I had a dream the other night where Dua Lipa was giving a concert in the parking lot of a big box store that was on fire. She performed next to large shipping containers while we all sat on ratty lawn chairs. They were green and white plaid.

There's something to be said about not giving into despair even in the face of certain doom. Dance in the parking lot. Be the band on the Titanic, play until the water takes you.

As I turn the dream, and the metaphor of the band, over in my head, I realize that the metaphors for perseverance that I know seem to no longer work. In the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century we are so accustomed to playing until we can physically no longer go on that the very idea of not doing it is strange to consider. There are so many swords hanging over us that the sky is all sharp points.

The world is ending and we will still have our fun. And the waters will rise around us and we will continue until we can't and that is just true. We've been playing and the water has been rising. For decades. So what does one do with a broken metaphor when the water is still coming?

A broken platitude or metaphor becomes a zombie saying. Something that we all understand but is so divorced from itself that silence would be better. I don't believe that meaning can be reattached once it's lost. Broken things can only be assembled in a simulacrum of the original. And the new meaning will always be there as well. Maybe we're way passed sayings being helpful anyway.

In the dream, we danced and had fun while the building burned. On the Titanic the band really did keep playing. We even think we know what song was the last played.

I leap to thinking about individual vs collective responsibility. How we put up blinders to both protect ourselves and to turn off our responsibility. I lived in New York long enough that I tend to walk by people with their hands out on the street. This isn't a ding against cities, it's an acknowledgement that to live in the US today, you have to find ways to exist. Sometimes existing means ignoring those who are struggling more than you because if you stop to try and help all of them, you will go under yourself.

If there were to be an idealized takeaway from the COVID-19 pandemic, it would be that we find a more concrete version of collective responsibility. A better version. One where we can openly discuss the lines between personal, individual responsibility, and the greater collective one.

This is obviously not happening.

One look at the news will point out that many, possibly most, have instead found a more insidious shade of righteous selfishness in the aftermath. A truly lost opportunity if there ever was one in modern history.

It's inviting to make a claim like "we owe each other more than this", but it's a bit of a false narrative. The collective good should outweigh the personal unless it will cause harm. Ultimately we owe ourselves to be better. But seeing that is difficult. Forest for the trees - which is a metaphor that still works. Though a metaphor where the original version was "he who sees no wood for trees" which has a totally different connotation to the modern version.

The individual isn't really capable of change at the level needed anyway. Unless you are incredibly wealthy, most individuals are only capable of small changes. The big stuff, the putting out the fire stuff, takes a group working as one. And the putting out the big fires, takes governments, the rich, and corporations. If the world around us just pops back to pre-pandemic ways, it's hard to push against that when you need an ever increasing in cost roof over your head. It's a question of scale. Where is the line between what I can do and what I cannot?

It's a gray area that is dependent on the person doing the work and the work needing to be done. And again, the good being done amplifies the more people working towards it.

An example of sorts: It has been drilled into the public that it is up to us to fix climate change. Drive less, recycle more, get a bike, use less plastic, eat a plant-based died, cut down on beef, etc etc etc. Every major drive to course correct on climate change that I've witnessed in my lifetime has focused on the personal level. And personal, small scale, change does help, just not at a scale that impacts the massive undertaking in front of us. We are way passed volunteering to clean up a roadside as a means to impact the climate.

When you learn that BP invented the concept of the personal carbon footprint and sold it to the world as a means to distract from their corporate culpability it's hard to take any of the things that individuals do to combat climate change seriously. Corporations have spent billions convincing us that we are to shoulder the weight of many aspects of modern life that are simply out of our hands.

The attitude that only we can change things, that we must because governments and corporations will not has bled throughout culture. It is a broken social contract. You can see the results in the US in the disintegration of public trust for institutions. The obvious, dangerous, endpoints that spiral out of this inward focus can be seen in events minor to international. Not wearing a mask to dumping trash on the side of the road to storming a capitol building.

The tirelessness of continuing to carry on in the face of all of this is supposedly virtuous. An attempt to stem some kind of tide. But in 2022 it feels like this concept has been boiled down into a strange parody of itself. Working 10-hour days 6 days a week with no time off is virtue. Today, going down with the ship means holding onto the computer keyboard so you can get that report out before the waves get you.

I'm not advocating for giving up. But the energy needs to be refocused onto those who can actually effect change at scale. The billionaires, the governments, the corporations.

