i get so scared. and i get scared again. yuo are never gonna calm me down. i get so scared. and i get scared again. you are never gonna calm me down. i drink a nervous drink. i drink a frightened drink. i drink an anxious drink, i drink a scary drink. i fear the scares that remind me of the scary times. i fear the scares that remind me of the horror times
And bodies, whether living or dead, decay continuously. Our topmost layer of skin is dead. Our hair is dead. Bacteria, fungus, and germs thrive in just about every nook and cranny they can find. The smell of body odor is, in fact, the smell of these bacteria feasting on fatty compounds secreted by our sweat glands. And yet, bodies are sexy, not in spite of the fact that we are decaying but exactly, I think, because we are.
The Loveliness of Decay: Rotting Flesh, Literary Matter, and Dead Media, Jesse Stommel
went to see the keith haring exhibit at the broad and i was kinda disgusted by the frivolous/consumptive way people were acting, particularly in the final room focusing on the hiv/aids crisis. adults stopping only to take shitty pictures and it’s just so fucking indicative of how little has actually shifted since the height of the epidemic. i don’t know how you could stand in front of “unfinished painting” and not just feel the weight of that.
Palestinians have historically cultivated the land, not just with olive trees, but also with figs, apricots, oranges, and dates. Yet, Zionist propaganda, though a concentrated effort to steal Palestinian land, has insisted on “making the desert bloom.”
The desert has already been blooming and supporting its Indigenous population, as it has for thousands of years. Since the early twentieth century, Zionists have nevertheless co-opted the language of environmentalism and sustainability as a means of forcing the native Arab population off of the lands they covet. The Jewish National Fund (JNF), a self-described Zionist organization, has an explicit mission: to acquire land throughout Palestinian territories and plant trees—with “proud Jewish identity.” The JNF claims to have planted 240 million trees over 227,000 acres.
This tree-planting crusade is detrimental to the land. Pine trees that constitute the colonist’s imaginary of a forest in Europe replace the native plant species and change the soil’s chemistry, such that agricultural crops cannot thrive. This further displaces Palestinians, as well as the nomadic Bedouin peoples, who rely on the land for grazing their cattle. Settlers want to extract from the “blooming desert.” In contrast, the Indigenous approach to land is one of mutual respect and nourishment: the land sustains life and culture, a culture that settler-colonialism wants to erase.
To achieve this end, the Zionist occupation has used a variety of tactics to disrupt the Palestinian economy, including controlling water resources so that groves cannot be irrigated as needed, which is especially important now given the effects of the climate crisis. Additionally, the Zionists instituted a permit system that has prevented olive farmers from accessing their trees for all but a handful of days per year. This has made it difficult, if not impossible, to do necessary maintenance like pruning and weeding, greatly impacting the quality of the harvest. Most egregiously, the Zionists erected walls separating farmers from their groves, slicing up plots of land that have been in the same family for generations. Such measures have forced olive farmers to rely on olives of subpar quality. Because of the limited days that farmers are given to access their trees, they might be forced to pick the olives before peak ripeness, affecting the quality of the olive oil produced and therefore the prices that the oil will fetch.
A 1994 New York Times article summarized the struggle succinctly: “The Palestinians planted tiny olive trees; the Israeli soldiers dug them up. The Palestinians lay down in the road to block a bulldozer; the Israelis carted them off to police vans.”
“poetry is i say essentially a vocabulary just as prose is essentially not. …it is a vocabulary entirely based on the noun as prose is essentially and determinately and vigorously not based on the noun. poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. it is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. that is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is.”
