Author: dig

Today ~ I found a squirrel ~ dreaming ~ the sleep of the young and unknowing ~ I pray for a world ~ scatter-starred with that kind ~ of tenderness ~ Nothing hears me ~ Let’s pretend

[…]

I write these words ~ a lifetime away ~ at the foot of the mountains ~ another sea ~ vaster galaxy ~ primordial and without memories

Dear Sister, Emma Trelles

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All this beauty is tinder.

[…]

In Glitter Stucco and Dumpster Diving: Reflections on Building Production in the Vernacular City, the architect and urban planner John Chase describes LA as a city that follows no design or aesthetic ambition but insolently unspools from the desires of its people. LA has no Haussmann or Frederick Law Olmsted; it has Angelenos, and in the ‘mad and wonderful’ architecture of the city, with its stucco box houses alongside its faux Swiss chalets, its Tudor cottages, bungalows, faded pink apartment complexes and ancient auto repair shops, glittering strip malls and shabby hotels, there is a romantic stubbornness, at once dogged and extravagant, tender and brash.

[…]

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, … A fawn stumbled out of the smoke, and a horse ran back into it to nudge two other horses onward, faster.

Under the Santa Anas, Anahid Nersessian

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Your speech evokes a thousand sympathies,
And all my being’s silent harmonies
Wake trembling into music.

Dreams, Amy Lowell

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Newcleus, Jam On it. 1984.

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The ??launiu breeze lifts voices from the night.
Dogs curl under their houses. The city
burns to the shore, red with distant industry.
Awake, my baby’s eyes are two dark moons. 

Even the dogs curl into sleep. Even the city.
We watch the headlights swipe past our window.
Awake, my baby’s eyes are two dark moons
or their eclipse—night opening to night. 

Headlights skirt across our window
trailing the scent of gas. Sometime past 2am, 
I feel eclipsed. Night reaches out to night
drawing me back to the hospital room,

the scent of my baby’s matted hair. Past 2am,
I held his tiny body and we floated in a silence
that whirred and pinged. In the dark hospital,
in my exhaustion, I heard singing emerge. 

I held his tiny body, floating through a silence 
not silent, but a greeting from this other land, 
this one long night where we’d emerged.
He opened his eyes and his gaze was steady—

a greeting, a land. I began to weep. His body
against mine was too small for the weight 
of his gaze, his steady eyes—a doorway 
between our nights, and through it, voices.

Sleepless Pantoum, Laurel Nakanishi

January 2025 Poem-a-Day Guest Editor Campbell McGrath

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… it had been set in motion some time ago by what have by now become the familiar complaints that citizens of democracies make about all their leaders, particularly left-leaning ones, however moderate: that they represent an out-of-touch élite, that they are unresponsive to the economic necessities of ordinary people, that they are too sympathetic to outsiders at the cost of the native population, and all the rest.

Adam Gopnik on Trudeau’s resignation.