radiant fracture

Where is there to sit exactly
If everything is shining on me

Friend, you have buttsense
you have stone buns, as your grandma says
Here in the driftwood feeling sundrunk, sunbent
Sensate among the ebb tones of the sea

I thought you said stun bone
You draw with a stick among the ebb stones
The tide wriggles up the sand grooves
Your breathing makes the subtones shimmer

You draw the water up to bait our shoes
Just for the craft of it, just because you can do it
Like a gull riding on the sky tide
Laughing at our temporary ruin



* * * * * *

Every morning very nearly without fail I solve the Merriam-Webster Blossom puzzle, and then I re-solve it to see if I can get a higher score, and if I'm not careful this becomes a kind of intellectual busywork I can use to distract myself from actual writing.

So a thing I'm trying to do (among all the other things) is to use the puzzle as a prompt. Inevitably each group of letters generates a semantic zone. Real and nonce words produce themselves. The letterset today was BENOSTU.


Here's a less complete poem from Sunday (letterset EINRTVW):

The riverine interview of winter,
that inept vintner: cool distillate
interrogates the view, shreds and repurposes it,
turns window to vitrine
where the morning light, when it comes,
cold citrine, tobacco stain,
will ennerve us, animate the inert twin



...Not sure what I planned to do with that twin, but I will let you know.


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Thank you, james for the excellent dinosaur card!

I've been too exhausted to do any of the semi-bespoke painting I half-promised over the summer, but I had a last-minute compulsion to make hand-printed cards because anything that looks like work went into it makes me appear marginally better.

You see? the cards say. An Effort.

I don't mind how they turned out. Sort of "the Dove of Peace is pissed and wants you to get your shit together."



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This was the best of the gingerbread cuneiform. I put the good ones in the freezer to give to pals tomorrow at brunch and will eat the rest, or something. This is one of the maple syrup tables, which were lighter in colour and held the clarity slightly better. (More water, therefore harder texture? Not sure.)

I copied characters from Andrew George's excellent renderings of the tablets, as any photos I looked at were way too unclear. However, I freely skipped tricky characters or sections. Sîn-lēqi-unninni would be pissed.



ETA: Oh, I believe this text is taken from a fragment of the third tablet.

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As we are once again fording the atmospheric river, here's the villanelle (!!) I wrote about the one in 2022:

(Climate Change Villanelle)
After an image by K.

Consider the atmospheric river
as a dragon, slithering through peri-
apocalyptic skies. The end is never

reached of all this rain. Its teeth of silver
gnaw the bones of men who refused boldly
to consider the atmospheric river

as a dragon, not just as the weather,
winning us the wages of false bravery:
apocalyptic skies. The end is never-

ending. Consider the dragon, glitter-
ing, greedy, cruel and wise; now carefully
consider the atmospheric river

as an alternative to the wither-
ing coils of smoke, wildfires' choking, hazy
apocalyptic skies. The end is never

quite what you expect or would prefer.
Drink if you wish, smoke up, get high, daily
consider the atmospheric river,
apocalyptic skies. The end is nigh.

Hey, I made a little game jam, mostly so that I had a jam whereat to submit my own game:

https://itch.io/jam/winter-solstice-haunting-ttrpg-jam

Make something and I'll try to round folks up to play it!

From the Languagehat feed:

Trinity College Dublin reports World’s first film in ancient Sumerian released by Trinity filmmakers.

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Who was it who said something like -- in a way all books are games, whether they are actual gamebooks or not, because all readers engage with a novel (I feel like they said novel?) with some level of imaginary wiggle room, constantly envisioning alternatives?

Queer reading is one form of this, but any reading contains some aspect of this push-pull. I think this person said that this is in fact an inevitable part of reading a story, this alternate acceptance and refusal, this shimmering of possibility, such that (famously) you can read a story over and over again and still always hope at a particular point that a character will make a different decision?

(I may have asked this before, because it is an idea that intermittently preoccupies me.)

(Possibly several times, because it might be in my notes from 2023, but who can find those?)

(Now I feel paranoid that I never stop asking this question)

(Also I got double vaccinated today and I am a teeny bit feverish)

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There's a gorgeous windstorm going on. Beautiful for listening to, not so great for trying to hear the UPS truck.

Like a fool who thinks it's 2015, I ordered clothing online from the United States and have been fretting about it ever since. All shipping interfaces were as incoherent as you might expect.

But Blamo was having a deep-discount flash sale and I have been drooling over this non-species-specific sock-animal onesie for... a long time.

Sadly, that magnificent garment was not on sale and incidentally profoundly impractical. So I ordered this Completely Normal Cardigan(tm) instead:



... it happens to have this hood:





(Not sure why the resolution is so crap here.)

There did end up being tariff charges, but not that bad.

I... feel more whole as a person.

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PS I swear it did not have to be a rabbit.