Obviously there is a movement to correct some this going on - at least in the workplace. Unions are once again rising in the US, and wages seem to be going up in a real way for the first time in decades. People are talking about work life balance in ways that aren't about optimizing their time off. Real discussions are happening. But it is hard not to be cynical about what will occur in the next 18 months as the US and the world moves further out of pandemic mode. Toxic patterns that have been hard-wired are hard to break and we've been here before.

Underestimating the power of the wealthy and corporations to reaffirm their dominance even in the face of immense tragedy is a losing game. Every single one of the band members on the Titanic died that night. Only 3 of the 8 bodies were found. And the company that did the booking for the White Star Line sent a bill for the lost uniforms to the grieving families. Public outrage led to those bills being voided, but they should never have been sent in the first place.

Corporations should not be considered people under the law. Their money should be out of politics. They should have limits on the demands to their employees. Billionaires should not exist full stop. Governments should not be afraid of saying these things, or of acting on these issues. And all the above should be the ones being asked to make the largest sacrifices to protect the world around us.

I'm all for shaming the devil. So let's fucking dance. Let's focus on the small things we can do. Let's pick up a bucket and toss some water on the fire in front of us. But let's also think about how and when the fire started and who is responsible for putting it out completely.

RELATED READING:

• Sweetest Pie // Megan Thee Stallion & Dua Lipa
• Musicians of the Titanic
• The Damaging Myth of Individual Culpability // Alison Heslin
• The Dangerous Myth of the Individual Carbon Footprint // Tabitha Whiting

Poem : Begrudgery

I remember laying near the open window in my bed in Brooklyn. The rain falling on the sill and onto my face. It was heaven.

This poem isn't necessarily about that. It's about now. But it's also about then.

And about relenting.

---

Begrudgery

Ok

fine

          Let the rain

in the window                 let

          it fall on our faces

It’s night and corona is on fire
across the world

                              So

                              what

          is the point

                                        of

allowing ourselves to dream

          We could

manage a world into being
with our sheets

                              our


          red
                    cheeks

Poem : Sumi-e

This isn't a poem about Japanese ink.

Due to COVID-19 I've been working from home since March 13th. In that month I have not been able to really get in to writing.

It feels stilted. Tiring. Less important to me on a personal level.

On Friday, my company had to lay off 50% of their employees. About 250 people. I was "lucky" enough to keep my job. And I am grateful.

I am grateful.

This was written on Saturday the 11th. It is not about COVID or layoffs or even really about not being in to writing at the moment.

It is about feeling like I am a dry brush waiting.

---

Sumi-e

It dips itself — the handle — it — has something — filament a golden hair — within that it must — express — as grapes underfoot — it dips itself — the well of creativity — see it knows — something we do not — has that inside its head — it is a blankness waiting — it dips itself — like honey or a pool of warm water — the image began eons ago — creativity is an ink waiting for the dryness of a horsehair — to have a thought of its past life — have wells of past selves to unmoor — a cliff face waits to fall into the sea all of its life —

Poem : Cockshut

Civil Twilight in Manhattan

Twilight is my favorite time of the day.

It is so cleanly between two things. So present in its liminal nature. It feels like water starting to tide. This is probably why it has a history of being "magical" or "important".

In Hinduism it is advised not to eat in this time period as the Asuras are most active at this time in their battle with the Devas. To gain power from mutability seems incredibly useful.

There are three kinds of twilight: Civil, Nautical, and Astronomical. Civil twilight is the period after sunset when things are still fully distinguishable by the naked eye, it is also called the blue hour. Nautical twilight is the period after Civil twilight when sailors can still distinguish a horizon to take measurements for position at sea. Astronomical twilight is the last phase, it is when astronomical readings can begin. When the faintest stars begin to show through the skyglow.

Cockshut is a very old English word for twilight. It literally means - the time chickens go to sleep, when they shut up.

---

Cockshut

Everything is the color of things going to sleep

and that one vein in your arm that pulses under the pillow.


In the whitespace between rooms              a filament
                                                     a gap

passes unnoticed — one single silk thread of breath.


Opposite of a rooster call — a moisture

                             sliding down a single finger of grass.


The walls grow pine needles — cooling              cooling
                                                             cooling

gently —              now —              not              so gently.

Poem : Colour-de-Roy

Bolinus brandarus

Purple has a history of being a royal color.

