January 2021

 The last few days:

- Biden reminded the American military to remember their oaths (to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic)

- The German ambassador to the US, Andreas Michaelis, wrote a confidential report to Berlin, warning that "the Trump agenda would rob the legislative branch, law enforcement and media of their independence."

- The Americans shut down TikTok "for being Chinese"

- half a million users migrated to the Chinese Rednote app and started learning Mandarin

- TikTok started up again less than 24 hours later, with the founder thanking Trump (who had it shut down to begin with) for working out a solution; having removed his status as owner from his profile

- Meta is now on TikTok and American users are finding that their Trump-critical posts are being censored. Brightly, the Ben & Jerry's ice cream account is busy posting anti-oligarch protest videos

- Trump held an inauguration speech for his new Oligarch government which included snide remarks about how Elon rigged the election and promises to expand American territories

- Elon Musk did the Sieg Heil twice at said inauguration

- apologists argue online that Elon was just using the 'Roman salute' because Romans are cool. Which was also the reason Hitler was using it, btw.

- Among other things, Trump has already signed papers to:

pull out of the Paris climate agreement,

limit birthright citizenship for children of immigrants (which goes against the 14th amendment, so might take a little bit),

pull out of the World Health Organization,

officially declare that there is "only two genders, male and female",

rename the Gulf of Mexico "the Gulf of America,"

pardon the January 6 insurrectionists,

and declare states of national emergency at the border and concerning fossil fuels, giving him extra leeway to disregard usual jurisdiction where it concerns oil drilling or mass deportations.

We need to start organizing our resistance to the wave that's rising in the West. It won't stay there, and it won't just affect pregnant women, lgbt+ people, the press, immigrants, children of immigrants, liberals, Greenland, and the climate.

Today, I feel afraid. Tomorrow, I will try to shake it off and think about what we can do. Apart from keeping our eyes wide-open and our minds sharp.

Photo by: Ashton Legris

Last Call for the Lifeboats

I can tell by the gentle slope of the hallway

as I wade on through leftover luggage

and by the way the fluorescent lights

unignite

I'm just a little fool

I've got no head for physics or for maths

I've lived my life for pretty lights

glasses of effervescent wines

minor crimes

of the heart.

It's not my area of expertise

but this near to the closing of it all

even I can tell our ship is sinking.

Go to, unblinking. Hike up your skirts of cobwebbed silks 

and carry on. Here, the stairs.

The rushing of the ocean

cannot overtake

the memories of dancing

just a little while ago.

I know where the exits are

I can even swim. I won't. 

This is the closing of the ball.

The last call.

There's no one waiting on the shore.

The lifeboats have already left.

Yet, I've got an itch

a pinprick of a thought

that if I get to the deck up top

the stars will still be smiling high above.

she her I him them us

Fragment, 2024. 1986.

Seal

 I dipped my toe into the water, 

and it was still delicious. 

Selkie-fat and full of happiness, 

sliding,

I bit down, 

and my mouth filled with the sweetness,

of another's sweat.

Write

Don't sabotage yourself, he says. I do nothing else. Write. 

What right do I have to create? 

I want to tell stories, that's all. Beautiful painful little tales. I still ache for the plot. Throw some more at me. Let me fall, like Alice, into reveries. Let me slice myself open on heartache, hurting deliriously from the knowledge it all will end, it almost already has. 

Well, it has. 

We're in the after. There are no more kisses, no potential. She didn't become an artist, or a scholar, or any other kind of immortal. She's just slowly dying. 

A kind of luck, of course. But still. 

Write. 

Shut up, I will. 

 Do you ever think that maybe you started disliking yourself to make it ok for someone else to hurt you?

Paradise Lost

The heart is heavy with melancholy, the mind is angry and hard. Want to do more art. Want beauty to be easily accessible in everyday life; not something to constantly compete for and never reach. Want more touch. Want to share life with a friend group like when we were students. Want to let myself be vulnerable again, be excited again.

I felt loved at this game and around it, and also intensely lonely. I felt beautiful and talented and also strange and clumsy and shaped wrongly and in the way. I want to dance five more hours of waltz; I want to start my own studio, making only games in the dark feminine aesthetic. I feel so much love. I want to drown myself in embraces.

"intentativity"?

 The exquisite feminine sensation of discovering a whole new array of insecurities, you hadn't realised you were supposed to carry. 

Creation and the End of All

William Blake: The Ancient of Days

Just dust and flower mites?

The little cakes I bake are also a sort of poetry, 

nevermind the almond flour or the sugar, 

they contain 1 tsp longing and as much hope 

as you can locate in your cupboard.