How scared God must have beenwhen the woman who ate all the fruit of the tree he'd planted was cutting out each red body from between her legs

The sky, the wound that opens every morning when a red head is cut out between the fat red legs of the cloud

(Does that blood live inside me?) (Do I live inside that blood?)

- Kim Hyesoon

I just love how sad this little cockroach is. His tiny clasped hands.

[drawing by Emily Conner]

I keep getting invited to attend AWP off-site readings, and friends are discussing travel plans and the recent no-public-access-to-the-book-fair revelation, and I'm a little sad because I can't go to AWP this year. I love wandering around the book fair, being in among the physical objects of writing. I love guessing who's who at the hotel bar. I love sitting at the BWR table and talking up the journal. I even love sitting at the BWR table and getting personally queried about submissions. And I was so looking forward to eating sushi for every meal. I have a bookmarks folder just for Seattle Sushi Restaurants.

Life I love in me I do

You

Luster of this world that fills me

I complete my own picture by knowing how to stay in the frame

Nature supplies the medium

Of which I am

The medium

Of which I am

The medium

Of which I am

The medium

- Ariana Reines

I just finished Mercury, finally, and now I'd like to read it over again. The last section makes me think about heredity/liquids/art/mediums/wombs in a way that affects my reading of the earlier sections. It strikes me how much the form of this book is like a family saga—in length and in the use of sections, but also in collecting all the small parts, working against wastefulness, family as a synonym for excess and overflow. I'd like to be as honest and unafraid of blood.

This is a lovely morning and the second issue of La Vague just went live and it's as gorgeous as the first issue and there are bees and ghostly-looking ladies, my favorite, and I'm very excited and proud of this one, because these are the first poems from my thesis that are living out in the world, shyly turning their heads away, hoping you'll follow the slight bend in their necks.

My Dad's the kind of person who always carries a stack of books with him--seven novels, four discrete math textbooks, a bunch of printouts, three big nonfiction books that all discuss single topics in depth (like salt, or the history of the inventor of the hypodermic needle). I have always made fun of him for this. Today I'm at the coffee shop with this stack of lovelies:

I began to write in an ugly wayTo subtract myself from womanhood and see only A person in bas-relief with crucial parts and cartoon Grief. Grooming and fashion make a seduction To hide the horrors of the day. I have to be bad to be this way. I will give it up for you. I think I am ready to. I want to be sick over something else And act like another kind of person, a writer With ideas, not selves, a woman with values More than scars and years and you know Um tears.

- Ariana Reines

Finally / Reading Mercury / Making attempts to write in an ugly way / Having attended previews of our next poetry faculty candidates / Having realized / really / My need to be taught / To teach myself / To mourn my Self the Student / and to write more Um Tears / in the politics of my thesis as it becomes its own municipality.

Thus the nature of the fractal form is not static, but transformative. The term 'fractal object' implies an object that is fissuring infinitely; therefore, there is no possible 'final' or rested state for it to attain. Any image of a fractal object is an artificially arrested version of the real (though abstract) object, which is, of course, impossible to reproduce. Such an image is analogous to a photograph of a person: a body is never that still, but representing it as such can have its uses. This can be equally applied to language, with a word seen as the snapshot, the artificial stoppage of the ongoing motion of meaning. - Cole Swensen

White space becomes the silent medium that connects and supports the more volatile, vulnerable tissue of language, even as it also becomes the absence within the sign system that connects the work to the reading body, the body that is absent from the abstraction of language, the body that recognizes itself in the skeletal white spaces. - Cole Swensen

You think my gait "spasmodic." I am in danger, Sir.You think me "uncontrolled." I have no Tribunal.... The Sailor cannot see the North, but knows the Needle can.

- Emily Dickinson, in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson

[for when I doubt myself]