Mandy Brown quit her job. Robin Rendle also quit his job. I have tremendous respect for Mandy and Robin. They both have written about their experience with candid and honesty. I appreciate what they have shared and glad that they put it out there. I am happy for them that they can get out and move on. With their talents, they will be successful in what they will do next.

Everything they had gone through resonated with me. For eleven years, I loved my job and my colleagues. Then my supervisor retired. She was not happy with her new boss. I was forced to join another team (of two). Then what I loved the most at my job is being hostilely taken away. Soon, every line of HTML and CSS I had written from scratch over a decade will be completely vanished.

I stressed the fuck out, but I decided to ride it out. I don’t want to run away every time I run into issues. I needed to put an end to this madness. I am letting go of the things I cared about but out of my control. I am moving on without leaving. I am taking it day by day. I am preparing myself to be ready for whatever comes next.

What Mandy and Robin had said reassures me that I am not alone. I have four kids to raise. I can’t get out, but when push comes to shove, I know where the door is.

Moneybagg Yo has an infectious flow and he can ride hard-throbbing beats as smooth as a shot of Hibiki, like “Keep It Low” featuring Future. When not boasting about sex (“Super Wet”) or jabbing his baby mama (“F My BM”), Moneybagg reveals his pain and emotion. On “Goin Thru It,” he shares, “Treat her like she wifey, bought her a big karat ring / Soon as we agreed to have a child, she had a miscarriage / Deal with that shit behind closed doors.” Hard to Love contains 20 tracks and the beats he picked are consistently banging. Taking out the misogynistic shit, his lyrics are compelling and commanding attention.

They do not fit their given name. They glow
all day in the sun, without
ever opening up; they are able to retain
their shape and their seal under even the weightiest rain.

They may assert, or believe, that any problem
they notice among themselves must be a low
priority next to the crocuses, always picked first,
or compared to the unwell maple, whose phantom limb,
as recently as last summer, could provide
an afternoon of unreliable shade.
Their practice at holding their own
has made them feel less cultivated or planted
than like something they themselves have made.

Nevertheless it is tough for them to remain
so sanguine; they have arranged
to keep themselves together in almost the same
way they keep other people’s secrets,
even when shaky, at dawn, or nearly asleep.

They dangle and dodge in light wind
as if they were windchimes. They are, also, perennial,
able to outlast frost: they can insist
that the most important fact about them—more
than photosynthesis
or chromosomes, varietals or
Latin names—is just
that they continue to exist.

As well as the overfamiliar valentine,
the thumbnail spade for archaeological digs,
they duplicate the alphabet: a V
for victory, as well as a sort of X
wherever two or three will overlap.
Their bone-white, surprisingly durable
extensions resemble parentheses,
or quills, or claws. Once I heard
them claim that they were eggs,
dragon eggs; one day they would, supposedly, split,
detaching the bloom from the ornamental top,
so that the V-shaped part would drop
to Earth, and low-to-the-ground observers could see
the dragonets discover their feet,
their solarized scales, their yet-to-be-sharpened pairs
of retractable talons. The adults who share, or repeat,
these stories must be, not gardeners, but magicians,
the kind who understand how to escape
from anything, whom you hope
can teach you, too, how to do that.

Some renegade botanists
believe the cultivars can be regrown
from even the slightest cutting: one tendril, one stem.
Other experts think this trick can work
for closely related species, but not for them.

V for vigilance. V for vindication.
After a hailstorm, either V in survived,
in visible and invisible. They are the kind
of students who ought to teach, but will not give lectures,
having determined what parts of their own life cycle
are worth trying to explain
to the outer world, what to reveal from within their clusters
of shoots, their extracellular architecture,
and what belongs, for now, on the inside.

