Lex Gill

FIVE HUNDRED AND SIX

“Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale,” by Dan Albergotti (via Matthew Ogle’s incredible newsletter, Pome). Somehow exactly right for this particular moment.

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

Lex Gill

FOUR HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FOUR

From RM Vaughan’s interview with Paul Vermeersch about Self Defence for the Brave and Happy.

RM Vaughan: The book moves effortlessly between prophetic pronouncements and intimate, personal observations. Is it a goal of the book to conflate the two in order to make the reader more keenly aware that we live in prophetic times?

Paul Vermeersch: I think all times are equally prophetic and intimate. The lives of individuals unfold along with the cosmos. But the prophets only seem to get at half the picture, only the grand events. Perhaps one of the jobs of a poet is to be a prophet of the small things, too—to prophesy the taste of lobster, the pang of guilt, the fear of darkness. We can’t put small things on hold when big things happen. I think my poems encompass that spectrum: both the landscape and the figure within the landscape, both the star system and the escape pod within the star system.

Lex Gill

FOUR HUNDRED AND EIGHTY TWO

From David Whyte (audio here).

“We tend to think of vulnerability as a kind of weakness, something to be walked around. But it’s interesting to look at the origin of the word, from the Latin word “vulneras,” meaning “wound.” It’s really the place where you’re open to the world, whether you want to be or not. You’re just made that way. You were just grown that way. You feel that way. You feel the pain of others that way, and you feel your own pain that way. And it’s actually interesting to think about it not as a weakness but as a faculty for understanding what’s about to happen and where you need to go — the ability to follow the path of vulnerability. And yet, as human beings, we’re constantly hoping that we can find a pathway we can follow right to the end, which will never disappear; where we won’t have our hearts broken. We first of all try that in romance. Every time you have a new relationship, you say, “At last, the person who will not break my heart.”

Continue reading “FOUR HUNDRED AND EIGHTY TWO” →

Lex Gill

FOUR HUNDRED AND SEVENTY EIGHT

From If They Should Come for Us, by Fatimah Asghar.

my people I follow you like constellations
we hear the glass smashing the street
& the nights opening their dark
our names this country’s wood
for the fire my people my people
the long years we’ve survived the long
years yet to come I see you map
my sky the light your lantern long
ahead & I follow I follow
Lex Gill

FOUR HUNDRED AND SIXTY

By Billy-Ray Belcourt (2017), via Matthew Ogle’s Pome.

Towards a Theory of Decolonization

1. forget everything you’ve learned about love.

2. investment is the social practice whereby one risks losing it all
to be part of something that feels like release. lose everything
with me.

3. indian time is a form of time travel. a poetics of lateness.

4. i never liked goodbyes, but some of us aren’t here to stay.

5. superstition is a mode of being in the world that keeps ghosts like
me in the living room.

6. the afterlife is the after party: a choreography of mangled bodies.

7. i made a poem out of dirt and ate it.