Environmental Theory

I. My fellow Americans: We are no strangers to war. Your patience grows thin. Drugs, Terror, Afghanistan. Progress seems impossible. What happened to wars we could win? I tell you, we do not know whom we fight. I tell you truly, we do not know our enemy. We do not see what stands before us, chopping away at our territories, taking the lives of our children. We do not see the force that has plotted against us from the beginning of time. I say to you, we are fighting the wrong war. II. I wish to propose, very simply, war against that which causes...

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A Demented Waltz with Dead Russian Officials

How you play is you can either choose a Russian official or a dead author. Everyone wants to be an official because it’s more exciting. Usually Ivan the Terrible gets picked first, and then Rasputin, then Lenin and Stalin and all the more recent ones, and if you go down the row and people start running out of Russian officials they know about, or if they named one that didn’t exist, they can be either a boyar or a bureaucrat and they have to stand on the other side of the room. The kids who have been playing for the longest usually aren’t boyars because...

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8:00 PM

At this moment I prefer nothing to wrapping my arms about her in the dark while her nightlight shines shadows on the ceiling between the ghosts of stick-on stars. There is something delicious about a Beethoven piano sonata punctuated by slow, small, sleepy breaths....

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On Pronouns

She cries nebulas, every sob is something enormous and hazy and vaguely spherical, that’s how I know things aren’t going to be okay, and also she starts apologizing a lot, like “I’m sorry, I’m okay, really,” like it’s all absolute bullshit and we both know it but she feels the need to say it anyway, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry” and I’m like “No really it’s okay” and then “Why are you apologizing” and then “Damn it I don’t actually care that you’re crying, like do you think this is going to ruin my day because really it isn’t, I mean it’s actually kind...

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One night, in this very house, a child was born dead. A man stared out of his window while his wife screamed. That was the first time snow fell on this town. A stillborn waterbaby lies between his mother’s legs; the midwife slices the umbilical cord with a washed knife. The mother screams. The bedsheets are red, but her blood can still be seen dark and glistening against saffron. The sheets are drenched. It was a bloody birth. The midwife hums a song from her childhood she remembers out of nowhere as she calmly rinses off the small corpse; the man stares...

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We got lost in the labyrinth at three in the morning. Wandered in, looked around, tried to wander out but, guess what, there is no way out of the labyrinth at three in the morning. When you get to the center you can sleep; until then you just wander and wander and wander till your feet ache and your legs burn and you cramp up everywhere and want to double over but three in the morning labyrinths are powerful and invasive and they loop in and around you till you hardly know what’s you and what’s alien and your entire body feels like a wound or a mistake and...

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After a while you learn to tell when colors are pretending. You’ll see them everywhere: violent streaks of amethyst, lustrous tongues of jade looking like radioactive angel vomit splattered against walls. Sapphire winding around itself like a mad scientist’s depiction of a double helix, writhing and thrashing and breaking apart like a many-headed hydra, strangled through its own dark and unpredictable fury but always somehow managing to rise phoenix-like from the abyss inside itself it barely manages to contain—you’ll know. You’ll see it leaking out of the...

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