Have been thinking a lot about Daniela’s rogue taxidermy essay. Obviously, this strikes me as symbolic of a lot of artistic situations/ethical positions re: art.

Plus, I count, describe and index roadkill. I like dead stuff.

The alpha You. The omega You.
My grandmother’s ghost, its girlish snafu
Basking in the waters of urgency.

But I want the coolness of snow.
I want pairs of hands that speak to me cleanly,
Sutras to resuscitate what reigns

Over warped celluloid and heirlooms I can’t touch.
There are no family photographs.
Once I was ordinary.

I rattled around with arms, with legs,
with a damp remembering that served me well.
Then, a little sleep, a little slumber,

A little folding of the hands to rest.
I asked myself, don’t you just love it?
And then, why don’t you just love it?

And then, from what grace have I fallen?
Am I sisyphus with his mute rock
Unsettling now in the topsoil, dissolved now

Into brandied battle shouts and pages that breathe like people?
There are hazards here, more so than before
The Furies struck and scarved the white night siftin

The bright waterlights blinking
and grieving over a mash of ice.
Like them, I wanted only to die, moon-dark, blessed,

Poised beneath the driest arrows of my suffering,
Far from the flocks of burning, singing gulls,
Face to face with the God of my childhood.

Noelle Kocot

Home again, home again.

Have I mentioned that I am getting completely fucking obsessed with college football?

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.

Walter Pater

Ugh, crushing is the WORST. Makes me want to go back to fucking my seriously-involved and highly-unavailable exes.

THE WORST.

As Corpse                         Loosened, bare, profusely female,
the pulse in my thigh
unthreaded—

As Hair                              Clear of furies, of flowers,
the shade of dry paste

As Skull                             Fissured:
an unlit chandelier

As Dirt                               The ants sift through
and soften

And with no fingertips, imagine

As Dust                              You can hang the air on me

Mary Szybist

I am making memories so fast here.