She's going to sharpen her teeth

[sovay]

My contributor's copy of Not One of Us #71 arrived in the mail, containing my poem "A Correct Interpretation." I wrote it for the yahrzeit of the molasses flood, incorporating other Boston disasters and the way that time seems to have become one long residual haunting since the spring of 2020. The title comes from the definition of a ghost in Nigel Kneale's The Stone Tape (1972): "Let's say it's a mass of data waiting for a correct interpretation." Other variations on the theme of nothingness are provided by Eric Horwitz, Emmie Christie, Holly Lyn Walrath, Paul Michael Anderson, and more. The black-and-white covers by John Stanton are especially, eerily apt to the contents of apocalypse.

I prefer my apocalypses on the page. Who doesn't, I would have said, but then it turned out that people don't avoid the plague at all. I have donated to Planned Parenthood. I can't make the rapid response protest organized by the Beyond Roe Coalition for the corner of the Common across the street from the State House at 5 pm, but I hope everyone else within range can and does, since I haven't wanted to replace our governor with an artichoke for the last six years for nothing. It isn't irony to make it clear that the security of bodily autonomy is up to the individual while the unrestricted escalation of gun violence and unfettered police is constitutionally imposed, it's just cruelty. The point. Groundwork. May the earth drink them. There are so many people for so long now whose lives produce nothing but suffering and yet the other kind are the ones we always lose.

I just wanted to get up from sleep broken by spam calls and make scant notes on a movie I have no time to write about and pack the rest of my home into cardboard boxes and despair on the ordinary, personal level. I have no room in my disintegrating life for further grief or rage or struggle. And yet I keep having to excavate it. Hit bone, keep digging. I would like to live on someone else's marrow for a change.

P.S. spatch has made me aware that our governor has met the artichoke minimum of this crisis: "and this executive order would protect providers who perform these services for out of state individuals as well as individuals from out of state who seek services that are lawful in Massachusetts."

Comments

[gwynnega]

I look forward to getting the new Not One of Us in the mail.

The news this morning was such a gut punch.

[sovay]

I look forward to getting the new Not One of Us in the mail.

I hope it arrives soon! (I look forward to the next thing you have in the magazine.)

The news this morning was such a gut punch.

I was not resigned to it. I hope that if I am human I will never be.

[minoanmiss]

I hear you.

*hugs you supportively*

[sovay]

*hugs you supportively*

*hugs in kind*

[troisoiseaux]

*hugs*

[sovay]

*hugs*

*hugs*

[selkie]

*hugs*
I'm so lazy. I hate that I will be fighting until I die. Isn't it boring? No one asked us. Ugh.

[sovay]

I'm so lazy. I hate that I will be fighting until I die. Isn't it boring? No one asked us. Ugh.

We'll sleep in the zemlyanka.

*hugs*

[aurumcalendula]

*hugs*

[sovay]

*hugs*

*hugs*

[skygiants]

genarti and I were at the protest -- it started out as two small separate protests across the Common from each other, but then they linked up and started marching and just grew exponentially the further we went, all the way down to Copley and then back to the State House. I haven't seen that big a crowd on the street since 2020.

[sovay]

I haven't seen that big a crowd on the street since 2020.

Good.

(I'm glad you were there.)