The Prototypes, then, are Air Jordans (late nineties models) disassembled into their constituent pieces and then remade into masks remarkably like those made by Northwest Coast First Nations peoples of, for instance, killer whale, raven, the forest giantess D’sonoqua, and frog. In other words, the sea
which no one empties
is also an ashtray
Remove the rug, replace it with the floor, sit, pluck splinter, spit ...
I must’ve been thinking of
Something ... the guys who
live in the parking
lot,
Carbon
contacts that conduct electricity
Bloodshot
moustache. There are four born
every minute, six,
eleven. he is two of them.
They circle warily
As a person, you can [own a plant]
It is stored in the [reptile superego]
Fully retractable &
[A state in which only the] underground pipes are visible
And the more people would have found a sweet intimacy with the active essences, and the more people would have worked to render it perfect. This would draw daily an amount of new active monads. This would be the happiness of heaven while living, like the sublime movement of the wings which raise the body of the ethereal not the material but the ethereal eagle, and like the air which carries the objects less dense and less strong than the material of the its invisible gases. This rupture may be more or less complete. They [the infinite essences] would have absorbed it entirely. But they must not stare when they manage
Whatever they are occasionally liable to do
It is often easy to pursue them once in a while
And in a way there is no repose
They like it as well as they ever did
But it is very often just by the time
That they are able to separate
In which case in effect they could
But since everything has already happened, I decide I will press forward with the attempt. From studying its shape and looking at my own car, I decide it is a liner for the inside of the fender. The word fender is short for “defender.” The bird spends its life in flight, ranging over thousands of miles of water, sleeping and feeding in motion, landing only to breed. Eventually the transmitter battery dies, and the albatross path goes blank.
Developed world, is this why your libraries full of tears?
It’s been a long summer and the drought is spreading.
Not a single store has a fan to sell.
It’s been a long summer and the fires are spreading.
The linguistics faculty never heard from me again.
Developed world, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
I can’t stand my own mind.
Developed world, when will you end the human war?
I don’t feel good, don’t bother me.
When will you be worthy of your millions of refugees?
She was afraid of the giraffe but wanted to embrace the lion.
Then we went to the Pergamon Museum.
Developed world, my queer shoulder has been dislocated.
26 Euros, 5 pounds, 40 dollars, and 76 cents.
Meanwhile, in Brazil, Paulo Paulino Guajajara, an indigenous forest protector, was killed, shot in the face by an illegal logger, leaders of the Guajajara tribe said Saturday. Federal police will investigate blah blah blah in order to “bring those responsible for this crime to justice,” said Sergio Moro, the justice and public security minister. Bolsonaro just laughed and licked the still-wet blood on his hands. “It’s dee-licious,” he said. “It reminds me of one of those Chick-fil-A sandwiches.” Wanna hear something else, almost as good? On April 6, a man was arrested at the Kmart in Key West, Florida, after returning purchases for refunds. There was just one problem: the packaging he returned didn’t contain the original products. According to the police report, his bait-and-switch scam included two coffee makers — a Keurig ($153.99) and a Hamilton Beach ($54.99). Inside the returned Keurig box was a deflated basketball, and a old used coffee machine was stuffed into the other box. The man denied the charge he was booked on. In a rambling, vague explanation, he stated: ‘There’s an attorney, and I believe that he’s found some other people, relating to the store, who are involved. That’s all I can say right now.’ What at first seems unusual is that this shoplifting suspect, Andrew Francis Lippi III, is rich. A week before his Kmart arrest, he paid $8m for an island in the Florida Keys. Kabinet Bangoura, the Kmart loss prevention manager who scanned hours of surveillance video to build the case, is blunt about Lippi’s motivation: ‘Millionaires think they’re above the law and can get away with anything.’ That’s not just one person’s theory. The study results are remarkably consistent: the rich tend to be unethical and are more likely to cheat and steal than the poor are. In one experiment, the drivers of luxury cars were less likely to obey the right-of-way laws at a busy four-way intersection than the drivers of cheaper or older model cars. Then there’s the grim and troubling ‘candy experiment,’ where researchers observed wealthy people remove twice as much candy from a jar that had been earmarked for children than people of more modest means did. But what about this? In Oakland a church is being demolished, the boards are being pried from the studs, carefully stacked, incrementally hauled away, presumably to be reused. The graceful, though somewhat squat, arched windows, empty of panes (which were of plain, not stained, glass) having been removed, lean against the side of a truck. The reader is not apt to read this as a speculative passage, she is likely instead to take it as straightforward description, accurate to what it purports to represent. What about this: uninviting squat commercial buildings, cheap motels, copy shops, and then a stretch of Indian restaurants and a cluster of sari shops line the street from end to end. Or this: A man approaches, his feet and legs encased in armor made of shining silver scales. The front edges of his armored boots are decorated with curling silver claws much as the prow of a ship might bear a masthead in the form of a nymph whose long curls blow out over the waves. I want to know the world as it is, not as I see it, he says, but how is it? Real shadows are subject to the time of day, and to the position of the sun. Last night we went to the Buffalo Wild Wings on 75th & 59 with a party of 18. Upon being greeted, my husband Justin told the host that we had a party of 15. After he realized that he miscounted, my husband walked over to the tables to where the host was setting up and told him we actually had 18. A couple minutes went by and the host went up to my husband and asked, “what race are you guys?” My husband asked him why it mattered and the host responded that a table with 2 of their “regular customers” were next to where we were to be seated and he didn’t want us sitting there because he’s “racist.” “Us” being a group of minorities, mostly consisting of African Americans ... so of course, we don’t give him the satisfaction and told the host we’ll sit where they set us up. We knew right away who it was because the guy was staring at us the entire time and giving us looks as we were being seated. As we sit, our waiter greets us and gets some drinks & app orders started. After a few minutes we notice that an employee is talking to the “racists table” and approaches us and communicates to Justin and Marcus “these seats are reserved and we will have to move your group.” The guys politely tell him that we’re not moving and request to speak to the manager ... he says he’s one of the managers. So of course we left. Fuck racists. Not literally, of course, that’s sick. All networks have links and nodes. In the example of a forest, trees are nodes and fungal linkages are links. Scale-free means that there are a few large nodes and a lot of smaller ones. And that is true in forests in many different ways: You’ve got a few large trees and then a lot of little trees. A few large patches of old-growth forest, and then more of these smaller patches. This kind of scale-free phenomenon happens across many scales. Systems evolve toward those patterns because they’re efficient and resilient. If we think of my forest, and the networks I’ve described, that design is efficient for transmitting resources among trees and how they interact with each other. In our brains, scale-free networks are an efficient way for us to transmit neurotransmitters. There’s something so amazing that shouldn’t be about networks between and within trees having similar properties to the networks in our brains. But since we’re pathetic humans we have to ask, when we look at these things
Does it have a neural network?
Is there communication?
Is there perception and reception of messages?
Does it change behaviors depending on what it’s perceiving?
Does it remember things?
Does it learn things?
Those are all hallmarks of intelligence. Plants do have intelligence. They have all the structures. They have all the functions. They have the behaviors. And just ask Wendy Burk. They talk. So I kept reusing the same images with different captions. But there is one instance in which I use the same caption with different images. That caption is “the same door.” Doors came up not only because they were shut, but because someone was struggling to get out of the room. Staying inside was also a problem because the TV, phone and microwave seemed to be emitting high-pitched whines. I still wasn’t 100% myself, but just being in that crowd felt like a great victory. At the Tavern Books table, I picked up a poetry collection with a striking title: The Fire’s Journey. As I paged through it, I read these words:
I cast myself in a hollow of shadow
from the highest contour of the blood
from the skin to the light entering through dawn
climbing up through the syllable
I looked at the cover again: The Fire’s Journey by Eunice Odio. I’d never heard of her. A quick search on my phone revealed a stunning, movie star face: long dark hair framing a high forehead, eyebrows like black wings above fierce, luminous eyes. A visionary. However, her biography told a different story. Born in 1919, Odio was “the mother of Costa Rican poetry in the twentieth century.” But her work never saw publication in her home country until after she’d died, alone and undiscovered for days, in Mexico City at age 54. There were only a few examples of her work on the Internet, despite an impressive publication record. The book I’d just been reading was making its English language debut, the first volume of a 456-page epic that Odio had completed in 1957. As a poet myself, I felt desperate to know this brilliant, neglected woman — and how she’d come to that tragic end. Back home in Brooklyn, I obsessively Googled. I ordered anthologies of Latin-American poetry and source books of Spanish-American women writers. As I researched Odio, I was shocked to discover many other talented female poets who’d suffered similar fates. Paging through one anthology I found the work of Delmira Agustini, shot by her estranged husband (who then turned the pistol on himself) in a hotel room in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1914. She was only 27. She’d published her first collection at 21 and was praised by critics of the time (for her beauty as much as for her work). Her poem “Lo inefable” (“The Ineffable”) struck me:
Have you never endured a star like a white dwarf
inside you that gives no light but entirely consumes?