This is mainly to do with how hard it is to make purple dyes.

It's hard to make purple dye because the first real source for the color was snail mucus.

Mythology tells us that Heracles was walking on the beach when his dog found one of these snails and began to chew on it. The dog's mouth filled with the purple saliva. This color became what is today called Tyrian purple.

The snails were bolinus brandarus. The spiny dye-murex. The snail has a mucus that it uses to paralyze its prey. It is also a defense mechanism. To get the stuff for dye you either crush the snail or you milk it. You milk a snail by poking at it until it secretes the mucus.

Then you make robes for your king or queen.

--

Colour-de-roy

The dog you made us get runs off down the beach
despite being called over over over he refuses to come back

We got him because of his sad face
because of the two small scars across the front of his nose

Little square bites of gray in the blonde

Tyrian purple

I say you made us get because you made us go
to the shelter to the hill the shelter sits on

I like the dog fine I wish he’d come when you called him

The beach has tuned itself into a throb of seaweed
after a storm the sand is raw and untouched

Over the small hill the dog is tearing at the earth
shaking itself in a tug of war

He has eaten a spiked shell has lodged it in his mouth

A hundred arrow-sharp spines piercing its mouth
now stained purple the eyes filled with purple saliva flooding purple

All around him horseshoe crabs line themselves

Their heads inland and scorpion tails out to sea
each and every one of them dead

They wanted something somehow in their blind eyes they knew
it was just over this or that scrub of bleaching grass

They died crawling from one world into another

Poem : House-lew

A crow eating a shark.

"Safe as houses" is my favorite phrase.

It is Victorian English. It basically means that your investment or business venture or the thing you are about to do is a solid bet. Because what could be more sound than buying property?

Houses are supposed to be "safe". Many of us across the world are social distancing these days due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

For many, houses -- home -- that place, is not "safe". And even if it is. Houses feel less and less secure.

COVID is an acronym: COrona VIrus DIsease. Corona in Latin means garland, wreath, laurel. It is for the shape of the virus -- a circle covered in gem-like crown-like embellishments. It is a thing to be placed on your head. An honor. So safe sounding.

In ancient Greece laurels were presented to athletes, gods, or the dead.

COVID is sideways to corvid. Which are ravens, crows, jays, magpies. The most intelligent of birds. Mystic creatures who represent war, death, divination, news tellers. The Haida of western Canada and Southern Alaska believe the raven created the earth, this home.

The Haida wear masks showing animals transforming into other things. Meaning becoming another meaning.

So if this house has ceased being safe. We must evolve to find a new one.

The poem below is about death. It's on my mind.

---

House-lew

In the burntout crumbles of bunker — sounds of fluting — veil cathedral hand to eyes —

If you peek — you will see in glory in fire amen — the thing we all hide
from — locked doors and all that — a ghost in the pantry of the stomach —

It rumbles about with unrolled gem wings — finds north but turns west because
it wants to be the setting sun — we — safe as houses — we — are fine — yes —

In the moment when the heart collapses
perception becomes a slip
falling to the ground
in a bedroom somewhere in Kansas

The ribs release their long-caught bird
cold hungry everything safe then unsafe

It’s a rattle — curling of the body as wood sheets over flame —

In the aftermath — sound a lily makes when opening in the morning — the tube
a missile leaves behind — when going off — to finish what was started —

Poem : Train Scent

A train-scent is the scent left behind when you drag something on the ground to train a dog to follow the scent trail.

This is a poem about rough sex and apps and cruising in a bodega late at night.

Not that I know anything about that.

---

Train Scent

*
Those gray sweatpants — pink crop top sweatshirt
perfect rubber ball — your ass
is an orange to peel

You drop small gifts on the internet — a leaking
plastic bag on a walk from the bodega to your apartment
*
You send me a video you took with your phone underwater
the rippling — the hands outreached

Choking me — when you remember my name
I choke — swarm of dark olive green — pouring
bile into the floorboards
*
At the edge of the lake — after running for miles
over the endless curtain wall of dry leaves — yellow
a burning zoetrope you move across

There you become a man in sweats on a jog
you turn into the 1980s
*
There — you know the spot to hit
after being followed from store to door

A spot to drop clothes — pretenses — care
place to become roiling water in a pot on the stove
steam resting the itch in the back of the throat
*
On the tongue — scent of black pepper and body
sour within — wrapping — a shell of pinkness
sniffing around a penthouse for ass

You drop small gifts — across my clavicle
there an obvious scent an obvious color

Poem : Historicist

Photo of Sif taken by Julia Smith Wellner

Historicist has two meanings.