Again
By Ross Gay

Because I love you, and beneath the uncountable stars
I have become the delicate piston threading itself through your chest,

I want to tell you a story I shouldn't but will and in the meantime neglect, Love,
the discordant melody spilling from my ears but attend,

instead, to this tale, for a river burns inside my mouth
and it wants both purgation and to eternally sip your thousand drippings;

and in the story is a dog and unnamed it leads to less heartbreak,
so name him Max, and in the story are neighborhood kids

who spin a yarn about Max like I'm singing to you, except they tell a child,
a boy who only moments earlier had been wending through sticker bushes

to pick juicy rubies, whose chin was, in fact, stained with them,
and combining in their story the big kids make

the boy who shall remain unnamed believe Max to be sick and rabid,
and say his limp and regular smell of piss are just two signs,

but the worst of it, they say, is that he'll likely find you in the night,
and the big kids do not giggle, and the boy does not giggle,

but lets the final berries in his hand drop into the overgrowth
at his feet, and if I spoke the dream of the unnamed boy

I fear my tongue would turn an arm of fire so I won't, but
know inside the boy's head grew a fire beneath the same stars

as you and I, Love, your leg between mine, the fine hairs
on your upper thigh nearly glistening in the night, and the boy,

the night, the incalculable mysteries as he sleeps with a stuffed animal
tucked beneath his chin and rolls tight against his brother

in their shared bed, who rolls away, and you know by now
there is no salve to quell his mind’s roaring machinery

and I shouldn't tell you, but I will,
the unnamed boy

on the third night of the dreams which harden his soft face
puts on pants and a sweatshirt and quietly takes the spade from the den

and more quietly leaves his house where upstairs his father lies dreamless,
and his mother bends her body into his,

and beneath these same stars, Love, which often, when I study them,
seem to recede like so many of the lies of light,

the boy walks to the yard where Max lives attached to a steel cable
spanning the lawn, and the boy brings hot dogs which he learned

from Tom & Jerry, and nearly urinating in his pants he tosses them
toward the quiet and crippled thing limping across the lawn,

the cable whispering above the dew-slick grass, and Max whimpers,
and the boy sees a wolf where stands this ratty

and sad and groveling dog and beneath these very stars
Max raises his head to look at the unnamed boy

with one glaucous eye nearly glued shut
and the other wet from the cool breeze and wheezing

Max catches the gaze of the boy who sees,
at last, the raw skin on the dog's flank, the quiver

of his spindly legs, and as Max bends his nose
to the franks the boy watches him struggle

to snatch the meat with gums, and bringing the shovel down
he bends to lift the meat to Max's toothless mouth,

and rubs the length of his throat and chin,
Max arching his neck with his eyes closed, now,

and licking the boy's round face, until the boy unchains the dog,
and stands, taking slow steps backward through the wet grass and feels,

for the first time in days, the breath in his lungs, which is cool,
and a little damp, spilling over his small lips, and he feels,

again, his feet beneath him, and the earth beneath them, and starlings
singing the morning in, and the somber movement of beetles

chewing the leaves of the white birch, glinting in the dark, and he notices,
Darling, an upturned nest beneath the tree, and flips it looking for the blue eggs

of robins, but finds none, and placing a rumpled crimson feather in his mouth
slips the spindly thicket into another tree, which he climbs

to watch the first hint of light glancing above the fields, and the boy
eventually returns to his thorny fruit bush where an occasional prick

leaves on his arm or leg a spot of blood the color of these raspberries
and tasting of salt, and filling his upturned shirt with them he beams

that he could pull from the earth that which might make you smile,
Love, which you’ll find in the fridge, on the bottom shelf, behind the milk,

in the bowl you made with your own lovely hands.

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My recent reading features two short works by Tamsyn Muir, author of the Locked Tomb series.

I liked both of these books a lot: they seemed to me to feature Muir's strengths without some of the excesses of the Tomb books.

(I am aware that these excesses are precisely the source of delight for fans. I appreciate the meticulous artistry of the series; it's just that the particular qualities of deferral, substitution, and abrasion that are the formal and tonal preoccupation of these books, and that Muir wields so expertly and so persistently, are just not quite my tempo.)

The first book was Muir's 2022 novella, Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower.

This is a revisionist princess-in-the-tower story, so the pleasure comes not from a surprise twist but from seeing how the genre is executed. Very well, I thought.

(That said, there were two or three times I did exclaim out loud, "oh no!" etc. So it's not twistless.)

I liked it enough that when it was done I felt wistful about not being with the characters any more.

(Not in a sentimental way. Or yes, in a sentimental way, but not in a cute way. Or yes cute, but not cozy. Difficult and heartbroken and ridiculous. That way.)

ETA: I mean to say that genre-wise Princess Floralinda is solidly with Beagle's The Last Unicorn and Goldman's The Princess Bride as an anachronistic and self-reflexive take on the genre.

The second was a long short story, or maybe novelette? called Undercover, blurbed thus (in part): "A fresh-faced newcomer arrives in an isolated, gang-run town and soon finds herself taking a job nobody else wants: bodyguard to a ghoul. Not just your average mindless, half-rotted shuffler, though. Lucille is a dancer who can still put on her own lipstick and whose shows are half burlesque, half gladiator match."

What's more, I think it is better that that sounds.

sabotabby, I felt like you might enjoy both of these. Like you might start out thinking "Why did Frac think I would like this?" but then fairly rapidly think "OH" instead.

Anyway, that appears to be most of Muir's non-tomb catalogue, which is too bad. I wish there were more.

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