Those lines described exactly how I’d felt during my breakdown. In the same book I came across this biographical note for Alfonsina Storni: “Depressed and in bad health, she walked into the sea in October 1938.” She was 46. Pages later, I read the lyrics to “Gracias a la vida” (“Here’s to Life”) by Violeta Parra, born in Chile in 1917. The version in the anthology was co-translated by Joan Baez. An activist like Baez, Parra had collected and performed Chilean folk songs. She toured Europe for four years, introducing her audiences to regional singers and local customs. In 1963 she founded a performance space in Santiago called La Carpa de La Reina — the Queen’s Tent. The following year, she became the first Latin-American artist to have a solo exhibition of her paintings, sculptures and arpilleras (patchwork pictures constructed from scraps of cloth and burlap) at the Museum of Decorative Arts of the Louvre. Unfortunately, the public’s response to the Queen’s Tent was not positive. Feeling abandoned, Parra shot herself in the head in 1967, in the space she’d created. I had to close the book. I was reminded, of course, of Plath and Sexton, but I’d personally known poets like that. My best friend Lydia Tomkiw passed away in 2007, alone like Odio, of alcoholism. We’d met in a college poetry class, back in Chicago. Together, we plotted our rise to literary fame, sent work out, and gave readings. We’d even hatched a scheme to kidnap Allen Ginsberg, to get ourselves on the cover of Time magazine. (When we met him at a reading, and told him about our idea, he was all for it. Too bad we didn’t have a plan.) During my breakdown, poetry had sustained me. Now, I realized, I had a debt to repay. I got up and Googled Delmira Agustini’s face, printed the image, and pasted it in the anthology next to her selection. I did the same with Odio, Storni and Parra. I read their work, stared into their eyes, and made notes. Be always conscious of your wings. In the house of keeping still, all is hollow-eyed, and groaning. What is the sound the stars make, rushing through the sky?
what I remembered best
were accidents
of quiet brightness
at dawn all in black
high on mescaline
and now I am
passing back into the rocks
into the god of the rocks
my unborn eye
the one-eyed sky
Long Bones knows the face it sees. Long Bones runs long fingers through the cat-fur, forehead first, against the grain, suffers the cat-eyed gaze a while. Darkness in the Dark is not surprised. And this, of course, is where certain technical problems of explorations explicitly become part of a social exploration, whether the ‘social’ is simply the consideration of performance space and what is brought into it (where it is brought out into), or whether it’s seen to resonate more widely. In other words, the Red Mesa programme note’s gestures towards landscape, history and the like are deliberate gestures, and introduce a tension between quote unquote machinic and quote unquote natural, between the empty and the populated, at least hinting at the removal of human presence in the interests of a fetishized slash genocidal sublime, so that a phrase like “magnificence and geometric purity,” used to describe the Painted Desert, comes up against “often-filmed Monument Valley” etc. All this building to some chunky left-hand thunders, ending with a kind of ‘main theme’ restatement, dying away. Then he crouched in his closet and removed a lacquered case. He placed the case on his drafting table and undid the ritual of latches and ribbons. Two flicks of the scroll rollers, and there, spread in front of her, was China, the half of her no more real than a fable. Chinese words tumbled down in columns, swirling like tiny flames. Each ink stroke shone as if she had just made it herself. It didn’t seem possible that anyone could write like that. But her father could, if he wanted. After the flowing words came a parade of men, each a chubby skeleton. Their faces laughed but their skin sagged. They seemed to have lived for hundreds of years. Their eyes smiled at the best joke in creation, while their shoulders bowed under the weight of a thing too heavy to bear. “Who are they?” Her father studied the figures. “These men?” His lips tightened like the smiling figures. “Luóhàn. Arhat. Little Buddha. They solve life. They pass the final exam. He turned her chin toward him. When he smiled, the thin gold edge of his front tooth flashed. “Chinese superhero!” She wriggled free from his hand and studied the men. One