it’s been January for months in both directions
- Kaveh Akbar, “Wild Pear Tree”
Even the memes agree:
Indeed, this January has contained so much. The fascist bro-ligarchs are as explicit as ever about their greed and fears. Los Angeles was in flames and in New York temperatures bounce between unseasonable highs and low-lows. It’s a “quademic” and everyone seems to be just getting over “whatever is going around.” Bad Bunny transported us forward into a Nueva York summer, one decolonial bop at a time.
Perhaps the exhaustion stems from realization that all of it, not just January, has been ongoing; that some of this month’s beginnings—Gregorian, inaugural, or otherwise—are false ones. Deportations have been happening before this administration, too much of our air has been dangerous for a long time, and surveillance over our digital lives has always been.
This year, I’ve resolved to do less to do more. I love a theme, of course, so I made my first book of 2025 a re-read if Andrew Sean Greer’s novel Less. I’ve been cleaning out closets, inboxes, and personal archives, which has taken on particular meaning listening to accounts from LA talking about the impossibilities of packing a to-go bag. Even after the Great (14-hour) Tik Tok Outage of 2025™ had passed, I did not go back to the app. The dystopian language about the ban and its triumphant “return” were enough to have me disengage. I’ve been seeing friends announcing similar departures on my Instagram feed, encouraging alternatives (including Substack) to keep in touch. This shift has liberatory potential, though the challenges are nuanced. What does anything close to an exodus mean for folks who rely on social media channels to stay connected in the context of isolation (from COVID, and otherwise), or who rely on it to fundraise or survive? [I’m still on Instagram, at least for now, and are aiming for this newsletter to be monthly. Also! If I’ve sent you a postcard in the past, I’d love to hear from you, and if you’d like a postcard from me, feel free to reach out.]
This question of gathering, in all of its forms, remains a tenuous one. Hellgate recently reported on the consequences of New York City banning outdoor dining sheds, which have significantly reduced the non-indoor options for eating together. I relate to the isolation folks expressed in the article, a feeling intertwined with sadness and anger at the many structural failures that have contributed to this particular flavor of hellscape we’re living in.
And yet, we keep creating alternatives together. Just yesterday, I went to the Crown Height Mutual Aid / Crown Heights Care Collective Free Store — where mask-wearing, goods-sharing, and food-serving was abundant. Next Saturday 2/1 (the end of January, at last!) comrades at Celebrate845 are hosting a Virtual Dance Party (Also, ICYMI: Kevin Gotin, AKA DJ Who Girl, of Crip News, was recently on Kelly Clarkson (!) talking about crip nightlife). For those in Brooklyn, anna rg (part of A.I.R Collective, which has a whole calendar of cleaner-air events) is playing new songs at The Owl Music Parlor in a masked required show with yaz lancaster (whose Poetry Project Marathon performance was stellar) and gg200bpm.
Looking ahead has been comforting this season. I’ve been planning Spring and Summer travel, adding books to my to-read list, and as always grounded by collaborators. Ry and I are excited to announce another year of the Long Poem Support Group, which starts next week on Discord!
Join us anytime this year:
Continuing to look ahead to not-January, exquisites is continuing our virtual winter workshop series with the lovely Aishvarya Arora, who will be hosting ‘my own self / my quarry’ on Thursday, February 6th (Free RSVP here):
To close, I want to go back to Akbar’s “both directions.” I’ve been thinking about the tensions between simplifying and simultaneity, between slowness and urgency, between abundance and too-much, between the kinds of accumulation that happen out of steadiness and those that happen out of anxiety. How can we develop strategies where “both directions” doesn’t mean binary or strain but instead means possibility? How can we think about units of time in ways that untangle them from capitalism and bring us closer to cosmos, nature, and lineage? How can we reclaim this collective feeling that one month has seem to have contained many as a way to experience expansiveness, to make connections from the overlap?
Wishing you care for this last bit of January and beyond and beyond,
d
P.S. I want to share one of the postcards I got from Visual AIDS Postcards from the Edge fundraiser, which is still live (and currently having a BOGO sale!). Check out some amazing work for a worthy cause.
