For the first few months, I was irritated by red notifications which bubbled up over my phone app like a rash. But over the years, it’s become a source of comfort.
Giovanni Battista Bracelli
In 1624, Giovanni Battista Bracelli—an Italian engraver and painter working in Florence—produced an extraordinary book of prints titled Bizzarie di Varie Figure (Oddities of various figures). Its forty-seven plates show a variety of human figures mainly interacting in pairs, their bodily forms composed of a range of objects, mostly abstract—cubes, interlocking rings, and squares—but also such things as rackets, screws, braided hair, and the natural forms of trees. From Public Domain Review.
Here’s A Little Song
Sometimes I ask people about their first memories. Most involve Christmas, or a vacation at Myrtle Beach, or a tracheotomy victim blowing balloons out of his neck-hole.
So Maybe It’s True (and other poems)
But, oh, to live awhile as marrow
in someone else’s bones,
to breathe her breath upon the mirror held up to your life,