Today was sunny, so we trimmed the fuck out of the yard. M mowed the whole thing and I edged a bunch, plus continued in the great trash clean up of forever, because there is literal garbage all over every nook and cranny of this property. Edging is pretty good meditation, but now my wrist aches like a broken heart.

I also read from a new book-in-the-mail: Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. The first essay made me want to download Chance the Rapper. I first read Hanif in the March Shredness competition, where he wrote about Bang Tango. I really like this line: “I imagine a song endures by the way it still finds its way out of our bodies in the years after it was imagined to be forgotten.”

Yesterday, I went to hear Tabitha Blankenbiller read from her new release: Eats of Eden. I read an essay about the death of Portland and how to make a facsimile Bahn Mi that I want to try.

I also knit a bit on a sweater and graded some student work, both, even though they killed my wrist. It was a good day, and except for a few flares, the wild animals in my mind were kept at bay.