We get so strange across the border

My poem "The Direction of Escape" is now online at Not One of Us.

It was written for R.B. Lemberg; it was the product of going to re-read Ursula K. Le Guin's Orsinian Tales (1976) at the current world-historical moment. The title is a line of Le Guin's. The stories it contains are real.

We would die if we'd walk the same

For the first time in nearly six months, I was well enough to join a rehearsal of A Besere Velt this afternoon. It was over Zoom, but it was still good to sing with people. I had not lost any of the songs. I am weighing the safety of the concert in the spring.

As soon as the singing ended, I fled the schmoozing that traditionally follows and ran out into the last of the sunset with spatch. There were shell-pink contrails suffusing the sky as we looked back from School Street. We were revisiting the rubble we had discovered what feels much longer than a week and a half ago. He took some pictures. This is the one that looks most like I'm about to stage a heist.



Coming down Walnut Street, we thought we had found a new stretch of community path running beside the commuter tracks—the chain-link gates were open and the streetlights in their old-fashioned loops of iron were lit—but the farther we walked down it, past the brick-fringed gouge out of the hillside that marked the last traces of A+ Auto Body, the more we realized there was nothing between us and the rails except some wooden fencing such that we could have climbed out onto the overhead lines if we had wanted to die stupidly. We turned back before it passed under McGrath, where the lights and the fencing ran out.

I need to figure out how to write about movies, which I had planned to do much more of last month before a war happened. I remain glad that "The Direction of Escape" found a home.