Glittery pastel creemee appliques

The seller's photos of the creemee appliques for Yamarrah's sweatshirt do not encompass the sheer tackitude of these decorations, so I have scanned my own appliques.

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I can just imagine the designer's thoughts:

Okay, this needs to be REALLY BRIGHT. I'll do light pastels: pink and blue. Wait...I really like pink. Better add some magenta. And canary yellow. 

Hmm...still not enough. I know! Besides pastel pink and baby blue, the creemee swirls should be iridescent purple. Tres glitzy.

I don't know. It's just not POPPING.

Hmm...Hmmm...

Well, of course! The cones need to be polka dotted! And the ice cream needs stars on top!

...Whaddaya mean -- a Bedazzler would put us over budget?! I wanted rhinestones!

Fear not, frustrated designer! With the small adhesive rhinestones from among my supplies, I will rectify such a grievous decorative omission!

I just ordered Not Your Mother's Rules...

 Previously excoriated sight unseen here. I got it for throwing against the wall scientific purposes, I swear!

As much as I depend on NOAA's weather.gov...

...for my local forecast, I seriously query their pride that Mark Trail, terminally dull protagonist of the long-running eponymous "comic" strip [since 1946 -- shoot it already!], champions NOAA weather radio. As Mark Trail would say, "What th -- ?" Pretty much any character has more charismatic cachet than Mark Trail.

The Lady with the Pet Dog by Anton Chekhov

Translated from Russian by Avrahm Yarmolinsky.

My favorite paragraph is, incidentally, the last:

And it seemed as though, in a little while, the solution would be found, and then a new and glorious life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far off, and that what was to be most complicated and difficult for them was only just beginning.

Apology by Richard Wilbur

A word sticks in the wind's throat;
A wind-launch drifts in the wells of rye;
Sometimes, in broad silence,
The hanging apples distill their darkness.

You, in a green dress, calling, and with brown hair,
Who come by the field-path now, whose name I say
Softly, forgive me love if also I call you
Wind's word, apple-heart, haven of grasses.

I love the language here, especially the "wind-launch," with its connotations of air caught in the depths of long grasses. And the apples, "distill[ing] their darkness" -- what does that mean? I think of tangy fermentation, cider, fall, secrecy, something somber, witnessing and slightly menacing.

And that enjambment in the second stanze -- "whose name I say / Softly " -- wow! A word sticks in the speaker's throat as a word sticks in the wind's throat. It's such a regretful poem, a melancholy evocation of thwarted feeling.

The one thing I like by D.H. Lawrence

The dude generally pisses me off with his fucking stupid misogyny and gender essentialism, not to mention racism, but I do love this poem:

Death Is Not Evil, Evil Is Mechanical

Only the human being, absolved from kissing and strife
goes on and on and on, without wandering
fixed upon the hub of the ego
going, yet never wandering, fixed, yet in motion,
the kind of hell that is real, grey and awful
sinless and stainless going round and round
the kind of hell grey Dante never saw
but of which he had a bit inside him.

Know thyself, and that thou art mortal.
But know thyself, denying that thou art mortal:
a thing of kisses and strife
a lit-up shaft of rain
a calling column of blood
a rose tree bronzey with thorns
a mixture of love and hate
a wind that blows back and forth
a creature of beautiful peace, like a river
and a creature of conflict, like a cataract:
know thyself, in denial of all these things --

And thou shalt begin to spin round on the hub of the obscene ego
a grey void thing that goes without wandering
a machine that in itself is nothing
a centre of the evil world.

Frankly, I ignore the fact that someone's been reading too much Freud and return to this poem for the middle part: the quintessence of glorious, vacillating humanity. "A calling column of blood" -- what a perfect evocation of our physicality and our longing for emotional connection.

D.H. Lawrence really hates machines... He especially has it out for electric wheelchairs [ref. Clifford Chatterley]. Fuck off, D.H. Lawrence!

I'm ignoring the title.

...which is A Christmas Tree, which I think somehow cheapens the whole thing by making it some trite, pallid God metaphor.

A Christmas Tree
by William Burford

Star,
if you are
A love compassionate,
You will walk with us this year.
We face a glacial distance, who are here
Huddld
At your feet.

I like the personification of the astronomical body, the begging of warmth across the chill of space, the abject genuflection of the insignificant people [who are so insignificant that they can't buy another vowel for "Huddld"]. It's a desperate and rather hopeless plea.

Question by May Swenson

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

Swenson does the best poetry of the body. I love the enjambment in "Body my good / bright dog is dead." It's like the speaker loves life so much that she actually breaks off in the middle of the thought before getting to "dead" because she's so stuck on the goodness and brightness of being an embodied being. I also like the phrase "wind for an eye" because it implicitly continues the house metaphor by subtly recalling the etymology of "window," from Old Norse "vindauga," or "wind's eye."