#flickr files

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[photo of my mother from my flickr files]

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I have inherited my mother’s temper. Temperature.Temperament. The violence of my moods rendering my body chaotic, my mind confused. I tear myself into rags and rages. The kindling effect. That’s what they call it. One little twig of a mood or a nerve and all of a sudden everything is ablaze. To set fire to one’s house—to free oneself from one’s cage…

Kate Zambreno, excerpt from “Weather Reports”

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[from my flickr files]

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“This is freedom. This is the face of faith, nobody gets what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself. Also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something at sea. Here hands full of sand, letting it sift through in the wind, I look in and say take this, hurry. And if I listen now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only something I did. I could not chose words. I am free to go. I cannot, of course, come back. Not to this. Never. It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.” ― Jorie Graham, Never

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[photo from flickr :: creative commons :: Brad Choi]

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“For the ambitious children of the bourgeoisie, high achievers raised on Adderall, Xanax, and a raft of discreet legal narcotics, drugs are the norm just to get to sleep, to deal with anxiety, to avoid crushing bouts of abjection and the relentless pressures to exceed and excel. In the hood, promethazine, the syrup of Houston, became the fashionable coping agent for those living in the free-fire zones of America, where turf wars regulated with cheap handguns cut down lives in a vicious spiral. From so many points of view, then, one looks out into the Trump era with a prevailing numbness, nihilism, cruelty, ambient anxiety, disarticulation seeping in from all sides. The music records all this. It sounds like this. Future’s lyrics are mocked for their lack of sophistication, but the veritable pharmacopeia in his verses is not dishonest or inarticulate about an affect that is pervasive, or its origins… A preoccupation with depression, mental health, a confused and terrible desire for dissociation: this is a fundamental sensibility shared by a generation.”

— Jesse McCarthy, Notes on Trap

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[from my flickr files:: My Grandfather’s photo albums]

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Today Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! You really are beautiful! Pearls, harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all the stuff they've always talked about still makes a poem a surprise! These things are with us every day even on beachheads and biers. They do have meaning. They're strong as rocks. “Today," by Frank O'Hara, from The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara. © Vintage Books. Reprinted with permission. [Writer's Almanac]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

sky

[St. George Island from my files]

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PERIDOT I awoke in an ecstasy. The sky was the color of a cut lime that had sat in the refrigerator in a plastic container for thirty-two days. Fact-checkers, check. I am happy. Notice I speak in complete sentences. Something I have not done since birth. And the sky responds. - Mary Ruefle Trances of the Blast