sat in a small cave. One had a red sash and earrings. Another paused on the edge of a high cliff, with crags and fog trailing off behind him. One leaned against a tree, as Mimi would lean against her mulberry the next day, telling her sisters. Her father pointed at the dream landscape. “This China. Very old.” Mimi touched the man under the tree. Her father lifted her hand and kissed her fingertips. “Too old for touch.” She stared at the man, whose eyes knew everything. “Superheroes?” “They see every answer. Nothing hurt them anymore. Emperor come and go. Communism, too. Little insect on a giant dog. But these guy?” They were where they were, crossing streets, speaking, lifting tunics, reading, grazing, and where they weren’t, they were not. Honey and milk, ample flocks, hosts of angels, altars founded on bedrock, libraries, libraries of candelabras, and their gods were where they were, and scribes were who they were, and when they weren’t elsewhere, they wrote records of what went on: the revealing and the concealing, eating and excreting, revealing and sealing, needing and willing, revealing and re-reading, they had no memories of birth or learning. They could not remember rainbows, names changing, rainbow cloaks, dreams in Goshen, pyramids, cattle dying, hail, darkness, congealed water, loaves from the sky, cylindrical fires within cloud cylinders, ambushes, gold, rocks, thunder, clouds, rocks, wrath, purity; spies, giants, milk, honey, wrath, bronze serpents, trumpets, miasma, snails, water, rocks, so she said, “the hole he felt in his head was the place that;” or, “the desert that;” or, “I would, but.” Jerusalem then slept and the trees slept. Cherubim fell off cornices, asleep, landing softly in the roots of a treestump. The veil also fell. The goat to be killed fainted. In his sleep Solomon painted branches that gave actual apples; the paint dreamt of the snail that gives such turquoise, such scarlet; and the snail dreamt of its mother’s thigh, it’s grim in the dim rebar covering the coast. In the hotels’ wheels covering the sea, in the flotation chamber, the gunnysacks, it’s funny there ...
frying potatoes
in a football helmet ...
insectile math
[If they thought the answer “time machine,” they ought do their own damn remembering, dreaming for one damn once]. There ghosts here, though. And an insistence on blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood. After that, bleeding seemed redundant, so we didn’t — no one wrote us up, we kept on keeping on. We documented our suspended hemorrhaging. As if by priority, suppressing bleeding superseded simply not bleeding. Management wouldn’t be accountable for their (re)actions at our accounting on their account. To relieve ourselves the red pressure, we trickled in surreptitious intervals. It now appears MetaGen was undaunted by this setback. According to an anonymous letter allegedly penned by the whistleblower and included with the released document cache, MetaGen’s internal position was that “the government, the military, and the general public continue to underestimate the underlying technology’s vast potential for long-term returns.” The letter continues: The Pacific Islands are basically gone. Bangladesh lost two-thirds of its land mass. Miami? Osaka? Rio de Janeiro? Underwater. I was assigned to the Busan office before the tsunamis took the city, then the peninsula. Seeing the ocean levels rise by the day and with no government solution forthcoming, I truly believed in our mission, truly believed that MetaGen’s gamble on amphibious capabilities (for civilian rather than military use) would give humanity a fighting chance at survival. But what we’re doing here no longer feels like that. Here are some preliminary notes: Okay. The gluey flower lowered to the pavement in Maya Deren’s short film. No, the long, white monkey-flavored arm. The animal emits a soft blue light as it pounces on something also blobby and blue, an outward problem of dimensionality and an inner one of verisimilitude. All of this is a kind of undisclosed compositional material, like a score that was never set to music. Which is to say that the two monsters would vomit into each other’s mouths and then they’d eat the sofa they were sitting on. The leg, which would normally be retracted ... the monster would have this mechanism to extend it and then it would wrap around and ... I think of the hairy little hairs
On my head,
Millions of little
Secret trees
Filled with dead
Birds,
That won’t stay
Dead.
