Fern (do over)

This storm is named Fern. A cat named Fern scratched Ilya once.

There's a perfect moment in Yuri Norstein's "Сказка сказок"("The Tale of Tales") where a cat sleeping on a table in the garden, reaches over and snuffs out a candle with his paw. 

In the same film, a woman peels potatoes, while rocking a baby to sleep in a carriage.

This week I held four different babies, ranging from five months to twenty-four months old. The eye contact was intoxicating. The powerful grip of their little hands: five baby fingers to my one thumb, the drawstring of my hoodie, the temples of my glasses.

At the party where I held two of the babies, a friend of a friend told how he'd worked in a daycare in Texas at age sixteen, where he was responsible for four babies, and paid $7/hour. Now he is a programmer.

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I find myself starting emails with "I hope you are well as can be in dark times," and it feels like too much and not enough.

The algorithm surfaces stories about a deadly roof collapse in Katowice, Poland, during an international convention of mail carrier pigeons, and it takes me much too long to realize that this catastrophe happened in 2006, these are twentieth-anniversary posts.

I want to chuck the internet across the room but all I can chuck is the phone itself, the unlikely expensive container of the internet.

There is other news, actual current events, that cannot be contained, they are in motion now and will proceed until they resolve, they are a runaway truck. Will they choose to turn onto the runaway truck ramp, the arrester bed, the fire road? Will such an exit even be available to them?

I don't hear people talking about moving abroad "to weather the storm" anymore. Perhaps the ones who could do so, did already, and perhaps the others realized how hard it is to leave your home and start over. Or perhaps they understood that there isn't really anywhere to go, even if they could gather their rosebuds and their courage. I mean, have they watched any sci-fi?

I make Divinity School from scratch without AI. The writing and the photos here are all my work, always. Thank you for reading, please share near and far!

I forgot to tell y'all that I would be reading new work at Hearth Gods in Brooklyn on Saturday night. Yeah, I did that! I almost didn't leave the house because it was so damn cold.

The next Hearth Gods will be in March while I'm away at the writing residency, please go!, because we're out here making our art no matter what. It's just one way to participate, and resist.

Save the date – March 25 – for a launch party for SEARCH WORK: A Collective Inquiry into the Job Hunt, edited by Rachel Meade Smith (OR Books, 2026), available for pre-order now.