We are not dead yet: ONE LESS BRICK IN THE WALL

The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.

Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them

where (no detail too small) the Pacific drains

rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,

he stares at the dragging grains. 

37 years ago today, on May 18, 1980, Washington’s Mount St. Helens erupted in a blast that killed 57 people and covered a huge swath of the western US with ash and destruction. Alan Taylor, who grew up nearby and vividly remembers the eruption, shared some photos of the eruption and its aftermath at In Focus.

It was a land of ghosts.  An estimated 1.3 million people were sent to the camp, of whom at least 1.1 million died . . .

In the following decades, survivors such as Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl, and Elie Wiesel wrote memoirs of their experiences in Auschwitz, and the camp became a dominant symbol of the Holocaust

I want no tombstone.

Bury me near the cold river

close to my friends

under the red leaf tree

not in the ism section

where thawed ground collapses.

Don’t hold me down

with some monument.

Sing something sweet.

I’ll listen near the stream current

There were 10 to 20 of them, scientists and philosophers. They met on Thursday evenings, calling themselves the Vienna Circle. We're still struggling with the aftermath... Circle on Dunaj River 

HARD TO ARGUE WITH THAT: Kurt Schlichter: The Big Problem With Hollywood Is Its Product. “We need good stories with interesting characters doing things we have not seen before in worlds we don’t inhabit. It’s not hard. That’s what made The Godfather work (at least the first two times).”

 

In Search Of The Mysterious Author Of A Memoir From Inside The Gulag

“How the diary emerged reads like a detective story, with Zoya Eroshok, a prominent Russian journalist, spending years piecing together the identity of its author and her fate. … [The] diary is believed to be the only one written inside the camps to have survived.”

 

Tonight, as you undress, I watch your wondrous
flesh that’s swelled again, the way a river swells
when the ice relents. Sweet relief
just to regard the sheaves of your hips,
your boundless breasts and marshy belly.
I adore the acreage
of your thighs and praise the promising
planets of your ass.
O, you were lean that terrifying year
you were unraveling, as though you were returning
to the slender scrap of a girl I fell in love with.
But your skin was vacant, a ripped sack,
sugar spilling out and your bones insistent.
O, praise the loyalty of the body
that labors to rebuild its palatial realm.
Bless butter. Bless brie.
Sanctify schmaltz. And cream and cashews.
Stoke the furnace
of the stomach and load the vessels. Darling,
drench yourself in opulent oil,
the lamp of your body glowing. May you always
flourish enormous and sumptuous,
be marbled with fat, a great vault that
I can enter, the cathedral where I pray.