Come, help flatten a raindrop.
It’s hard to argue with such plainspoken observations. But the more I think about it, the crazier I feel. The radio and the newspapers and the TV keep talking about the fibres growing through everyone’s skin, and as much as I keep on scratching the fibres are simply not there. Of course you’d say that, people tell me, you’re part of the problem, you’re in league with the fibres. And then my blood pressure rises, and the hair thins out around my temples, and I realise that one day soon I’m going to die. I came here so that the. I came before being dried. I measured that year in sequence of vivid dreams of it. Because you think that you’re people.
Cross the silver mesh path there.
Turn off the law.
I’m not part of your growth chart, saying this life is compelled.
I have the unconditioned, in a heap in my pocket.
* * *
I’ve done this so many times.
How did you learn it?
It’s in my genes. It's in my global genes.
There were once jaguars everywhere around here.
If I find your soul do you want it?
* * *
It floats within.
He has a big face; his eyes are closed.
How do you know?
It stands between
the king and queen
of swords.
There are no rooms here. There are no beds.
The hoot owl sings; the jaguar grins:
light grey whiteness of fog against invisible ridge
song sparrows lined up on fence in right foreground
Thailand has said that as of 1 December, a ban will take effect on the use of the following farming chemicals:
- chlorpyrifos, an insecticide made popular by Dow Chemical that is known to damage babies’ brains;
- Syngenta’s paraquat, a herbicide scientists say causes the nervous system disease known as Parkinson’s that has been banned in Europe since 2007;
- and Monsanto’s glyphosate herbicide, which is linked to cancer and other health problems.
Thailand joins dozens of countries that have already banned or are planning bans on paraquat, chlorpyrifos and/or glyphosate. The US isn’t one of them. US regulators parrot industry talking points as they insist that dietary exposures to pesticides are nothing to worry about and say any risks to farm workers can be mitigated with proper training, protective clothing and other measures. It’s certainly not surprising that the Trump administration is working to protect whatever bring profits to big corporations. The US is especially upset about a glyphosate ban, arguing that it could limit hundreds of millions of dollars in Thai imports of US grains, which are often laced with glyphosate residues. Outraged Thai officials say they have been forced to “clearly explain” to US officials that Thailand’s priority is the health of Thai consumers. “Our job is to take care of the people’s health,” the public health minister, Anutin Charnvirakul, told the press. It may be disgraceful, but it’s certainly not surprising that the Trump administration is working to protect this shit. Chlorpyrifos was scheduled to be banned two years ago from US agricultural use but when Trump came into office the EPA decided to delay any action until at least 2022. The agency is currently updating its risk assessment of paraquat, seeking public comments through 16 December; but it appears poised to allow continued use. And earlier this year the EPA affirmed that it continues to find no health risk associated with glyphosate. One example of Trumpista fealty was laid out in an internal Monsanto consultant’s report made public through litigation against the company. The report quotes a White House policy adviser as saying: “We have Monsanto’s back on pesticides regulation. We are prepared to go toe-to-toe on any disputes they may have.” What kind of shit human being either works for or still votes for these people? The winter was early, with storms and rain squalls, the bats threw themselves against the house, emblems torn loose, blindly fluttering around the symbiosis of banking, and latifundia, we heard them thumping against the colourful panes of the windows above the stairs, and the dull thuds mingled with the crackling of the wood burning in the fireplace. We had no medications for calming the mentally disturbed, nor could we use pain-killing injections since many of the patients had dysentery, and the hygienic equipment was inadequate, so the issue of the importance of one’s own personhood sounded almost ludicrous. Technicians had supplied a roof antenna for the radio receiver, a Telwas so, as I already understood, because nothing could impress us from the outside, from above so long as we were prisoners, any attempt to grant us a vista could only be awkward, we wanted no rations, no doled-out patchwork, we wanted the totality, and this totality was not to be a traditional thing, it had to be newly created. This was a groping, we did not yet know what our discoveries would be, all we understood was that in order to make sense it had to come out of us. Coppi’s father, having deposited his briefcase on the table, took out the folded wrinkled paper, a bottle, a two-part sandwich holder, he washed up at the sink, coffee was put on, Coppi’s father, bare-chested, scrubbed his throat and face, then put on a woolen jacket with a row of embroidered stag heads in front. In the evenings, my arms are seven feet long, said Coppi’s father, when I walk, my hands drag down on the ground. This image captured all the art and literature that had come close to us during our growing up. At the factory loading ramp, Coppi’s father had shoved, pulled, and lugged crates for eight hours, ordnance parts were