#annesha mitha

[llovelymoonn]

favourite poems of march

miki schumacher de / re / formation

craig arnold pitahaya

brian turner here, bullet: “what every soldier should know”

eileen myles not me: “peanut butter”

noor hindi breaking [news]

jane hirshfield my species

annesha mitha you are a tyrannosaurus rex

mary ruefle among the musk ox people: poems: “blood soup”

alice notley mysteries of small houses: “as good as anything”

nomi stone on world-making

k. silem mohammad poems about trees

franz wright the break

fred marchant the looking house: “night heron maybe”

carl phillips cortège: “domestic”

alexa luborsky connotations

bruce smith the other lover: “to the executive director of the actual”

nikky finney head off & split: “the aureole”

alice fulton personally engraved

amy beeder because our waiters are hopeless romantics

chiagoziem jideofor self-preservation

carol muske-dukes skylight: “the invention of cuisine”

joyce peseroff a dog in the lifeboat: “april to may”

rigoberto gonzalez other fugitives and other strangers: “other fugitives and other strangers”

toi derricotte the undertaker’s daughter: “my dad & sardines”

tarfia faizullah yr not exotic, but once ya wanted to be

jenny george the artist

jack spicer a second train song for gary

victor hernandez cruz maraca: new and selected poems 1966-2000: “red beans”

xi chuan power failure

jean valentine door in the mountain: new and collected poems, 1965-2003: “sanctuary”

duane niatum drawings of the song animals: new and collected poems: “consulting an elder poet on an anti-war poem”

kofi

[rubyfire777]

personal update 10.28.2023 💫💕💗

good things that happened this week:

i had a wonderful date night with lily. we went out to see friday the 13th at art house (in the chapel theater too <333 ugh) and got bill and tims after. she'd never been but she thought it was lovely inside and of course she loved the pulled pork she got :) when we got home we watched part 2 and 3 (i tapped out and went to bed 30 minutes into 4) and those ones were not good but it was so fun to watch with her :) i love just watching things with her

quint and i watched halloweentown for movie night! i hadnt seen it in a few years, but my sister and i used to watch it and the next two movies in the series every year. it was a lot of fun to see it again with him!! its silly

got my covid booster so ill be all juiced up with immunity for kumoricon 💪💉

bowling night with darren! i had a pretty bad fatigue crash in the middle of it but we all still had a lot of fun :)

went to breakfast at ihop with my mom and sister for my moms birthday, picked up some treats at sweet life, and went on a little road trip to see smiley face hill! it wasnt very bright and it was hard to find somewhere to view it from, but it was very cute

i survived a really hard mental health week. late october through november is a seasonal trigger for me (even though i love this season) and it hit me hard this year... but i got through!!!

new sailor sitting weird images just dropped

sailor desk adventures

new art experiences this week:

albums:

happy heartcore (spott, 2021)

rainbow parade (cerror, 2009)

pure fire (toriena, 2020)

movies:

friday the 13th (dir. sean s. cunningham, 1980)

friday the 13th part 2 (dir. steve miner, 1981)

friday the 13th part 3 (dir. steve miner, 1982)

short stories:

"the waiting room" (annesha mitha, 2023)

[creativitytoexplore]

https://ift.tt/33hdxdo

Annesha Mitha, “No One Wants to Be Here Forever”

“When Mrithika first came home, she expected, selfishly, that she would be taken care of. She didn’t account for the tumors found on the ultrasound screen, curled up with the dog’s wet organs. She didn’t understand how much care a small body like the dog’s could absorb. But now, the dog is fed pills stashed in Vienna sausages three times a day. She’s held until she falls asleep, and her messes are cleaned up with bleach that warps the floorboards. As Mrithika slowly regains her strength, or rather, learns how to move with the pain still inside her, she and Cupcake haunt the courtyard like ghosts in training.”

—

Joyce Carol Oates, “The Redwoods”

“At first when it was happening, when the process of dying began, Vanbrugh hadn’t paid attention. Exactly like Vanbrugh: not paying attention.

On the phone. Concentration elsewhere. (In fact, ignominy of ignominies, he’d been on hold.) Couldn’t be bothered to take heed of a physical symptom. Or two, or three.

