messily written[...]

 

[...] in a hotel lobby, during snowfall.
New Year's Eve, 2024. Tonopah, Nevada.

Sudden Hymn in Winter

What if, after years
of trial,
a love should come
and lay a hand upon you
and say,
this late,
your life is not a crime

— Joseph Fasano

Object Permanence

  (for John)

 

 

    We wake as if surprised the other is still there,

    each petting the sheet to be sure.

 

    How have we managed our way

    to this bed—beholden to heat like dawn

   

    indebted to light. Though we’re not so self-

    important as to think everything

   

    has led to this, everything has led to this.

    There’s a name for the animal

   

    love makes of us—named, I think,

    like rain, for the sound it makes.

 

    You are the animal after whom other animals

    are named. Until there’s none left to laugh,

  

    days will start with the same startle

    and end with caterpillars gorged on milkweed.

 

    O, how we entertain the angels

    with our brief animation. O,

 

    how I’ll miss you when we’re dead. 

    Nicole Sealey

Perpetual Care — Andrew Wyeth, 1961

Andrew Wyeth

 

The Floor Scrapers —Gustave Caillebotte, 1875

As subject to the Salon Exhibition standards of 1875, this work was denied a place
and reassigned instead to the Impressionist Exhibition in 1876.
Impressionist paintings caused the French art world and, unsurprisingly, the upper class
to bristle, as the works tended to honestly portray the condition & quality of life
for the working class, as well as accurately depicting the private needs of the bourgeoisie and 
how those same needs had a detrimental effect on the proletariat.

Given all of the above, Impressionist painters were largely ignored at the time, their work remaining unsold, and all of it resulting in Impressionists struggling with their own livelihoods.
Caillebotte, who was wealthy, was also an Impressionist and understood the societal flaw in logic for what it was. Caillebotte prioritized supporting artists, and became a patron of other Impressionists by purchasing their work.

Skeletons dancing.

Etching by R. Stamper after C. Sharp, 1700s

in new york.

 street art.

WET PAIN captured by Elaine Levia

Nassau MTA station

Love leaves leftovers — Maria Giebrecht

Hands of the Oracle — Jon Eric Riis

fresh-water pearls. coral beads.

Peoples -- Neil Farber, 2019. Mixed media on panel.

 

The Oak -- Andrew Wyeth, 1940-45. Watercolor.

 

ludwig van.

 

Is Milton trying to tell us that being bad is more fun than being good?

Lawrence Tierney & Oliver Reed walk into a bar...

 

1978

 

perceptible absence.

 There are no seagulls in the desert. 

from 2 Poems, 12/5/24.

  Sober Alcoholic

The enemy of my enemy lives on honeysuckle nectar and never blinks.

I took the enemy of my enemy to the creek to watch her leech sunlight from poison ivy.

The enemy of my enemy looks like she isn’t even breathing sometimes. Is she breathing?

The grass grows between the enemy of my enemy’s clenched fists, but she still won’t move.

Hell exists because the enemy of my enemy believed it into being. Heaven is her daydream.

If the enemy of my enemy could speak, she wouldn’t.

The enemy of my enemy tosses pearls into a bonfire.

When she runs out, she’ll use her own eyes.

Kimberly Wolf

Cuts.

 

from Shadows on the Rock

Its history will shine with bright incidents, slight, perhaps, but precious, as in life itself, where the great matters are often as worthless as astronomical distances, and the trifles dear as the heart's blood.

—

The sailors, though they might indulge in godless behaviour, were pious in their own way; went to confession soon after they got into port, and attended mass. They lived too near the next world not to wish to stand well with it.

Willa Cather

from the Submission Guidelines at Storm Cellar

Traditional: 1. not experimental; 2. ignorance, thanatos, octopodes, standing stones, sex work, MRIs, cavaliers, Cadillacs, rude boys, buried toys, gold fever, war fever, bone fever, baby fever, submarines, pipe dreams, body horror, paycheck horror, sign vs. signifier, black on black tattoos, "for sale: condoms, never used," cigarettes & punk music, smugglers, prairie fire, dice sharps, kissing cousins, "here there be monsters," grown folks business, border crossing, Amazons, apocalyptics, analytics, riding tigers, tiny islands, embezzlement, graffiti, hackers, holograms, huitlacoche, hot zones, outer space….

from an interview in The New Yorker, 6/30/24

I do not “turn to” other writers or stories in the way you suggest. I read a great deal—short stories as well as everything else. For myself, I personally find the short story to be the finest expression of serious writing. Many would argue that poetry claims that place, and for them it does. For me, the entangling strands that make up a coherent short story take skill to construct and skill to read. As for a list of writers and/or stories that I appreciate and admire, I do not have the hours—days—to make such a list. I read for pleasure as well as instruction—if that is what you are getting at.

Annie Proulx

The Good Gods!

Alex Dimitrov

Sartre

 It's strange. I felt less lonely when I didn't know you.

from The Dilemma of Being Human — Glen Martin Taylor

 

An interpretation of the Japanese art of Kintsugi, currently showing at the Arc Gallery, Chicago.

Nothing — Margaret Atwood

Nothing like love to put blood
back in the language,
the difference between the beach and its
discrete rocks and shards, a hard
cuneiform, and the tender cursive
of waves; bone and liquid fishegg, desert
and saltmarsh, a green push
out of death. The vowels plump
again like lips or soaked fingers, and the fingers
themselves move around these
softening pebbles as around skin. The sky's
not vacant and over there but close
against your eyes, molten, so near
you can taste it. It tastes of
salt. What touches you is what you touch.

Alex Lemon

 

Louise Erdrich

 

Deer

 

 

Anguish — August Friedrich Schenck, 1878

 

Kathleen Ryan

 Bad Fruit

Little Death — Malgorzata Kalinowska

Malgorzata Kalinowska

Tram Drey

 

Tram Drey made a shotgun, complete with shells, (this may initially seem redundant, but I mean shotgun shells, not crustaceans), out of crab.

Pacific, 1967 — Alex Colville

 

Phil Hale

 

 

Pandemonium - George Grosz, 1919

 

Secret Admirer

 

Autographs

The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, Dr. Seuss

 

White Noise, Don DeLillo

 

Fine Just the Way It Is, Annie Proulx

A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan

Barkskins, Annie Proulx

The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis