Left
︎︎︎ Selen
︎ Nov 20, 2025
To try to like anything deeper than sex
(unless it leads to that)
just makes me sleepy now.
My heart's a backward
heading-forward engine
quieting and cooling.
Heart, be something other
than a heart
with its back turned to me.
It grieves me that grief repeated
like a word repeated faithfully
has no sense to it.
Everything blurs except the blurring.
The first day I feel good again
will be like entering this little room
I've left the lights on in
and passing out, no problem.
(unless it leads to that)
just makes me sleepy now.
My heart's a backward
heading-forward engine
quieting and cooling.
Heart, be something other
than a heart
with its back turned to me.
It grieves me that grief repeated
like a word repeated faithfully
has no sense to it.
Everything blurs except the blurring.
The first day I feel good again
will be like entering this little room
I've left the lights on in
and passing out, no problem.
For William and Kristine
︎︎︎ Curtis Yarvin
︎ Nov 19, 2025
We all died in Covid.
Owl Creek Bridge. This
Ambrose Bierce future,
Increasingly surreal
And certainly virtual,
Brings virtual children:
Emigrants from an alien
Star. Here to learn
Our ways and take our place,
They come bloodied, blinking,
Demanding, with their first
Cauled eyes, instant
Obedience. And we are as dogs
Whose master has come home:
Souls made not just
To reign but also serve.
This first service now
First painful, then menial—
Work for a slave or a dog.
A splinter of the cross!
The male, of course, feels
Fractions of this crucifixion,
And consequent transformation—
Small for this third son,
Who will never know me
At my own age today—
In ‘77. Lol.
How is this the future?
A world too strange for words,
And my place in it strange,
A haunt of hanging dreams—
Remembering that I died
Like everyone in ‘20–
Or with Jen in ‘21.
The clouded newborn eyes
Of our alien overlord,
Bluing to his mother’s glass,
Care nothing for the past,
Our “beautiful oak door.”
That was your dream, they say.
Feeble as this being is,
His every cell is perfect.
Mine are raked with sun
And smoke and meat, bit
Decay and cosmic rays.
They will not always do
What I want: and this world
Prove as fake as I thought.
The child of late youth
Is later partner in crime;
The child of middle age
Will stand at your bed
As mine at their mother’s bed.
The family is a nation;
All politics is loyalty;
All realities are false.
In November the Pacific storms
First sweep brutally in,
Hard rain and blue,
Testing roofs and roots,
Rooting April’s grass—
Each California season
Unimagined by the last.
These waves are all we have.
Let faithful mother bring
Forth faithful child—
Though planets rot around us.
Owl Creek Bridge. This
Ambrose Bierce future,
Increasingly surreal
And certainly virtual,
Brings virtual children:
Emigrants from an alien
Star. Here to learn
Our ways and take our place,
They come bloodied, blinking,
Demanding, with their first
Cauled eyes, instant
Obedience. And we are as dogs
Whose master has come home:
Souls made not just
To reign but also serve.
This first service now
First painful, then menial—
Work for a slave or a dog.
A splinter of the cross!
The male, of course, feels
Fractions of this crucifixion,
And consequent transformation—
Small for this third son,
Who will never know me
At my own age today—
In ‘77. Lol.
How is this the future?
A world too strange for words,
And my place in it strange,
A haunt of hanging dreams—
Remembering that I died
Like everyone in ‘20–
Or with Jen in ‘21.
The clouded newborn eyes
Of our alien overlord,
Bluing to his mother’s glass,
Care nothing for the past,
Our “beautiful oak door.”
That was your dream, they say.
Feeble as this being is,
His every cell is perfect.
Mine are raked with sun
And smoke and meat, bit
Decay and cosmic rays.
They will not always do
What I want: and this world
Prove as fake as I thought.
The child of late youth
Is later partner in crime;
The child of middle age
Will stand at your bed
As mine at their mother’s bed.
The family is a nation;
All politics is loyalty;
All realities are false.
In November the Pacific storms
First sweep brutally in,
Hard rain and blue,
Testing roofs and roots,
Rooting April’s grass—
Each California season
Unimagined by the last.
These waves are all we have.
Let faithful mother bring
Forth faithful child—
Though planets rot around us.
Curtis Yarvin is a Bay Area writer.
