Could You Repeat That? CXXXV

Saga of the Swamp Thing, Book One (graphic novel), Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette, & John Totleben
It's raining in Washington tonight.
Plump, warm summer rain that covers the sidewalks with leopard spots.
Downtown, elderly ladies carry their houseplants out to set them on the fire-escapes, as if they were infirm relatives or boy kings.

Bossypants, Tina Fey
I have a suspicion--and hear me out, 'cause this is a rough one--I have a suspicion that the definition of "crazy" in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.

How to Build a Girl, Caitlan Moran
Marvel that, at the time, you kept so many secrets. Tried to keep the secret of yourself. Tried to metamorphose in the dark. The loud, drunken, fucking, eyeliner-smeared, laughing, cutting, panicking, unbearably present secret of yourself. When really you were about as secret as the moon. And as luminous, under all those clothes.

Copia (poetry), Erika Meitner
But how to explain my obsession with destruction? Not self-immolation
but more of a disintegration, slow, like Alka-Seltzer in water. Like sugar in water.

I dissolve.

A Tale of Time City, Diana Wynne Jones
Vivian quailed. "Oh, no more buildings, please!" she said. "My mind's got indigestion!"

Happiness, Like Water, Chinelo Okparanta
I exhume the memory of the morning break, toss it about in my mind, like a pebble in the air, as if to get a feel for its texture, its potential, its capacity for success.

Things I Don't Want to Know: On Writing, Deborah Levy
I did not know how to get the work, my writing, into the world. I did not know how to open the window like an orange. If anything, the window had closed like an axe on my tongue. If this was to be my reality, I did not know what to do with it.

Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, Paul Bloom
Here is a good candidate for a moral rule that transcends space and time: If you punch someone in the face, you'd better have a damn good reason for it.

Small Stories, Big Changes: Agents of Change on the Frontlines of Sustainability, Lyle Estill, ed.
I was both stunned and disheartened. On the one hand I was having a beer with the grandfather of permaculture, my hero, Albert Bates. On the other we were in an Olive Garden.

"Murder," And Short the Season (poetry), Maxine Kumin
I want to tell him that I too
murdered this day, I slumped at my desk
over unborn poems adding
a word here, half a line there
but mostly deleting, deleting, deleting
in an ecstasy of failure.