First, Tha NEWS.

As I write this I'm waiting for an axle to arrive for my car, and am avoiding entirely the outdoors. I spent this weekend finally (mostly) finishing the garden layout, one of the few things I had on the agenda this spring, but not, like A Project. It's too humid out today, now. The temp is fine, but no breeze and astonishingly gross humidity is getting to me. Sometime today that axle is supposed to get here though. Sometime.

Last week was spent largely recovering from a week of travel even farther west—Idaho and Montana—and dodging rain and/or heat to catch back up with mowing. I'm not sure how much actual space on this particular parcel is mowed, but it's easily north of five acres. It starts wearing at you after a while, the bouncing, the noise, the shoulder pain. A riding lawnmower may be faster, but it's no less labor in that same amount of time. (An aside: we were talking to Elle's dad the other day and he mentioned that the tractor he has in the fields has a massaging seat. People love to shit on modern farming conveniences, but what they don't get is that the human body was not meant to sit for fourteen-plus hours a day, in the heat and the noise, and still survive. Farming is actually one of the most dangerous jobs there is, both from a fatality and injury standpoint. I know people who have had limbs turned to hamburger faster than anyone could notice. I've seen the aftermath of a grain elevator explosion. Every truck driver I've even known, and there's a lot, have all had back problems. Farming is brutal, and power equipment only makes it that much moreso. Let 'em have their A/C cabs and massaging seats and GPS-assisted steering.)

This week is my last full week at the farm. Early next week I'll be packing up the Fiero and heading back to Chicago. In the meantime I still have to see a zillion people. Well, maybe more like six. But still, it's cramming a lot of emotional stuff into a short period of time, including driving back and forth. I'll miss the fam here. I'll miss the dog. I'll miss the sunsets. I won't miss having to drive for almost 15 minutes to get to the dollar store, let alone a real grocery store. There's trade-offs.

While I was out in Idaho I started a poem that I finished this past weekend and posted to Patreon (sign up for as little as a dollar to read!) I'll be doing the notes for that later this week. I realized while I was out there, also, that I actually don't have that much left to write in 22 CARDS, only three (and a half) of the Arcana and a few pages of Ephemera would get me into full-length territory. It's a nice feeling, knowing that an end is visible. There's a piece of advice I read once that was not to start until you know where you're ending, and that's helpful inasmuch as prose and plot are concerned, but poetry is a little different. Hell, the poem in question doesn't even end in the same spot I originally ended it. Always in flux. So it is with poetry collections. Never finished, only abandoned. But I can abandon it soon and not feel bad about it, and maybe even consider it finished.

Speaking of things that are never finished but only (occasionally) put on a shelf, we released a new episode of the HOORF Podcast today. This season has been a little more fraught than others, with both Elle and I dealing with our various flavors of disability, and we're likely going to do one more episode after this (explaining the following) and then taking a bit of an extended stretch to rethink our structure. We have taken pride in Posting Through It on schedule (I think the only episode we missed was the week my dad died? If even then?) but it's getting harder. We're not gonna disappear completely. It's no big deal, it's just... we have to go away and dream it all up again.

Speaking of MUSIC, the spouse and their band, Sparkling Urbana, have a new album coming soon. Keep your ears peeled here.

One of my favorite little projects, PERVERSE is open for submissions (I don't normally give ups to anything on Substack, but... sometimes we break our own rules.)

All in all, though, all is going according to plan. I'll be back in Chicago for the worst part of the summer (ie, all of it) and will be around for some fun shit like the release parties for Sobotka and Pride and all that. Yeah, lots of people are migratory, and some of them by choice, but I feel like I'm the only person going south during the (northern hemisphere) summer because it's cooler. People don't realize how weather that's good for corn is miserable for people.

Second, INTERLUDE.

Hippo baby, little river horse,
you should be in a river.

O Donika, you should be in love.
~ Donika Kelly, “A Poem to Remind Myself of the Natural Order of Things”

Third, CONSUMPTION.

• Started reading Donika Kelly's The Natural Order of Things and it's fantastic. About halfway through, and will finish before I leave. It's—so far—sapphic goo and I love it.

• I've been reading a lot of Shadowrun content for the game I'm DMing when I get back to the city. Did you know in the late 21st Century, bug ghosts take over Chicago and then the way to address it is to tactically nuke the hive? Yup! Bug City, y'all. None of the actual rules have stuck in my head. This bodes well. Session Zero will basically be "Look you're gonna have to know your shit, because I'm barely holding on here, too."

• I scored a Super NES from a friend, and so the retro game empire expands. So far all we have (again) is Super Mario World, but I'm sure we'll get something going. I like emulation, it's great for both preservation and experimentation, but the OG hardware is just too good to not use. Maybe I'll splurge for one of those fancy Flash ROM carts.

Fourth, HUSTLE.

Books available:

• THE FAILURE EXPERIMENT - a serial poem influenced by 20th century sci-fi and cyberpunk, dealing with love in the age of mechanical reproduction. Novelist KB Wagers called it “a delightful electrical tangle of words and feelings.” A Kindle version is available.

• confessions from a drainage ditch - a collection focusing on growing up rural and how those experiences carry forward, both helpful and harmful. A Kindle Version is available.

• A Void and Cloudless Sky - A chapbook akin to an EP, short and experimental, and containing some of my favorite work. Musician and editor Mer Yayanos says it’s “packed with highbrow references and lofi phrases that beg to be verbalized, to be invoked.” [Note: this is my only “traditionally published” work, and I get no money from it until I hit like ten sales a year. But you get a pdf for free, just for being subscribed to this newsletter! Grab it here! It’s a beautiful object, if you’d rather have a physical copy, though.]

If you're liking this whole project and want to support it directly, here is my Patreon. All paying subscribers receive access to all content I post there, for as little as $1.

Finally, THE OUTRO.

It's Pride Month. Normally I have some kind of thing to say about it, but this year I've been much more subdued with all my political jabbering, mostly because I'm just so fucking tired of it all. But you know what? Every queer person I know is amazing. Every doll, every short king, every femboy and puppygirl and fag and lez and weird goblin who hoards Yu-gi-oh! cards and everyone everywhere in between. We will not vanish without a fight. We're going to live on. We're going to survive.*

As my friend Mer is fond of saying: We fight, loves. We fight.

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*Kudos to you if you recognize this reference. There is no prize, but there is a knowing wink betwixt you and I here.