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I've moved over to here now: https://specimensdays.substack.com/

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Dogs First

On the trail to our cabin, the wind shifts & sculpts the landscape at whim, hurling blankets of sustained 30 mph gusts across the tundra & depositing snow in undulating moguls that cover over our precious tracks. We see gales of up to 75 mph fairly routinely. I have skied home ten feet behind my wife on many occasions & been unable to discern her tracks. Say a word & the wind will carry it aloft & away. Drop a liner glove or a hat & you wait until spring to retrieve it. In the places I’ve lived prior to Alaska, I’ve known snow to behave in any number of ways. Here, for whatever diaphanous splendor it may reveal in the structure of the flake, it is always, always dry. When it drifts, the sugary weight of it transforms into the consistency of concrete. People use chainsaws to dig out trail. & when the wind & the snow conspire, people here know precisely what to expect & what to do. No matter the temperature, our community knows to check routinely o...
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For Mohammed Nidal Hisham Atallah, Age 0

  I repeat myself, Mohammed, but there is In repetition pulse of encounter– language Shored between borderlines of meaning, Dehiscing, almost, repulsed at notions of Fixedness. Syllabary of caul– to speak Into it is to emerge from it, anew. How many Births in you Mohammed? How many trailing Narratives ribboning time, riverine histories Carved of rock & rubble? Your midwives  Percussive blow & encroaching eruption.  Your attendants soot & black ash, rifle Report & mother’s wailing. You were born On a cemetery, headstones rubble of blasted Buildings, concrete & rebar, shattered wood, Glass like silver light off tremored water.  The dirt beneath century-deep, yet unsettled.  This is your history now– hiding the voluminous Dead under pavement & parking lot— Mohammed, we emerge from ourselves  Under the quick of our speaking. Our rooting Chutes & tunnels through the fragmented Syllables of names we’ve buried– Mohammed Nidal Hisham Ata...
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January 20

This morning I sat through the inauguration upstairs, the bosses smug in their pajamas, barking at the television, slurring ejaculates firing out of their fat lips. What a thing to witness. I live among Palin supporters, old guard Republicans who extol Christian virtue out one side of their mouth while spitting vitriol always out the other. Obama a terrorist, Obama not even a citizen, the “negro situation,” the elegance of Laura Bush, the accolades due her husband. I left the room after a comment about how blacks might finally get their acts together, went to pull weeds from the superfluous garden of these superfluous people, to tend to shoots & weeds & improve their lives even as they go about the deleterious business of condemning everyone else’s. At 11:30, I rose from weeding, nauseous with the morning, with what I was doing. I came in & packed for an hour, ate & went back to work. The neighbor stopped over in the afternoon to join the chorus & pitch polemics at ...
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