Stephanie Burt

Don Norman shifts his attention from The Design of Everyday Things to Design for a Better World. He challenges everyone, not just designers, to change from artificiality to humanity. We have the responsibility to design a meaningful and sustainable environment for ourselves as well as the future generations. Reading this book makes me want to move beyond designing for digital screens and into designing for a better world. As always, his writing is digestible, but my reading experience was quite slow—due to the typesetting. Gotham Book is a readable typeface, but I am not used to reading a 300-page book in a sans serif typeface.

Dad said if I didn’t graduate from high school
he’d buy me my own beauty shop. And that’s pretty
much how it went. I worked on heads.
      My students gave me wise advice.
One said the best critique came from a friend
who just wrote Wonderful! Keep going! on every poem.
Another said his favorite mentor
      simply put a giant X on any page he didn’t like.
Some had studied with lyric pooh-bahs
who taught them to be coffee wallahs.

Do birds theorize flying? I believe the best poetry
      instruction leans toward the oblique.

“This seems to be a ransacked candle.
This tastes like lowa. This reads
like the shortest building in the world
      trying to be tall. This syntax feels kissed.
This is like a bandage
that takes the skin off with it.
These lines look laser-cut;
      these need to be debrided, flayed.
Forget Esperanto. This is written
in Blackwatch Plaid. Did you use a protractor
or a pen to compose it? That school
      of poetics is called ellipsograph tech.

Lyric poets give their words to the wind.
It’s how the wind stays alive. To riff
on Miles Davis, you don’t have to write
      your poem every day.
You just have to touch your poem
every day. Even if it sounds like mucus
made for the glory of God
      or twinkles like a pissed-off
harpsichord. Even if it groans like a medieval
cathedral, eroded at the groins. You’ve heard

how flaws authenticate a gem? Usher in a stir
      and weird the real. Forget the celestial

and remember the celeste–
an organ stop that’s tuned to dissonance
to torque the note. Tone
      is the soul of poetry.
If you need a title ‘Lonely Consort
Of Wandering Phenomenon’ works
for almost anything. When revising think
      how a robin throwing himself against the glass
won’t change it into air.”
Poetry is never finished.
Only poets are. Some must be
      wrapped in burlap to survive.

Some must flash their stitches ==
though the deepest scars
are hidden, the damaged infra-
      trauma they intend to tell.
One bent her lines backwards
like the ankles of a sandhill crane.
One unzipped his surface to reveal
      his furtive fretwork. They all held their breaths
until their tongues turned blue.
Wonderful! Keep going!

Alice Fulton

Max Berlinger writes for the New York Times about the return of aggressive skating. I prefer aggressive skating as an underdog sport at the skate parks so I just do my own things without being embarrassed.

Human beings suffer.
They torture one another.
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that the farther shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing,
The utter self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
And lightening and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

Seamus Heaney (from The Cure of Troy)

Hero-banner sliders on homepages, particularly on university websites, are obnoxious and a waste of bandwidth. Though sliders can be useful for other purposes. Recently I needed a photo gallery for a personal webpage and I revisited Flickity developed by David DeSandro. It is still one of the best carousels I have used. The documentation is easy to follow. It is definitely worth 25 bucks for a license.

A kind of bird like a swan but more triangular
dives and lifts behind the knives of a tractor—
five paper airplanes poking at turned dirt.

Sometimes, he wears the condom
for hours after he falls asleep. I feel carried.
His body becomes the way I think.

Not being hungry, but wanting
to halve something.

I’ve never finished with a man
without needing to repeat, in my head,
that I want him inside me.

We pass by piles of salt, orange cattle.
He asks me to rate the day.
We both know there’s nothing emptier
than recognition in a new landscape.

Taneum Bambrick

Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and Mike Pence have entered the race. These candidates had once worshipped the ground Trump spat on. Now they all are fighting against him. Ain’t politics a motherfucking bitch? Chris Christie is expected to run as well. Can’t wait to see the GOP pigsty fights.

As for the Democrats, I would like to see a challenger. I am not ageism because I am half of Biden’s age and I already feel so fucking old. Then again, Biden has made historic legislative achievements in his first term. He’ll get more done in his second term. We’ll see.