“The stories he told himself about his own perilous and erratic progress through the world would be reshaped to place this anal ailment at the summit of his pilgrimage.”
From the novel My Lover, the Rabbi, by @waynekoestenbaum.bsky.social.
“The anal specialist—‘my butt doctor,’ the rabbi proudly called him—did not forbid anal intercourse.”
From the novel My Lover, the Rabbi, by @waynekoestenbaum.bsky.social.
"To the rabbi I’d promised a loyalty so primal and regressive it almost qualified as a throwback to a totalitarian, fascistic style of erotic attachment."
Fiction by @waynekoestenbaum.bsky.social:
jewishcurrents.org/my-lover-the...
"It wasn’t the rabbi’s cock I wanted in my face, it was the sense of annihilation and relief that rushed over me when his cock finally arrived to smother and obliterate my restlessness and ambivalence."
Fiction by @waynekoestenbaum.bsky.social:
jewishcurrents.org/my-lover-the...
“I, without a prehistory, became his forbidden, verklempt possession.”
Fiction by @waynekoestenbaum.bsky.social: jewishcurrents.org/my-lover-the...
From my past, this stirring and enigmatic phrase, Emerson’s, returns to me, like a keepsake I’d misplaced, and I am roused almost to action by the forgotten question’s reappearance: “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to nature?”
U.S., horror-catalyst, ungoverned land
in which I live and sometimes thrive —
paradox of dwelling inside this mallet
striking and destroying—
self-disgust at dwelling
inside the unlawful arm
reaching without pity or deliberation
into other people’s schools
and sanctuaries—
Two sentences from my forthcoming novel. @fsgbooks.bsky.social
An excerpt from my forthcoming novel, “My Lover, the Rabbi,” to be published by FSG in March 2026. harpers.org/archive/2026...
in an undoctored photo, I’m waving hello or goodbye to you
this morning: looking out my dirty, south-facing window, through a scrim of succulents:
They want to pollute the globe because they are the very incarnation of pollution.. They understand only pollution. It’s their lingua franca, their touchstone, their method, their core.
“A two-grappa boy goodbye / I insist on an ocean” — alert, terse, erotized poesy by Ryan Skrabalak, published by speCt! books in Oakland, 2024
I’m back. Not dead. Still sane. Still skeptical.
I’ll come back
Good people are arising like unbidden annunciating angels to counter these eruptions of unleashed state-sponsored violence.
fantasy: tomorrow morning the 25th Amendment will arise from its long sleep and kick ass
Join us for a performance lecture by poet, artist, and CUNY Graduate Center alum Ronaldo V. Wilson embodying form and place through language, dance, song, and video. Introduced by poet and artist @waynekoestenbaum.bsky.social
centerforthehumanities.org/event/still-...
@thegraduatecenter.bsky.social
Double-exposure studio self-portrait, 35mm Kodak T-MAX P3200 film
A pleasure to take these pictures of you!
“I would wish that only women could vote.” —Hannah Weiner
Tonight, Friday, Oct. 10, in Brooklyn, from 6-9pm, I debut 22 new cyanotype assemblages in a solo show at “B” Dry Goods, 679 Franklin Ave. Shown here: Marlene Dietrich’s Seconals.
“Someday, / someone will stand before you, and you’ll / realize / time is just a trick by which the sun renews / its vow to the flowers.”
—Selma Asotić @archipelagobooks.bsky.social
Now I’m getting ads for Snapple on Instagram. I’ll never buy Snapple. I’ve never bought Snapple. Doesn’t the algorithm know that I’m not susceptible to Snapple? Why bother trying to recruit me to become a Snapple devotee? Observe how degraded and coarse the strategies of capital have become.
“Thought does not progress in a single direction; instead, the moments are interwoven as in a carpet. The fruitfulness of the thoughts depends on the density of the texture.”
—Theodor W. Adorno
“It is sometimes possible to put the fallen petal back / on the flower.”
—Alice Notley
New order — Farbiarz orders Khalil’s release for 6:30 pm CT. He must surrender his passport, and the gov has to give him a copy of it and his green card.
Sometimes I just stop, shake my head, and think how ridiculous it is watching my country be destroyed by a demented old man just because some white people are afraid of the future.
