No matter what you do, you're going to learn the truth

There were two girls waiting for the bus last night when I left the theater, against a concrete wall in the dirty sodium light. I didn't have a camera on me and I couldn't have gotten them in those orange-peel shadows and the flash of passing cars, but I can't write about them without making them sound like chess pieces or a Tarot card. I should have had a better view of the girl on the left; she reflected more—white skirt, short-sleeved linen blouse, a straight fall of peroxide-platinum hair. The one on the right could have been posing, except that I also slouch against walls with just my shoulders and gravity; the streetlight made her hair as black as her tank-top, a two-tone illustration, the same color as her cargo pants. I don't know their relation to one another. I thought they were talking, but I didn't hear anything said. I want them to be daimons of the city, one of those pictures that says everything about a time. They were probably students.

No, not those, those are my time-travel trousers

1. My poem "Taking the Auspices" is now online at inkscrawl. The rest of the issue is impressive, too—selkies, Catullus, cities in translation.

2. I still don't know that I'm going to see Tomas Alfredson's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011), but I will take any excuse to read an interview with John Hurt, especially when he talks about weedkilling and Facebook: "I think people should be protected from being made to feel that they want to know what somebody famous had for breakfast."

3. Counteract Orson Scott Card; help rachelmanija list queer main characters in genre YA. Also, write Hamlet slash.

4. Courtesy of someone I met, appropriately, on Sunday at Tea: chap-hop.

5. lesser_celery and I are starting Millennium (1996–99) tonight.