At night I can see the stars on fire and I can see the world in flames

My poem "Without Prayer or the Place in the Forest" has been accepted by Uncanny Magazine. It was written for selkie; it is snarkily overstating only a little for me to refer to it as A.K.A. The Subtweet About Jewish Magical Realism. It has firebirds. I am glad it has a home.

At the end of a long day with a lot of traveling (I feel betrayed by Daniel Pinkwater—the PATH train went through Hoboken and I did not see a single giant chicken), I had a very quiet evening in which people often sat around different sides of the same room, talking sometimes, sometimes just existing around each other. It was nice. I got fed pasta and chocolate and raspberries and my hosts had stocked goat's milk, to drink warm with honey. Tomorrow I can run around.

Five hundred mug shots and a hundred to one

I slept more than ten hours. I don't know if that was the trigger for the elaborate, anime-ish dream of conspiracies and powers in the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, but I was thoroughly enjoying it by the time I woke, despite having been obliged to go on the run with my computer, my cats, two pieces of jewelry that in waking life my parents never gave to me, and genderfluid semi-immortal Jared Harris. I appreciate my parents not being dead in the dream, because that's not usually the way going on the run with a supernatural conspiracy works in this genre. (My mother gave the semi-immortal conspirators political advice for her exit line.) It is also true that if I discovered myself to be one of the keys of a long game of free will and future-shaping, I wouldn't just leave my cats behind when the confectionary hotel got blown up by people who could turn gravity into time and matter into light. Harris feels like my brain just internalized him as Loki, even though I have seen him generally as very male and very mortal figures indeed, but he was splendid, including when she. I was reading Neil Astley's Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times (2002) before bed, but I don't see how that explains it. Anyway, it was great.