He's just upset about missing the Rembrandt exhibit at the National Gallery

1. We have a bed for real. We've been sleeping on a queen-sized futon mattress on the floor since the beginning of the year. As of this evening, the mattress is on a queen-size, non-futon slat frame and the smaller futon, which had been serving as a kind of intermittent alternate bed (derspatchel and I couldn't share a bed most of the time he had his cast), is now a living room couch. This is like receiving two pieces of furniture in one stroke. Someday we will want another, sturdier bedframe—this one is two generations inherited—but the salient point is that the mattress is no longer on the floor and I am really looking forward to sleeping no longer at eye-level with dust bunnies.

2. The History Blog, despite its rather generic name, is a one hundred percent bona fide time sink. As of page six, I am perhaps most fond of the sheep of the White House, the fixed prizefight in 267 CE, and the Emperor Claudius and the ithyphallic god Min, but the tattoo stamps of Auschwitz are awful and haunting. I had not known that was how it was done. I know that the generation of World War II is dying out, because that is my grandparents' generation and neither of them is any longer alive, but I had not thought so concretely of the living fact of those numbers disappearing, turning into symbol and signifier. Something to be evoked, like imperial laurels or no man's land. Everything turns into memory, but there has to be a way to keep memory real.

3. Rob took these pictures of me tonight outside the HFA. We hadn't gone to the movies; we were walking back from Kendall Square. I had broken a sprig of lilac from a bush as we passed and handed it to him; he put it in the band of my hat. "If this comes out," he said during the second photo, "you're going to look like a goddamn Rembrandt."

Fair cop.

( RENOIR! )

I am going to take a shower and sleep on my non-floor bed.

Where do we begin our dismantling?

New guidelines for poetry are now live at Strange Horizons!

We'd been working for some time with the guidelines left by the previous team of editors, which were technically accurate—no more than six poems per reading period, no simultaneous submissions, no attachments without checking first—but increasingly less representative of our tastes in poetry and goals for the department. We decided to change that. (To be pedantically honest, rinue and ajodasso raised the question and I realized I'd just started telling people to ignore everything in the current set except the submissions address. And no simultaneous submissions. Seriously, we reject on sight for that.) New guidelines now reflect poets we actually like and the ways we feel about formal verse and science. We welcome experimental forms and diverse voices. We want stuff that transforms. We're pretty sure it's out there; we just hope it wants us, too.

Which reminds me: I'm still reading for the remainder of May. If you haven't sent me work, why not? If you know anyone who hasn't, ask them the same!