"I'm Waiting for the Ecology of District 6 to Right
Itself"
Dreamed
that there were regular housewarming parties at someone else’s house,
always
the same person’s house who was not moving.
It takes us longer to do everything, and we don't make any money.
Someone always has their leaf blower going.
Derek
in my dream, standing on the bed in workboots,
which
would horrify him to do in reality.
The
shadows of light, geometric, hard to look at.
I
used to memorize it every day.
"It would take thousands of bees to make enough waste to look like rain. Why would so many bees be in such specific locations, and why would they be pooping at the same time?" – On the Yellow Rain phenomenon/probable chemical warfare in South Asia
Celebrating
function words.
"We
are draining humanity’s lifeblood through vampiric overconsumption."
“Don't
seek the truth.
Stop
cherishing opinions.”
Two
levels in my dream, but like levels in school
as
well as a first and second level with stairs.
“How do you save a house?” – Angel Dominguez
My ephemera archives.
Pre-earthquake weather earthquake weather.
The Buddenbrooks effect.
“Conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty.” – Brian Eno
Alice Babette.
"The paper is a psychic capacitor." – The Booksellers
"Snow from When the Earth Was Healthier"
Confusing Cruel Optimism and Cruel Fiction.
Most of our relationship has just been me admiring his t-shirts.
Making lists of lists I’m going to make.
"These might seem like minor footnotes, but for a band whose leader conceived his work with a monomaniacal focus, they represented a proud embrace of directionlessness."
Remembering
today that there is a word in the Bhagavad Gita
that
is a cognate with samasthiti, meaning those who stayed behind
while
the others went to war.
I am in the market for phrases.
Not everything can be fixed.
"A so-called private military company (PMC) Wagner, also known as ‘the Musicians’ and alleged to consist of 25,000 convicts-turned-soldiers, marched on Moscow." "In Kyiv, Ukraine, popcorn and champagne sold out." – Zarina Zabrisky
The yoga aisle empty during lockdown.
"Sometimes spangled and ramshackle."
[Glazer] doesn’t “generally use very long shots, but he does use every other element of the currently ascendant rhetoric of the art film — distance, disidentification, naturalistic lighting, and bans on the closeup and on almost all camera movement (the most the camera moves is for sober trucking shots)."
The difference between belonging and not belonging can be subtle.
“Are you from the priory?”
Dots on a subway map.
I
wake up out of the dream and see a face and a camera, and I jump,
but
then realize it was part of the dream.
One day, one day will be every day.
"It's a Christlike vision to have a fundamentalist Islamic state."
"I Don’t Look Forward to the Weekend at All”
"They burned everything and took everything. We did not bring anything with us. We have only God and our clothes." –Asiya (of Sudan) (Last name redacted)
The virus you keep to yourself.
It
was in my apartment I live in now,
but
because it was a dream, it was very different looking.
“Radical passivity.” – Jack Halberstam
Sometimes I’m just shy about conversations.
“Old maid mermaid.” – Alice B. Toklas
All the daughters of everyone I went to elementary school with are always in pointe shoes.
"Marx became a materialist in 1841." – Schaff via Engels
“This wasn’t an analog rebellion.” – Damon Krukowski
One of those biographies that is just disputing what other biographies have said.
"Tosca" or "Turandot."
“I
was too poor to buy a horse skull for the festival
but
where there's cardboard & paper mache there is a way.”
Filming a film is the beginning of the film.
Hive mind questions for the purpose of marketing/engagement baiting.
Nightmare about ICE and they all have ice picks.
Placation is compromised.
“Habitation
for Hejinian involves a particular understanding
of the process of indexing.” – Charles Altieri
A blue heart from a blue bag.
“Books
organized around the border between
timeless
concepts and contingent examples.” – Lytle Shaw
My
choice went that way.
The Four Types of Cyclones
Epistolary book review.
My students tell me widows with children in Saudi Arabia get free housing.
“Despite battling a fever and being on the brink of death, Plato… retained enough lucidity to critique the musician [music was played on a flute by a Thracian slave girl] for her lack of rhythm, the account suggests.” – Lorenzo Tondo
Medical cruise.
I forgot about that jacket. I forgot about that memory, that bully.
Typewritten notecards.
“Intimacy isn't a choice.” – Violet Spurlock
The famous rattlesnake sound.
Thinking thoughts that are not quite words, but a sequence of events.
Just a backdrop to a nostalgia.
Andy Warhol and Gertrude Stein, paralleled doubles.
Famous for their image slightly more than their works.
The unintelligibility of difference.
“Disc golf obstacle.”
“The dynamic of our happening to notice things, our coming into coexistence momentarily with them, but stopping short of the need to possess, categorize or contain them.” – Emily Critchley
Aggressive breakfast energy.
Balloons as refuse.
Overheard: "Do you think that dog looks like Neapolitan ice cream?"
I am probably implicated in my very own critique.
The end result of a life lived having never learned how to cope and adapt.
Carrie Hunter received her MFA/MA in the Poetics program at New College of California, was in the Black Radish Books publishing collective, and edited the chapbook press, ypolita press. Her most recent full-length collection of poems is The Flow of the Poem's Display of Itself (Roof Books, 2025). She also has books out with Nightboat and Black Radish Books. Her latest chapbook Eva (not Eve) came out with Antiphony in early 2026. She lives in San Francisco and teaches ESL.