First twinge of headache, nausea, gut cramps, fever—Vanbrugh’s strategy had always been to ignore. Onset of flu, diarrhea—ignore for as long as you can.

Not a hypochondriac. Indeed, the antithesis of a hypochondriac.

Priding himself on being fit. For a man of his age, unusually fit.

And so, Vanbrugh had no idea it was dying that swept through him like a child running through a house switching off lights.”

—

Amy Sauber, “I Am the Man with the Horse”

“I stroked my insanely lifelike Kanekalon fiber mustache in the way guys do when they want to appear meditative. I really looked better as a man. But what did that mean? I took in my new self in that lambent, paranormal light: bolo tie, denim shirt buttoned to the neck with flashy pink-and-red-sequin roses embroidered on my shoulders. My jaw became more square. I felt a keen, quiet tug in my heart. You would have never known the feeling was inside me. I sang a bit of a gunfighter ballad.

Jim let his hand fall limply over his other arm. He said, ‘Now, go break some hearts.’”

—

Mary South, “Camp Jabberwocky for Recovering Internet Trolls”

“Lately, Camp Jabberwocky, a summer retreat on Martha’s Vineyard for troubled teens in need of an attitude adjustment and a healthier relationship with social media, had been receiving more than its usual share of drive-bys. The perps were a bunch of townie jock douchebags, scum of the island, who rolled by in an Infiniti—or some other car with satellite radio and a navigation system—and shouted obscenities intermingled with lines from the famous Lewis Carroll poem. They were trolling the trolls, so to speak. ‘Beware the Jubjub bird! Suck my dick!’ they would shout. ‘All mimsy were the borogoves, you fucks!’”

—

Lisa Taddeo, “The Psychomanteum”

“The psychomanteum is run by a psychic whose name is Kate.

She lives at the top of Topanga Canyon, where the real bedlamites roost, snarfing bananas and being Neil Young. Her father was on a long-running and very popular TV show from the eighties, so she is dilapidated Hollywood royalty. Nobody at anyplace current knows who she is, but if you walk into the lurid diners on Hollywood Boulevard, drink a hot black water from a Styrofoam cup with a dead fly floating at the top and say her full name within earshot, the owner with the jaunty terriers inside his nose will perk up, white-smock over to you, and wax about her dad.”

—

Ted Thompson, “The Electric Slide”

“Do you remember, she says, as a kid, and you flinch, knowing that the answer is usually no, though you have to pretend it’s yes. When you woke up one morning and cried and cried because you said everything had changed? And when we got in the car, just you and me, you told me that sometimes you wake up and the world is totally different and you don’t understand anything anymore? How lonely that is? Tears fill your eyes as you nod. I still think about that. She reaches for the weed gizmo and you hand it to her. She laughs. You were like a little crybaby poet and you had no idea, she says, and together you listen to the music of the frogs.”

[heyangella]

The Social Security Death Index is also called the Death Master File. It has no record of my father’s death (and I’ve tried), because he died after 2014, and perhaps those records aren’t yet public, or perhaps I’m not looking hard enough. Maybe, in a few years, he’ll live there too. And did you know that you may get a call one day about a debt that isn’t yours? It’s called zombie debt—what happens when a number from your past comes to haunt you, an electrical bill of twenty dollars that blooms into thousands, or else when your name aligns with someone who is dead, and the collectors, not knowing the difference, hound you as their ghost. There will never be fewer numbers in the world, just as there will never be fewer ghosts, or fewer numbers of the dead. Time passing means more, not less, and though this is obvious it is also astonishing. For months I used to call my father’s number, hoping, strangely, that he would answer, that his lack of ghostliness would end. And one day, someone did—a man’s voice, far younger than my fathers, slightly nasal. My father’s number was reassigned—did you know that they do that? I still have my father’s number saved on my phone, under the gibberish name I had changed it to once after a fight so terrible I didn’t even want to see “Baba,” which seemed to me more his name than his name, on my lockscreen when he called. And though his number lingers in my contacts, it now leads down a different path, to a different voice and a different life, a different history, too. Sometimes I want to call that old, abandoned number, and ask the young man who answers: Do you know that you are my father’s ghost? But I never do. And though I may also have a phone number of the dead (as do you), I have yet to receive one of these calls myself.

Catapult | What Happens to Our Numbers When We Die? | Annesha Mitha