Joshua Corey's Blog, page 3

100 Words: Blue mind

Blue mind, the opposite of screen mind, though screens shed the blue light that breaks up your sleep, shatters the pupil’s track, leaves us raw and rusty and red; blue mind in the sky, blue mind in the water, a puddle or a stream or Lake Michigan calling to me as it does nearly every day from a few blocks away, sitting at home feeling myself and everything tip and slide in the direction of infinite water. Today I’ve slipped up to a secret sliver of beach and dunes that Wilmette keeps to itself—dogs, kids, no masks. Dizzyingly normal, blue.

100 Words: Intricate thicket

Intricate thicket of breezing clouds, depths of darkness depending from their bellies, below which invisible curtains of pollen wrench from me one sneeze after another. The pastoral of our political degradation goes on, even as the antibodies in the body politic leave their mark on the whose streets our streets. Under the pavement, the beach; under the beach, the living possibility of change. But will the new boss be the same as the old boss? And what of the virus which our society seems hellbent on forgetting? It all goes down the memory hole—but the sky, denser each day, remembers.

100 Words: Wind pushes through

Wind pushes through strange cells, like micro-climates on the run: rain, then intense heat and humidity giving way to cleansing breezes, and now it’s almost chilly, gray to the east and the west while overhead poke through patches of blue. Wind in tree branches like a sustained loud hush, like so many fingers pressed to so many hissing lips. All around me the world gropes toward a normalcy it can scarcely remember and that I can scarcely credit. We careen on, a country without leaders or a plan, inertia of the absence of imagination superheating these massy and doomful airs. 

100 Words: The arc

The arc of this President’s moral grotesquery is long; let us pray that it bends toward justice, or if not justice toward power to the people who deserve it most and enjoy it least. Wind after rain, dark gray patches chasing light ones in the sky, and the surface of the lake roughs up like the fur of a cat rubbed backwards. A massy cloud due east of me like a formation of land, black mesa topped by white riders. They’re burying George Floyd today but his name will live on—I wrote “love on.” How soft the air is today.

100 Words: Once more

Once more unto the breach of the day, of summer teaching—faces on a screen on a June morning to whom I’ll try to teach what I know about metaphor and story and how no two things are really alike except in the imagination, by crossing the imagination’s bridge from the familiar to the unknown and back again with prize in hand, like Odysseus returning informed from the underworld at the price of besting back his mother’s shade with his sword. It is easy to lose track of days, of hours lost, of the gap between sunrise and sunset, of days.

100 Words: Step in now

Step in now to the pastoral of protest, the rich text of which spreads itself like a banquet cloth across every available public surface, restoring as though from memory the suppressed fact of the public’s existence and most sacred qualities. In my town’s central square a holiday atmosphere, a sober jubilation of white, black, queer, Asian, disabled, Middle Eastern. The voices of speakers rise and fall, none louder than the sound of the crowd itself—the sound of listening, the sound of long-stokes rage, the sound of trust rediscovered, risk of trust. For a moment with my daughter, I believe everything.

100 Words: Our building’s a pod

Our building’s a pod, six sheltering families, and we’ve gathered together in our small backyard to celebrate three of our children who are graduating from 8th grade. Two of them find robes to wear, one’s in his usual uniform of t-shirt and shorts. What desperate hopes we have for them, the new generation, charged with the unenviable task of undoing some of the damage we did when we thought we were simply living. They will surpass us easily enough, simply by being themselves, awake in a cruel century. We dance, we grill, we throw our arms high. Defund the police.

100 Words: Everything under heaven

Everything under heaven is in total chaos, remarked Mao, and added: the situation is excellent. Under heaven everything is gentle humidity, clouds capturing the waning sun and turning white light into color. The three of us bicycle through quiet streets, dusking from house to socially distanced house; dinner with friends in their backyard and a visit to the front yard of others where we talk while their new dog races himself in the grass, hysterical with joy. Nothing changes until everything does. I capture a bubble of chaos in my chest, like a hope, and it carries me lofting home.

100 Words: Is it possible

Is it possible, I ask myself, to retreat any further. Step into my bedroom and close the door. Outside the window the familiar, almost comically bleak blankness of the white siding over the staircase attached to the neighboring building, sulphurous brick, the hammering gray sky. It starts raining. Drifts on my lap, a friend, a second self inscribing the Möbius-strip satisfactions of writing about writing. Each particular drop of rain has its inch of earth into which it sinks. A flood is coming, a human flood to wash inhumanity away. I’m listening in my bedroom, writing out of the rain.

100 Words: Grief attacks the heart

Grief attacks the heart. Wind pushes in strangely regular waves through treetops—no, it’s the gasp of a university building’s ventilation system. And a dog unseen passes by, tags jingling. Out of habit or reverence I return to the water, still tonight, the light posts casting long rippling doubles of themselves across its surface. I feel alone. The heart sinks under repeated blows, riding lower and lowe in the chest until it’s in my bowels, leaping up again hurting my against the diaphragm. I can’t breathe. But the air is quiet and the waves are calm. Alone, small, with the world.