In my heart of mine I talk to you about my actual favorite matter

Happy Halloween. I wish I were not awake at this hour. I hope to have something more seasonal later on.

1. My poem "The Firebird's Revenge," published in January in The Cascadia Subduction Zone, is now free to read online with the rest of its issue. It was written last spring for Rose Lemberg and is basically what it says on the tin. Other cool stuff in this issue includes poetry by Mark Rich and Bogi Takács.

2. Autolycus just leapt onto the desk at a particularly inconvenient angle, nearly knocking over several stacks of books before he was returned to the floor. The books stacked currently on my desk appear to be:

Richard Barrios, Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (2003)
Peter Conrad, The Hitchcock Murders (2000)
Derek Jarman, Kicking the Pricks (1987)
Derek Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion (2000)
Caitlín R. Kiernan, Silk (1998/2008)
David Kruh, Always Something Doing: Boston's Infamous Scollay Square (1999)
John le Carré, A Legacy of Spies (2017)
Marina J. Lostetter, Noumenon (2017)
Jean Potts, Home Is the Prisoner (1960)
Steven J. Ross, Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America (2017)
Valerie Taylor, The Girls in 3-B (1959)
William Wellman, Jr., Wild Bill Wellman: Hollywood Rebel (2015)
Stanley Wiater (ed.), Richard Matheson's The Twilight Zone Scripts: Volume One (2001)

I may have interests.

3. I hate loving a movie so much that I don't know how to write about it.

Bookshop, fifth floor, eleven

So I ran out of the house in order to purchase candy for children and canned food for cats (note: do not confuse) and got home to discover that a DVD of the one-time, original ABC Stage 67 production of Evening Primrose (1966) was waiting on my doorstep courtesy of ladymondegreen. I had plans for this evening, but they might have to change. Thank you!

It's much too good a story not to tell

My poems "אש לבנה חרותה באש שחורה" and "If it will help you think of me as Sappho" are now online in the debut, queer-themed issue of Blossomry. The Hebrew means "white fire engraved with black fire" and is one of the traditional rabbinic (Shimon ben Lakish, c. 200 CE) descriptions of the Torah which in characteristic fashion I discovered through the science fiction of Phyllis Gotlieb. The antecedents of the second poem should be present in the title. Both are one-line poems, which I had never written before this summer.

The rest of the issue is small and excellent, featuring both usual suspects and strangers to me. I am totally in favor of a tradition of Halloween-published poems, although having just watched something of a cautionary tale about poets in between running downstairs to hand out candy to trick-or-treaters (whom I have been mostly spotting from my office window, lights on and shades up so that they can see that someone is home, since the front stoop light is on a motion sensor and therefore cannot be left on like a lighthouse for roving packs of children dressed primarily as superheroes this year; this system has been working, but it totally makes me feel like some sort of silhouetted recluse), I am perhaps a little more mordantly amused than the occasion directly warrants.

"You're a poet. You'd have to put it in a poem. It's much too good a story not to tell."