And the back alleys have that familiar smell of wet leaves, lost dreams, and oil from Shell

Rabbit, rabbit! The end of March disappeared like so much of the month before it in a total lack of sleep. I did not spend most of it as I wished. Current plans are for April to start out differently at least. Wish me luck. Have some links and no joke.

1. Francesca Forrest's The Bee Wife (2025) is a luminous, deceptively plainspoken short story that reads like a cross between a fable, a folktale, and a family story and does not resolve exactly as any of these modes might lead the reader to expect. The beautiful cover illustration is also the author's work. Any day now she could come out with a collection and I would rejoice.

2. Via Gillian Daniels: a fundraiser for the legal support of Rümeysa Öztürk, organized by her legal team.

3. By now JewBelong has scraped industriously through the lithosphere as well as the bottom of the barrel and is starting on the upper mantle, but Anthony Russell's rebuttal and musical receipts are on point.

4. I love to discover new poetry by R.B. Lemberg, in this case "The blanket, the secret, the dark" (2025).

5. I would in fact read a book entitled Blatant Lies About Citrus Fruit.

I am still not especially sleeping, but managed to dream about meeting the future inhabitants of the house of my childhood and they seemed to be doing all right, which would be nice.