In one -- theology says that it is about how the prophecies of religious texts apply to our current times. Symbols are attached to events and people. They become sigils of proof.

In the other -- it is about how specific times in history are "important". They signify something. They mean.

Both are saying the same thing. That specific things hold more weight than others.

Out in the Antarctic a research vessel "found" a new island as the ice sheets melt away. They named this island for the Norse goddess Sif. Sif represents the earth. She is mother of all, wife to Thor. She is symbolically the root of everything. Her hair is wheat.

One could argue that an old god arriving at this moment, in this way, is a sign. A sigil. A warning.

One could call it bullshit.

Either way, Sif is there.

---

Historicist

A new island in the Antarctic — Sif — mother — holder of things like wheat

But of course — it is not new — it has been there forever — waiting
      glacier’s patience — patience that is violent

That she has come now — according to the prophecy of various religions —
      sleeping giants awake at the sound of the warning claxon — the glaciers — which
            until now — chose to be still — now bleed with speed — with iron

Slide into the water — clear with the lack of things — become
      the waiting ragnarok beneath a receding history

Violent because it is so slow you cannot see it — but of course it can be measured
      in the acts of kindness — the small gifts of vapor that
            become the fields of wheat tomorrow

Your belly Sif — let it become red in the sun — stare until you blind
      until you un-hunger —
            full with whatever world is next

Poem : Resiliating

Risiliating basically means when something resumes its shape after being deformed. Think of pressing your hand into foam. Or those stress balls.

A week ago my grandfather died. He was 90. His funeral was yesterday.

I hate funerals. They are unnatural. You sit on little chairs or pews, too close to each other, you say a few things about the dead person. You shake a lot of hands and hung a lot of people who barely know. You move on.

The funeral home in my parent's home town has been run by the same family for 125 years. They advertise with a sign that says they are a "Victorian crematory". They have a sign with a little horse drawn hearse on it.

The inside of the funeral home is decorated in shades of emerald and amethyst. Floral wallpaper. It smells of perfume. It is an old house, the rooms are oddly shaped. There are fireplaces.

The flowers around the urn, which was actually a box, were too shiny. Like they had been polished. Peace lilies have unnaturally shiny leaves already and the one by the urn glossed like the uncanny valley.

Funerals are definitely the uncanny valley.

---

Resiliating

At the funeral

lilies were glossy reflection

Light diffusing
around the edges
of the eye of a swan

They were the shape that lilies always form

Pristine loon necks
rising lowering
from a fountain of leaves

A school of boats
lolling on a calm water

—

Rooms breathe

Burn themselves
images on a television
left on too long

—

The old television
in the old room
filled with green

Is where the old man died

Where he breathed long
like a room
his ribcage became solid
then permanent

His heart leaving a imprint
a notch in space

We all burn an echo

—

Press hand to
mushroom soft mat of soil

Leave an imprint

Funerary green
on the retina
the rod and cone of it
a bobbing sound
over a mid-morning lake

Poem : Bloody Caesar

Bloody Caesar (The Theatre of Pompey)

Side streets mirror the edge of the theatre’s stage

Fragments of the old building jut out of basement walls

have become columns in buildings
old but half as old

On the spot where Caesar was killed
a cat sunbathes

Poem : How to Make Gribiche

Picture from Bon Appétit

In one of my many jobs I was briefly a food reporter for a local weekly. It was one of my favorite side hustles I've ever had and it was over really fast. I would sometimes write about making a recipe I'd never tried just to describe the process of making something. I'd then modify the recipe a bit and take some process photos. It was the best part of the job.

I often think about making a cookbook. I don't actually cook all that much, but it seems like a process that I want to engage with. The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook is one of my favorite books ever, so this shouldn't be a surprise.

I used the Bon Appétit recipe for Gribiche written by Ted Cavanaugh for this poem.