GONDWANA
︎︎︎ Anna Krivolapova
︎ Nov 18, 2025
We are five hours from the ocean and the crabs aren’t fresh. I cover the dining room with paper until it looks like a padded cell and climb onto the table before everyone arrives. I wait for my guests like surgery. In a few hours this room will be painted iodine, with orange enamel crunching underfoot and hammers trading hands across my face. I will disappear under piles of spice, fossilized in rock salt, resisting my guests’ attempts to pry up my carapace and taste my thoughts. I am scraping the cage. I want to call you. I am thinking about the way your arch fits my cheekbone, my size ten telephone, Brazil and West Africa, together again. There are hundreds of crabs scattered across this table and they all have your eyes. Of my seventeen guests, nine have a vulgar way of dangling you by the claw. I am starting to understand why you came with a quiver of mallets. You make everything look like a nail.
Anna Krivolapova is the author of the short story collection Incurable Graphomania.
Something Awful and Beautiful Is Coming
︎︎︎ C. Sandbatch
︎ Nov 17, 2025
Op. VI — Cantata in G Minor
I. To My Bishop
(For Marguerite Porete)
His mitre, his style.
My habit: an open vein.
They all said:
I blasphemed.
I say I scried
the breath of God
with thighs unsighed.
What heresy
is this?
II. Tidy
As one travels
inward, through the mind,
four winds gather,
stroking seams of sandy hills.
Is it not conquest,
drinking the small surge
of touch imaginal?
Here, at one thigh’s shadow?
Towards there
my thoughts incline.
III. The Daylight Moon
On accident, perhaps, by chance,
this shiny ore struck
against the sky’s blue velvet lining.
You loiter, wan diorama, fortune
strained but no longer hiding.
An afterthought
to evening’s dress,
wandering noonward,
unresolved,
a question
left unpressed,
a riddle
none have solved.
What calls you forth to lunchbell chimes?
Is it hunger, for stars, for dreams?
These shadows swung at awkward time,
or a feast of uncurtained beams?
Does not your soft intrusion prove
our “conquest” is
but cunning delay,
a pause,
an unremembered foray,
from a throwaway scene
in some forgetling play?
IV. Speak, Roman
(Fragments from Valerius Aedit(i)us)
Why do you carry a torch, Phileros? We will not need it.
Like this we’ll go, enough flame in my chest already.
That flame, the wild rush of wind from Heaven,
breaking, bending, sudden calm,
the tempest dampens but cannot drown.
When I try to tell you, Pamphila, the trouble of my heart,
Whatever I want
to ask
of you,
When from my lips the words depart
Sweat, sudden, seeps through my chest;
So, silent,
blushing,
gripped by shame,
I
die.
As for this– fire of Venus,
except for she herself,
no power, none, can quench it;
and even she, descending,
might hesitate, might smile.
V. Phaedra, Consummatum
Strophe
(The moon announces)
Not meant to appear,
and yet, yes, I loiter
against the stone ledge,
seeking water’s edge.
Sliding my riparian body
across your thoughts.
Antistrophe
(Returns the querent)
Like torchlight in oil,
imaginal, yes,
but real as the breath
held between
“come” and “don’t.”
Your song was broken Persian,
mine an old Slavonic lullaby:
where your voice goes, I burn.
I was the here
at the shadow
of your one bent leg.
I was the inward curl.
I was not conquest.
Epode
(The moon resolves)
So I did it.
I slid his body in through my belly…
It’s done.
Writing to him
in those soft languages
heard only
when the gods are watching elsewhere.
He moved
like a riddle none should solve,
with delay,
with dark design.
I called it
my forgetting.
I called it
my breath
held too long.
VI. When Again He Meets You
(Riffing on the Exeter Book)
When again he meets you,
he’ll take you in his arms;
he’ll listen, really listen.
Then again, you two will live,
in just one home, and share two lives,
joined by the same love.
And no power in this world,
neither darkness nor fate,
will part you ever in the night.
VII. Fifteen Minutes — Grey Evening, Copper Patina
Sways through the glass, shyest shining fire,
and I with it conspire to understand;
to dance, to touch almost that incandescent wire.
Fifteen minutes, but not yet, not yet.
Upon this pyre, my heart, unwilling, still unable to forget.
O pulse too quick for what these eyes have seen,
O joy too fleet for any heart to bear;
Fifteen minutes, then the spell will break,
Lethe, not time, will cool this fevered ache.
But, oh, not yet!
Once to her I was gold, or thought. Not so.
