round-up: 5/13
reading recs, quotations, & tweets
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
What I’m reading/watching
Quotations
Tweets
What I read this week:
Dear Animal, MK Chavez
What I’m watching:
John Mulaney’s new comedy special (loved it)
The Fabelmans (too long; loved it nevertheless)
Beau is Afraid (I have never been more stressed out by a film in my entire life)
Quotations:
The initial question that sort of comes up over and over—or used to, I think it’s slightly more nuanced now—is “Can you separate the art from the artist?” And that’s one of the first principal questions this book asks. And because I believe that biography befalls us, and because I believe we can’t pull out our response to the biography, I think the decision to separate is a flawed decision. It’s a failure before it begins.
I always knew that I would burn.
-MK Chavez
The petal skin of my inner thigh blossomed / red & purple.
-MK Chavez
The collision of our breath
makes the universe fall,
when your hands touch my face
everything opens.
-MK Chavez
I like how we look. What a turn on. Let’s not mind being the abomination.
-MK Chavez
Language is gut. Twisted rope.
-MK Chavez
The sky is bereft / of hope.
-MK Chavez
Last night I dreamt of you. I was trapped in a house
with a million rooms. You were behind each door.
-MK Chavez
You were assemblage of saline and troubled root systems, mangle of habitat. You being woman, being girl, you pillar of salt, you became the kind of terrain that accepts whatever settles into it.
-MK Chavez
There is nothing / but silence between us.
-MK Chavez
In an effort to explain myself
I sometimes uttered, I am the aftermath
of war.
-MK Chavez
What if the reality is that most people really do try to help others once disaster strikes, at least in the most immediate aftermath? What if it isn’t human nature that produces any ensuing trouble, but institutional or elite failure to imagine or encourage better outcomes?
In her 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit investigates the aftermath of five disasters, including the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the events of 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. In each case, Solnit argues that while institutions often fail or are simply too slow to respond to large-scale tragedies, many ordinary people immediately spring to each other’s aid, sharing resources, rescuing neighbors from danger, and otherwise forming effective temporary communities defined by mutual assistance. For a moment, neighbors are not competing for space or resources or power or attention, instead sharing what they can with those around them.
It is the devotion of the moth to the moon / that drives it to its end.
-MK Chavez
When your mouth met mine
it was Vitruvian. We leveled the place.
-MK Chavez
You, being poet, / and you, being woman, / knew it was too late / from the start.
-MK Chavez
In the city of want we find ourselves / behind every door.
-MK Chavez
Tweets:
No, I still can’t embed them because, yes, Elon is still a brat.
Wow. Expensive chapbook contest.