---

How to Make Gribiche

Is there space? :
: on the counter
: move the mail the bills the ever present keys to the various things

: in your heart

: in the crawlspace behind it

: not dark there that is a wrong impression it is luminescent a cathedral of ribs and fascia

: think about the kinds of calories in eggs then ignore

Tools :

: knife

: a gift from an ex's mother when moving in together a housewarming it is sharp

: it has tasted blood once when slicing a leek it took a finger to the bone

: pot bowl water large wooden spoon

Ingredients :

: whole grain mustard with seeds that pop on the tongue olive oil slightly unfiltered the color of ale white wine vinegar sitting deeply in acid sweetness

: eggs speckled white brown shining in their softness cradled in the palm of the hand until slightly just laid warm

: hard boil then chop into quarters or some other desired percentage this is about aesthetics about what goes in a bite

: tarragon parsley salt black pepper

: fresh old from a garden or found in a store safe in tins that don’t feel expensive or frightening in their closeness to nature

: whichever

: cornichons capers could be there it depends on the type of person the type of cupboard the type of refrigerator

: unlockable thing that refrigerator a doorway like an eye a brain outside the body

Method :

: mix pour over vegetables meat fish

: who just has capers lying around?

: the French

Poem : Home Along (Under the Greenwood Tree)

Under the Greenwood Tree (1929)

Since January 1st I've been secretly doing a poem-a-day again.

I figured it was a good way to mark 2020. The year I turn 39. The start of my 40th year. The times. The celebration and elegy to the 20 years of my work vanished by computer.

Same rules as always. OED word of the day. Write it that day. See what happens.

This is technically #46 of a new series. But if attached to the old Poem-A-Day and Poem-A-Day 2.0 projects it is poem #1411 overall in my OED word-a-day poems. I'm going with the legacy numbering because I see this as the third part of a thing I started 13 years ago. I won't promise a poem every day on here. But some a week for sure.

Today's word is "home-along". It means to be pointed or oriented homeward. It's first use was in a lesser Thomas Hardy novel called "Under the Greenwood Tree". It involves a woman who promises herself to two men (one is a priest!). She has to choose which to marry. Despite a happy tone, the book ends with a strange lingering question as to the main character's true motivations and feelings on her own choices. The novel was made into a movie in 1929, and again 2005.

---

Home Along (Under the Greenwood Tree)

The broken buildup of vapor over grass presses against the column of a church where stories have unspooled for centuries —

Pile of fibre unbleached wool roving handled enough to remove the shit of sheep and fields —

These things combine into a diagram of a wedding day favors falling from the sky as rain as tin clippings from the edge of soda cans left on the field after a tailgate —

In the photos — 

even if there are no photos but let’s pretend there are photos —

in the photos the face of the bride happens to catch fully the camera lens to negotiate time with it as she dances wildly with her new husband —

They are spinning under the lights of the tent in the center of the town green under the largest oak tree in history —

His face is away from the camera but the suit is pressed clean is crisp his hair is tousled in the dance hands about her waist her skirt pulled up in one hand —

The crowd seems massive the depth of focus insane the music is here with us —

Her eyes are staring out of the frame lines form in the molecules siphoning interpretation balancing act the stare becomes the moment it is focused on us on the who that is behind the camera —

And a question arises there like smoke before the fire takes hold.

Sellers: A Warning / Triggered

A Warning
Author: Anonymous
Publisher: Twelve Books
272p

Triggered
Author: Donald Trump Jr.
Publisher: Center Street
304p

1. Two Books

These two books sit at #1 and #2 as we start the last month of 2019 and that feels exactly right.

We have an innate desire to know what goes on behind closed doors. Especially the closed doors of the "important" and "famous". Look at the popularity of celebrity Instagrams. Of Jennifer Garner's pretend Facebook cooking show.

We want to not only see what these people are doing, we want to know the details of how.

This goes double when it comes to how our country is being run.

Even if you are "not political" you probably find the possibility of knowing more about the behind-the-scenes interesting. I don't know how else to explain the success of entertainment like Jack Ryan or 24. I don't know how else to explain the bumper stickers.

I don't know how else to explain these two books.

America is supposedly divided. Very divided. I don't buy it. I think that media is divided. Manipulative. Is actually currently creating multiple realities. We can debate the reality of "truth" but there are things that are real and things that are unreal.

One of these books is about a more real real than the other.

Sidenote: How the fuck are you not political because all things are politics and your very existence depends on the politics of where and who you are.


2. Public v. Private

That there is even a discussion about whether the person who sits in America's White House at the moment is actually fit for the job is perhaps a shocking thing. That this person won an election at all is perhaps shocking.

