Today

war is media filtered and heightened by the bots who channel through our clicks and likes

our preferences bring us straight into the bloody horror of what soldiers can’t erase

we feign surprise that civilian are targets despite the centuries of this standard practice since everyone made this their go-to wartime strategy like Hiroshima like London like…an endless list of those blown apart worlds and people haunt us through nighmares

but cynicism feels rough feels like the howling wind

raw

snowflakes blow about a few feet higher than me and I am transposed to wonder

“People are asking if the far right in the U.S. is influencing Russia or if Russia is influencing the far right, but the truth is they are influencing each other,” said Thomas Rid, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who studies Russian information warfare. “They are pushing the same narratives.”

“What I regret is that in a hearing about my qualifications to be a justice on the Supreme Court, we have spent a lot of time focusing on this small subset of my sentences.”

“I think that there’s going to be not only a guerrilla war, but there’s going to be civil resistance where, you know, people get poisoned when they go to the restaurant, sharpshooters are on roofs picking off Russian soldiers. It’s going to be long and ugly, but this is a people that fights back.”

Court battles over redistricting are pending in at least 15 states.

The highly contagious Omicron subvariant, known as BA.2, accounts for the majority of global cases, the W.H.O. says.

“The team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes — he did,” Mr. Pomerantz wrote.

There is always a hill ahead when you run about in this town and you must get up and over it if you wish to continue on your journey which of course I very much want to do

so I push myself even when I am wrestling with four difficult students

four oh let’s be real and call it eight extra pounds along with the possibility of a world war

an already problematic and tainted mid-term election

our preposterous rent increases and lack of housing from coast to coast

hills are just the day to day so this one I climb and thank on this midweek dash up

what else can we do can I do can you do

I ask with some hope that there might be an avenue sideways a sort of way out.

Black crows fly over the field and caw at the turkeys who pick at the dirt while I run past

don’t ski those trails anymore but still am glad to see the white strokes cutting vertical lines and zag about and can still hear those voices hey mom watch this watch this mom

I filter the photo to find a green

instead of the brown and dreary that I seem to be lost in oppressed under

seeing how a filter can lift me up and refresh I am glad I did it, added that green tint

and the streaks of blue in the sky and fought to crest the hill after feeling so impossible when I first started out

always we applaud the rise but here we must acknowledge the fall too, right, once we’re up

the dream deferred that rots and festers and never blooms until it does

In the doorway I howl at those who feel justified in stealing Kings words to use as theirs

when the whiteness of their privilege opens country club doors and puffs their self sense like peacocks strutting and questioning Ketanji Brown Jackson like they have some sort of moral authority over a person who speaks like an American like they never could

Howl again as the parking lot fills with oversized SUV’s so massive they not longer fit between lines but line your children’s lungs with perceptible poison and kill off this living

Howl like a Beat who dared to raise a cigarette in the air and denounce something entrenched in the dusty his-tory books now being sold as the only truth the only one the the the righteous right of their being white but we tell another story

 Howling and ranting until the dawn broke us open into another war killing babies

What is it I can teach you about I wonder when I step inside and they watch me from their desk and I drift off into my own loss and madness and desire and doubt that peace will come

How is it that we are all left to howl on these evenings with no audience but sequestered