The other night, I had the best pistachio ice cream of my life at this shop in Princeton called Halo Pub. I mean, life changing, really, the pistachios soft but still a little chewy, the ice cream rich and homemade-tasting, man. Made the half hour line more than worth it. I’ve already been back one, and I imagine I shall continue to go, especially since the place I’m moving into later this week is closer to it.

“JUST THE WIND FOR A SOUND, SOFTLY”, Carl Phillips

I really like this line, It is hard to see anyone who has become like your own body to you. And yes, much of what I see in others that I love is myself, and yes, when I have broken with others, it was often me trying to break with a piece of myself that I found brought too strongly by a certain person.

“[Intimacy unhinged, unpaddocked me]”, Diane Seuss

The intimacy theme is good, though standard, and I find the last two lines rather nice. One doesn’t really suck on frozen sugar water. One allows it to melt in the oven of the mouth. How quaint. How presence and genuineness and engagement trumps brute force and intention, though I suppose often brute force and intention can? be a part of the former nouns and I’m not quite sure what to do with that. The next time I see Diane Seuss’ book in a store (it’ll be what, the fourth time?) I’m buying it on the spot.

“Summer”, Chen Chen

Another dose of Chen Chen–his tones are impeccable. The word splendiferously, the Pokemon reference and video game scoring that runs through it all, and particularly the ending. And I know this is meant in a particular setting, but fathers seem to be in the business of forcing their sons to change in whichever ways they can muster. I was thinking a few days later (today, when I’m backlogging this) about how if you take emotions to be like gradients for gradient descent, I’d been giving gradients my whole life and my father ignoring them and continuing to construct my neural network weights manually using his own gradients, which have been static for many many years now like his own network weights. And then I end up here, bursting from his grasp, and my network weights are so far away from the gradients that I continue to output and how to descend now that more is being asked of my network and the weights are starting to harden, condense and the stakes are in theory higher?
Another favorite line: Your powers are great, are growing.

“Self-portrait Toward a Fugue [No. __ in __♭Minor]”, Michael Wasson

This poem gives me Ocean Vuong on the surface level. I’m not super compelled by it. Which has made me think a bit about why Ocean Vuong is so good at what he does, and of course it’s not on the surface level images and words and all but some derivative of it, some tone that makes me feel held in its gentleness even when anguished, this analysis is incomplete but forgive me, I’m still only halfway through Time is a Mother.

I don’t like that I’m titling this one “intimacy unhinged”. I mean, it fits, but that title feels like it should be used on a more intense post. If, or when I end up with a more fitting post, I shall come back and rename this one.