Suburban Skyline

@suburbanskyline

"I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see––and I don’t." ––Georgia O’Keeffe | "I take with me the emptiness of my hands. What you do not have you find everywhere." ––W. S. Merwin. | "Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board." ––Zora Neale Hurston

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“Write the hard poem.” Toi Derricotte

Natalie Eilbert is the author of Swan Feast (Coconut Books, 2015). She is the founding editor of The Atlas Review and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

nevver

Where’s the dog? Klaus Kremmerz

by Mark Bibbins, EditorThe rape joke is that you were 19 years old.The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, ...

Petersburg, Virginia. Protests and training for lunch counter sit-in harassment. Photographs by Howard Sochurek (1960). via blackarchives.co

It Was Summer Now and the Colored People Came Out Into the Sunshine

By Morgan Parker

They descend from the boat two by two. The gap in Angela Davis’s teeth speaks to the gap in James Baldwin’s teeth. The gap in James Baldwin’s teeth speaks to the gap in Malcolm X’s Teeth. The gap in Malcolm X’s teeth speaks to the gap in Malcolm X’s teeth. The gap in Condoleezza Rice’s teeth doesn’t speak. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard kisses the Band Aid on Nelly’s cheek. Frederick Douglass’s side part kisses Nikki Giovanni’s Thug Life tattoo. The choir is led by Whoopi Goldberg’s eyebrows. The choir is led by Will Smith’s flat top. The choir loses its way. The choir never returns home. The choir sings funeral instead of wedding, sings funeral instead of allegedly, sings funeral instead of help, sings Black instead of grace, sings Black as knucklebone, mercy, junebug, sea air. It is time for war.

#morgan parker

Facing All the Same Tomorrows (Unreleased 1965 Demo)

apoemaday

Under One Small Star

by Wislawa Szymborska

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity My apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all. Please, don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due. May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade. My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second. My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first. Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home. Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger. I apologise for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths. I apologise to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m. Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time. Pardon me, deserts, that I don’t rush to you bearing a spoonful of water. And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage, you gaze always fixed on the same point in space, forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed. My apologies to the felled tree for the table’s four legs. My apologies to great questions for small answers. Truth, please don’t pay me much attention. Dignity please be magnanimous. Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train. Soul, don’t take offense that I’ve only got you now and then. My apologies to everyone that I can’t be everywhere at once. My apologies to everyone that I can’t be each woman and each man. I know that I won’t be justified as long as I live, since I myself stand in my own way. Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words, then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

Guy Billout

“This photograph depicts a classified ‘listening station’ deep in the forests of West Virginia. The station is located at the center of the ‘National Radio Quiet Zone,’ a region of approximately 34,000 square kilometres in West Virginia and parts of Maryland. Within the Quiet Zone, radio transmissions are severely restricted: omnidirectional and high-powered transmissions (such as wireless internet devices and FM radio stations) are not permitted.

The listening station, which forms part of the global ECHELON system, was designed in part to take advantage of a phenomenon called ‘moonbounce.’ Moonbounce involves capturing communications and telemetry signals from around the world as they escape into space, hit the moon, and are reflected back towards Earth.

The photograph is a long exposure under the full moon light.”

thepulpgirls

“It was once a tactic of students of religion to cite the appendix of James H. Leuba’s Psychological Study of Religion (1912), which lists more than fifty definitions of religion, to demonstrate that ‘the effort clearly to define religion in short compass is a hopeless task’ (King 1954). Not at all! The moral of Leuba is not that religion cannot be defined, but that it can be defined, with greater or lesser success, more than fifty ways.” – J.Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious”