And work myself into a fire

My poem "Sibylline" is now online at Uncanny Magazine. It is a ghost poem for Vergil, written for selkie. It is not the most important thing about the poem, but Etruscan mirrors are not uncommonly found as grave-goods defaced with the inscription śuthina, "for the tomb."

So let's take a ride and see what's mine

The funny thing about driving is that it invariably gets Iggy Pop's "The Passenger" stuck in my head, even though I am by definition not the passenger at all. Today contained two major adventures by car. The first was planned and lovely: driving out with rushthatspeaks to the Old North Bridge in Concord, where he had never been. We walked around the Robbins House and the Old Manse, the Buttrick Gardens and whatever that meadow is called where the road winds up to the estate, which was full of clover and dragonflies. The river was low but steadily flowing, with geese on the reflections above and fish in the slow currents below. The arm I injured in the move interfered with climbing the first tree I tried, but we had a decent conversation later on while I was sitting in a beech. We came back just in time to miss the majority of the mosquitos and made steak and baby corn for dinner with a sauce devised by Rush from pan drippings, lemon juice, mustard, and parsley. The second was unplanned and hilarious: having collected spatch after work, thanks to a delivery screw-up we found ourselves having to leave again almost immediately in order to pick up the ice cream which we had been hoping someone else would leave on our front steps and not the counter of the Scoop & Scootery. On our way there, we listened to a radio program where people were calling in to tell stories about pickles—it seemed to be a rebroadcast, otherwise Rob who was sporting his Pickles the Great T-shirt from Mamaleh's would have had a moral obligation to call in. On our way back, we tuned randomly in to WHRB and were confronted with what sounded like a calliope with a bone to pick, reminiscent of Lora Logic crucially minus the skronk. It was such ideal late-night student radio weirdness that we kept listening, especially when the succeeding track suggested a jam session that was having a dispute over time signatures and was about to be shut down by the neighbors if the latest coda didn't actually come to a stop. We got no help from the DJ—we didn't even get a DJ—but it appears that we were listening to Wetdog's "Snapper" followed by Storm & Stress' "Dance 'Til Record Skips Like Passengers Shift on Take Off." Frankly I am sold on both bands. I can see I am going to need to make some species of mixtape, since the car to which I currently have access can play CDs but not as far as I can tell mp3s or whatever more technologically hip drivers now use. I may still associate night driving specifically with the Propellerheads remix of Soul Coughing's "Super Bon Bon," but I heard it a lot while learning to drive stick in Gainesville officially more than twenty years ago.