Still, faintly she to me whispers, bittersweet:
“Hold fast the hour; our heartbeat lives with thine.
This burden, this crime, a bower bell
Thrust upon the choir of
your evening chimes.
Yours, though, I am not,
at least, not yet.”
End of the Cantata in G Minor
I. To My Bishop
(For Marguerite Porete)
His mitre, his style.
My habit: an open vein.
They all said:
I blasphemed.
I say I scried
the breath of God
with thighs unsighed.
What heresy
is this?
II. Tidy
As one travels
inward, through the mind,
four winds gather,
stroking seams of sandy hills.
Is it not conquest,
drinking the small surge
of touch imaginal?
Here, at one thigh’s shadow?
Towards there
my thoughts incline.
III. The Daylight Moon
On accident, perhaps, by chance,
this shiny ore struck
against the sky’s blue velvet lining.
You loiter, wan diorama, fortune
strained but no longer hiding.
An afterthought
to evening’s dress,
wandering noonward,
unresolved,
a question
left unpressed,
a riddle
none have solved.
What calls you forth to lunchbell chimes?
Is it hunger, for stars, for dreams?
These shadows swung at awkward time,
or a feast of uncurtained beams?
Does not your soft intrusion prove
our “conquest” is
but cunning delay,
a pause,
an unremembered foray,
from a throwaway scene
in some forgetling play?
IV. Speak, Roman
(Fragments from Valerius Aedit(i)us)
Why do you carry a torch, Phileros? We will not need it.
Like this we’ll go, enough flame in my chest already.
That flame, the wild rush of wind from Heaven,
breaking, bending, sudden calm,
the tempest dampens but cannot drown.
When I try to tell you, Pamphila, the trouble of my heart,
Whatever I want
to ask
of you,
When from my lips the words depart
Sweat, sudden, seeps through my chest;
So, silent,
blushing,
gripped by shame,
I
die.
As for this– fire of Venus,
except for she herself,
no power, none, can quench it;
and even she, descending,
might hesitate, might smile.
V. Phaedra, Consummatum
Strophe
(The moon announces)
Not meant to appear,
and yet, yes, I loiter
against the stone ledge,
seeking water’s edge.
Sliding my riparian body
across your thoughts.
Antistrophe
(Returns the querent)
Like torchlight in oil,
imaginal, yes,
but real as the breath
held between
“come” and “don’t.”
Your song was broken Persian,
mine an old Slavonic lullaby:
where your voice goes, I burn.
I was the here
at the shadow
of your one bent leg.
I was the inward curl.
I was not conquest.
Epode
(The moon resolves)
So I did it.
I slid his body in through my belly…
It’s done.
Writing to him
in those soft languages
heard only
when the gods are watching elsewhere.
He moved
like a riddle none should solve,
with delay,
with dark design.
I called it
my forgetting.
I called it
my breath
held too long.
VI. When Again He Meets You
(Riffing on the Exeter Book)
When again he meets you,
he’ll take you in his arms;
he’ll listen, really listen.
Then again, you two will live,
in just one home, and share two lives,
joined by the same love.
And no power in this world,
neither darkness nor fate,
will part you ever in the night.
VII. Fifteen Minutes — Grey Evening, Copper Patina
Sways through the glass, shyest shining fire,
and I with it conspire to understand;
to dance, to touch almost that incandescent wire.
Fifteen minutes, but not yet, not yet.
Upon this pyre, my heart, unwilling, still unable to forget.
O pulse too quick for what these eyes have seen,
O joy too fleet for any heart to bear;
Fifteen minutes, then the spell will break,
Lethe, not time, will cool this fevered ache.
But, oh, not yet!
Once to her I was gold, or thought. Not so.
Still, faintly she to me whispers, bittersweet:
“Hold fast the hour; our heartbeat lives with thine.
This burden, this crime, a bower bell
Thrust upon the choir of
your evening chimes.
Yours, though, I am not,
at least, not yet.”
End of the Cantata in G Minor
C. Sandbatch is an American writer.
Your Teeth Are Books
︎︎︎ Joel Reber
︎ Nov 15, 2025
Your teeth are books
The medical establishment has hid this from you
They’re tiny white books
You mustn't read them
They contain forbidden knowledge
The medical establishment has hid this from you
They’re tiny white books
You mustn't read them
They contain forbidden knowledge
Joel Reber grew up in Arcata, California, and now lives in Oakland.