packed in them, and Coppi’s mother, at the Telefunken Works, had built manoeuvring devices for war planes. Every delivered item, every package was accompanied by a checklist naming all the people involved in the procedure, which could make each one personally liable. A loosened screw, a few grains of sand in the gears, a missing or misplaced wire, those were the concrete things by which to measure the results of reading, of looking at a picture. But then again we stumbled on things that did not reveal an immediate political impact and yet had disturbing and, we felt, important qualities. If books or paintings of this sort, especially when decried as degenerate by the new rulers, were removed from public collections, then we felt all the more strongly about including them in the registers of sabotage acts and revolutionary manifestations. Heilmann joined us after reading us his translation of Rimbaud’s Un Saison en enfer at Gleisdreck Station on the way back from night school. Both sides are correct, said Heilmann, the lunge that yanks the ground out from under our feet as well as the effort to establish a solid basis for investigating simple facts. Most people are too remote from such inquiries, said Coppi’s father, to see any necessity in them, your words fly past them. There was a humming in the ears. It would have been presumptuous to try and talk about art without hearing the shuffling as we shoved one foot in front of the other. Every metre toward the painting, the book, was a battle, we crawled, pushed ourselves forward, our eyelids blinked, sometimes this squinting made us burst out laughing, which helped us forget where we were going. And the thing then shown to us when we viewed a painting was a web of threads, shiny threads, clotting into lumps, flowing apart, shaping into fields of brightnesses, darknesses, and the switch-gears of our optic nerves marshaled the oncoming storm of tiny luminous dots into messages that could be deciphered. Once, when we had sat down on the bench in the front yard of the house, the landlady, Frau Goldberg, came and asked us to leave the yard, because first of all, she said, we were paying only for the apartment and not the garden, and secondly the bench was not meant for Jews. When I indignantly tried to reply, my mother held me back and, standing up, pressed my arm hard against her body. While pulling me into the house, she said that after being called a Jew several times because of her dark hair, she had now declared herself a Jew, which, however, made it difficult for her and Father to find another apartment in Warnsdorf. So she had to knuckle under to the owner of the house, who made it clear to her at every chance she got that she was allowing her to stay here as a favour and that soon, the day was just around the corner, she would get what was coming to her. During one of my last days in Warnsdorf I saw what that could mean. On the edge of town, coming from Saint George’s Valley, near a gravel pit, where the road passed through the so-called Kirchenbusch, I heard the shrieks and laughter of a group of children and adolescents. At first I thought they were playing a game and I slowly walked on, but then I noticed that in their midst a man was lying in the shingle, uttering rattling sounds, and as I came closer, I saw that it was Eger Franz, who was being called names, village idiot or Yid, a harmless, mentally challenged day labourer. His face was covered in blood, his mouth foaming, he rolled around convulsively amid the teenagers who kept kicking him and smashing sticks into his head. Driving his tormentors away, I picked him up and carried him to the Fiala Nursery in Niedergrund, where help soon came. I later heard that he had died as a result of his injuries. His young murderers, whose identities were known, were never called to account, it was announced that he had fallen during an epileptic fit and fractured his skull ... which reminds me, that by the time I made it to the Mariposa Grove, Wawona was lying dead on the ground. But even sideways, its great radial cylinder of collapsed trunk still reached way above my head. A thing estimated to be about as old as Socrates lasted roughly one human lifetime after humans decided to cut a tunnel through it. Perhaps it’s my overactive imagination, but there may be some metaphor in that! At least the Park Service decided to leave Wawona where it fell. There may be orders of magnitude more life in a dead tree than there is in a living one. Related to this is the research of Patricia Westerford, regarding which one reads: It will take years for the picture to emerge. There will be findings, unbelievable truths confirmed by a spreading worldwide web of researchers in Canada, Europe, Asia, all happily swapping data through faster and better channels. Her trees are far more social than even Patricia suspected. There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest. Competition is not separable from endless flavors of cooperation. Trees fight no more than do the leaves on a single tree. It seems most of nature isn’t red in tooth and claw, after all. For one, those species at the base of the living pyramid have neither teeth nor talons. But if trees share their storehouses, then every drop of red must float on a sea of green. Tolkien, by the way, was indeed an inspiration in some of this. His Ents must surely be among his most spectacular creations. Slow to anger, slow to act. But once they get going, you want them on your side.
