words

coruscate
v. - To give forth intermittent or vibratory flashes of light.

we carp

This fastening, unfastening, and heaving—
this is our life. Whose life is it improving?
It topples some. Some others it will toughen.
Work is the safest way to fail, and often
the simplest way to love a son or daughter.
We come. We carp. We’re fired. We worry later.

That man is strange. His calipers are shiny.
His hands are black. For lunch he brings baloney,
and, offered coffee, answers, “Thank you, no.”
That man, with nothing evil left to do
and two small skills to stir some interest up,
fits in the curtained corner of a shop.

The best part of our life is disappearing
into the john to sneak a smoke, or staring
at screaming non-stop mills, our eyes unfocused,
or standing judging whose sick joke is sickest.
Yet nothing you could do could break our silence.
We are a check. Do not expect a balance.

That is a wrathful man becoming older,
a nobody like us, turned mortgage holder.
We stay until the bell. That man will stay
ten minutes more, so no one can complain.
Each day, by then, he’s done exactly ten.
Ten what, exactly, no one here can say.

Joshua Mehigan, "Work Song"

words

plumule
n. - Bot. The rudimentary shoot, bud, or bunch of undeveloped leaves in a seed; the stem of the embryo plant--A little feather; spec. in Ornith., a down-feather--The plumose pappus of a seed--One of the peculiar obcordate scales found on the wings of certain lepidopterous insects, as Pieridæ

words

col
n. - A marked depression in the summit-line of a mountain chain, generally affording a pass from one slope to the other. A word belonging to the Romanic dialects of the Alps, which Alpine climbers and geologists have used of other regions.

white buildings

from "The Broken Tower"

the english language going to shit

moneyness
n. - Finance. A measure of the degree to which a derivative is likely to have positive monetary value at its expiration.

something in the chemical

11

You come upon it vestigial,
onionous,
the blued tissues exuding.

So what can be spared of the nerves?

The orchid thrives on its loveless foot.
The inward earthworm unminds.

Something in the chemicals
remembering

sunlight scumbled over
water,
those bloodroots of cloud.

Emily Wilson, "Radical Field"

words

scumble
v. - to apply an opaque glaze to an area of a painting to make it softer or duller.

words

paresthesia
n. - a sensation of pricking, tingling, or creeping on the skin that has no objective cause