If you haven't been paying attention to the growing divide in media representation in America over the last 30 years, you would naturally be shocked. Naturally.

That one of these books sits at #2 mainly because political money was used to bulk purchase it feels even more 2019.

That in private Republicans actually seem to have morals that they refuse to express in public...is actually the more shocking thing to me. See, I assume that all of this is a con to gain power money power clout legacy money etc. But I also assume that to be that bald in your ambitions, you would have to be a pretty terrible person.

But a person still.

There are divides. And then there are fences walls purpose built. These two books represent the latter.


Sellers is my attempt to examine what books are topping the best-seller list and why. To talk about and understand the trends in popular writing.

The Everything

Months ago a computer was on its last legs. And its hard drive held Everything. And I moved that Everything on to the old external drive that I've used since 2007. A new drive was bought. The plan was made to transfer the Everything from the old drive to the new drive. To have it doubled.

Double the Everything.

Friday a confirmation came. That drive. With the Everything. It no longer held anything. Something about partitions.

Partition.

From the Latin.

Noun or verb.

To divide, subdivide, separate, split.

To screen, hide, a barrier, to wall off.

In computing a partition is essentially creating a room within the drive where something can exist.

The Everything was all of the writing that I has done since I was 18, since 1999, since what feels like forever. 20 years is a long time.

My 20th high school reunion was scheduled for this September. I normally do not care about these kinds of things, reunions. I only lived in central Pennsylvania for the 4 years of high school. I didn't have lifelong ties to the place, the people. I barely remember most of those 4 years. I do not really talk to anyone from that time in any real way.

This isn't because I don't like the people. Or the place.

It just isn't the room where my memories live.

I decided that I would go to the reunion.

I figured that if I were to ever care about what happened to the people there, now would be that time. Before we all got old. Before we started to die and still somewhat looked like ourselves.

While I had a job I was proud to talk about. Had recent published books to talk about.

It was cancelled. Because no one wanted to come. It says something about modern life. The high school reunion was/is/? an important part of American culture. Or at least it seemed that way. The events seem to be dying off. Blame social media. People can connect, keep contact with, the people they want to. Why get together when your current job is listen on your profile?

It makes sense.

The death of the drive. And the sudden vanishing of the Everything is a mixed emotion. Who was the 18 year old that really only still existed in some dust files on a drive that I barely used?

We all partition ourselves daily. The way we interact, the way we dress, the things we engage with. And over time. We become a series of hallways connecting rooms where parts of ourselves are kept.

Today I opened my Facebook. Thought about deleting it for good for the 100th time since I first signed up for it over a decade ago. I logged in to my Livejournal. I reread those things. I began to scour email and Submittable to find files I could salvage.

There are shadows of things everywhere. I still have the handwritten roughs of everything that I actually hand wrote. On various websites, this one included, are versions of myself. Versions of Everything. I spoke to my mother about a work trip. About my 90-year-old grandfather. About how the rooms we build are never really that stable.

In the most recent episode of Prodigal Son -- another TV murder/cop show, but with Lou Diamond Phillips -- the main character, son of a serial killer haunted by his potential knowledge/involvement in the crimes, tears a wall open to answer a long forgotten phone.

The voice on the other end says it's been a long time. Our protagonist doesn't remember the voice, phone, room even.

As I downloaded the fragments of things and did laundry, I also read Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier -- another kind of Everything being lost but felt.

I have a numbness about the loss of Everything. I do not know how to feel that 20 years of final edits, drafts, manuscripts, school papers, my thesis, letters, photos, music, literal history -- is now a shadow in my brain.

Early in Rebecca, du Maurier's unnamed protagonist, the second Mrs. M. de Winter, sits at a writing desk in her new home and explores the various surfaces and drawers. She finds things in the unmistakable "scrawling pointed hand" of her predecessor. 

We process things oddly. That Everything, was it even mine? I opened a few of the downloaded files from Submittable. Thankfully, that site saves your files you've uploaded. Did I even write these?

Things always end with a fire in these types of novels. The history, the Everything, must burn off like the alcohol in cooking, leaving only whatever flavor you were searching for.

What does it look like to imagine yourself back into 20 years. To think about the fragments that can be found there and reconstruct the sound of the rain against those windows. Some Pompeii made out of the sludge of a brain at 38.9 years.