[Note: Sources: Jeff Derksen, “From the »Commodification of Everything« to »Everything Is Being Made Cultural«”, at Springerin 3 (the Prototypes are sculptural works by Brian Junger); Kevin Davies, Pause Button; Louis Riel, “A System of Philosophical Theology”; Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation; Allison Cobb, “Car Part”, “The Albatross”, in Plastic: An Autobiography; Athena Farrokhzad, “A Letter to Europe” (tr. Jennifer Hayashida), at BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)), 1 Nov 019; JBR; “Brazil Amazon forest defender shot dead by illegal loggers”, at Al Jazeera, 3 Nov 019; JBR; JBR; Rene Chun, “Rich robbers: why do wealthy people shoplift?”, at Guardian, 4 Nov 019; JBR; Lyn Hejinian, “From ‘Positions of the Sun’”, at BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)), 13 Oct 019; Mary Vahl, Facebook post quoted in Jay Connor, “Buffalo Wild Wings Employees Fired After Racist Seating Incident”, at The Root, 4 Nov 019; JBR; Suzanne Simard, quoted in Brandon Keim, “Never Underestimate the Intelligence of Trees: Plants communicate, nurture their seedlings, and get stressed”, at Nautilus, 31 Oct 019 (hat tip Donna!); JBR (see Wendy’s fabulous book Tree Talks); Sara Ahmed, “The Same Door”, at Feminist Killjoys, 31 Oct 019; Sharon Mesmer, “Flood the World with Beauty”, at American Poetry Review, vol. 48 no. 06; Lucie Thésée, “Poem”, “Rapture: The Depths” (trs. Robert Archambeau and Jean-Luc Garneau), at Circumference, 14 Apr 014; David Grundy, “Cage / Lockwood / Ferrari: Xenia Pestova Bennett (piano), City University, Tuesday 29th October 2019”, at Streams of Expression, 5 Nov 019; Richard Powers, The Overstory; Joel Newberger: “Bamidbar”, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Joel Newberger: ‘Bamidbar’ (In the Desert) from HEXATEUCH, 2019”, at Poems and Poetics, 30 Oct 019; Eleni Sikelianos, The California Poem; Douglas Kearney, “A Natural History of Inequality”, at Haunt Journal, Nov 018; Son Kit, “Anthropiscine War Machine Appendix I & II”, in “Interjection Calendar”, at Montez Press; Bhanu Kapil, “Notes Towards the Feminine Monstrous: 7 pm”, at THE VORTEX OF FORMIDABLE SPARKLES Bhanu Kapil's always-never: blog, 30 Oct 019; JBR; Bob Kaufman, and Tony Leuzzi, quoted in Leuzzi’s “The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman”, at The Brooklyn Rail, Nov 019; Sam Kriss, “The war against the Jews”, at Idiot Joy Showland, 8 Nov 019; Alice Notley, “Remember What I Came Here to Do to This World Very Little Actually”, “from In the Pines”, at Lyrik-Line; Stephen Ratcliffe, “11.9”, at Temporality, 9 Nov 019; Carey Gillam, “Thailand wants to ban these three pesticides. The US government says no”, at Guardian, 10 Nov 019; JBR; Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance (translator not specified, probably Joachim Neugroschel), at Krisis Munter Press, Sept 010; JBR; Richard Powers, quoted in Bradford Morrow, “An Interview: Richard Powers”, at Conjunctions (originally printed in Conjunctions 34)]