I imagine the Everything, now an ash of code, 1s and 0s in a gray pile. A locked in body somewhere beneath the surface just waiting to be found. Language is dumb in the face of technology.

A room somewhere attempts to assemble itself. The carpet is threading itself from fibers made out of thin air and the shed scales of a butterfly. The walls will attempt themselves out of paper or reeds or the breath of trees. In the house that forms, will live the Everything. And it will stay there, as the building, the room, the carpet itself, forgot to even imagine the idea of a door that could open into it all.

On the Eve of No Longer Being a Teacher

Lately I've been thinking a lot about self.

This was my last year teaching. For the better part of 4 1/2 years this defined me in multiple ways. I was a teacher, but also an adjunct. I was paid little better than minimum wage. Making less than $2000 a month. I had other jobs. In the years I taught I also packaged items for online sale, made coffee, worked at a pizza place, wrote food reviews, worked at Publisher's Weekly on book reviews, and freelance edited. I still made less than $40k a year.

As a result my identity was one of not having. More importantly, of over-working only to not have.

I grew up ok. Not poor. My father was in the US Air Force. The buffer of not paying rent hides a lot of the discomfort of low wages for our military. Ultimately, I had a comfortably lower-middle class childhood. I never went hungry. We went on vacation. I had a Nintendo. My childhood identity was one of not thinking about identity and class.

I am now 37.

My adult life has sat firmly in the lower class. I only recently crossed the $30k marker. And I often think about how my identity, while not tied to income, is definitely tied to my relationship to $$$. Mostly, this comes out as a comfort in not ever having it. In spending it when I do.

This feels like a common response in the lower rungs of America in 2018. You use what you have when you have it. Because tomorrow you will have nothing.

For the time I was a teacher I spent most of my hours working at one of the various jobs I listed above. My identity shifting slightly with each. But in the background I was still a teacher. A writer. A person doing "good" work.

One year ago the school I worked at until this passed week announced its closure. It wasn't really a surprise, but it was a blow to both the city I live in and to myself personally.

I have never felt like the kind of person who would move for a job. And the idea of finding a teaching gig out of New Mexico actively made me anxious.

Without the background umbrella of "teacher", who was I. Was I ready to go back to being coffee shop employee, or waiter, or anything else.

It was a blow to my self.

The school officially closes June 1 but my job there is over May 16th when grades are due. At that moment I will no longer be a teacher.

Part of this shift has been trying to find a new job.

I spent 6 months last year applying to academic jobs across New Mexico and the country. Most were low-paying or only part time. Many of the out of state jobs were offering less than I was already making. The concept of moving across the country for $2000 a month is ridiculous. But I know people who took those offers. This breaks my heart. I decided I couldn't do this. That teaching, despite it being what I did, couldn't be this huge of a thing in my life that I would take a wage that couldn't even support me.

Shedding identities is not easy.

I spent most of 2017 in a literal haze. Auto pilot became pretty normal. As this final school year started I looked up for the first time in a long time and realized I had lost myself in the grind to feed myself.

I always told myself I was a writer first. Everything else was meant to be paychecks.

Somewhere along the way I convinced myself that it was ok to erode the identity of writer to the point where it became hard to say that in response to "what do you do".

How does one reclaim land washed away?

I suppose the answer has something to do with throwing the garbage in the water until you can build on top of it.

The more honest one, the healthier one, is that you don't reclaim it. You move. You build somewhere else. You don't repeat the mistakes you made. You don't allow the river in.

A new self will find purchase on the new rock.

Poem : gonna go

gonna go

          — gonna go for this

— gonna hold the stick

                    — carrot 'til it rots
          hold the end of the branch — the end of the wick
a candle over each eye

snuff the lot —

the instrument of good — pincers
of domain and collapse

                    — thank you for the booming violence —

          — the bull the horn the melting

          — the hangin' swing

     — the thermometer of the clouds
a swirl of bait n switch

Poem : The space - of a letter

I wrote this for a friend who is hurting. It isn't going to help anyone but myself.


The space – of a letter

               The space – of a letter – the –
void within the Q –

               A soft rain – holds itself
rocks itself – this is the thunder – popping the floorboards – rain
trying not to feel – desperate in its lack of color –

Think about letters without voids – ones
          zeroes – the whitespace –
          around an I –

          Someone laughed – it was fireworks –
in your peripheral vision – it was a sudden peel of a Band-Aid –

That you couldn't stand – let alone think of white space –
               well –

               There is an answer to the question –
that answer must unfill – it must –

Dust Jackets : Snowball's Chance

Snowball's Chance (2012 edition)

Designed By: ???

Let's get the weird thing out of the way first. I don't know who designed this cover. Melville House has an in-house design team. As far as I know that team is Kelly Blair and Carol Hayes, but I can't find trace of this cover on either of their personal sites.

Based on the look of this cover I would guess it has more in common with Hayes' other work. But both have a minimalism aesthetic going so...

If anyone has thoughts on this, let me know.

The Neversink Library is Melville House's attempt to "champion books from around the world that have been overlooked, under appreciated, looked askance at, or foolishly ignored" and they all have this silhouette design as the starting point.

I picked this book up because it is a sequel/satire of George Orwell's Animal Farm. Here, John Reed imagines Snowball, the ousted pig from Orwell's book, returning to the farm and introducing US-style capitalism/democracy to the animals. It is really worth a read, if for no other reason than the incredible way Reed has both captured and made light of Orwell's vision. That and the take this book has on post-9/11 America.

But the cover, right?

So I bought the book because of what is inside the cover, but I was immediately taken with the cover. It captures the absurdity of the pigs in both Orwell and Reed's books. The nobility in the stance. The "visionary" quality. This is a pig as Lincoln. As Shepard Fairey's Obama poster. It's PR. And it makes so much sense.

Now, Reed wrote his book in 2002 as a response to the September 11 2001 World Trade Center attacks. So the aping of modern propaganda techniques is interesting. The lead-up to the decade+ response to the attack has been a massive lesson in PR. One that culminated in the Brexit vote and 2016 US election. It is nihilism and cynicism dressed up in logos and advertising dollars.

Fairey's Obama poster is an obvious callback to cold war propaganda. But his entire aesthetic is dependant on that referencing. What is interesting is the clear parallels to Soviet-era posters.

Lenin Lived, Lenin Is Alive, Lenin Will Live!

The 'visionary' stance is an obvious trope of political discourse. It goes back centuries. Think of any statue of someone on a horse. Think Napoleon. That many of the examples that are buried in our cultural memory are also tied to oligarchs and emperors is perhaps something to mull over.

That desire to influence memory is hugely tied to both the plot of Animal Farm and to that of regimes that use propaganda.

And we do it in small ways too.

What else does that cover remind us of?

It immediately recalls the decorative form of cameo carvings. That form, where successive layers of alternating colored stone or glass are carefully carved away to created an effect that recalls block printing or murals, is most famous for the silhouetted faces on Victorian brooches that show up in every period film ever made.

Portland Vase (c.1-25 AD)

That a cameo comes to mind isn't really that strange. The Romans heavily used the form in jewelry and containers. The famous Portland Vase is a beautifully preserved example of a glass cameo.

The form also resonates to any kid who went to a fair and had one of those black paper cutouts made of themselves. An entirely different form of PR. That of idealized childhoods.

It also echos ancient forms of shadow puppetry and the links to allegory and fable-telling that come with that. A form of cultural smoothing to spread information with ease.

And through that we come to the work of Kara Walker, which addresses historic and modern evils through the simplicity of paper cutouts. A form of reverse PR where the work emphasizes the darker things left out of these sorts of images normally.

What I'm saying is that is that this cover evokes a history of public relations. From antiquity to this very moment. And it drags a lot of baggage in its little pig head.




Dust Jacket is a sometime article about the design and art of book covers. The idea is to shine a spotlight on the work of the designer separate from the author. Literally judging a book by its cover.

Poem-A-Day #365 : One Year

One Year

Let the year — crack like an egg
the yew of it drying out your mouth

                    Spit
                    if you can

Amber
if you can

                    — There
is a bird inside you it is
flapping the cage apart

Poem-A-Day #364 : Weird Sisters

Weird Sisters

I dreamt about The Golden Girls singing
the abused child they had taken in was soothed to rest
and I awoke -

In some television Miami a pastel universe
expands quickly from Blanche's ranch house
not a bang an immense zoom in

Here is the universe
and now a kitchen table where the fates of everyone
are knitted and decided over a very large cake

Dorothy holding the umbilicus knowing when to shear
Blanche measuring out the lengths of twine
Rose picking the thread

Sophia standing watch
deciding which skeins to toss into which basket
all the while singing Bobby Darin