Turchino Rain

"ICE Out" by Charles de Lint (free PDF version)

ICE came to Newford. Big mistake.


For:
Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres
Geraldo Lunas Campos
Víctor Manuel Díaz
Parady La
Renee Nicole Good
Luis Beltrán Yáñez–Cruz
Heber Sánchez Domínguez
Alex Pretti
murdered by ICE


I've been an activist for decades. I've done marches and letter campaigns and all the usual stuff. The technique I've found with the highest throughput of people saying, "I did the thing!" is plain old storytelling. Stories are part of what makes us human. Stories bind the past, explain the present, and imagine the future.

For bards, this is our fight. This is how we fight. Pass it on.


EDIT 3/5/26 -- My contribution is "The Express Bus to Crazy-ass Death Land."

This year I'm doing Community Thursdays. Some of my activity will involve maintaining communities I run, and my favorites. Some will involve checking my list of subscriptions and posting in lower-traffic ones. Today I have interacted with the following communities...


* Posted "Books" in fantasy.

* Posted "News" in fem_thoughts.

* Posted "March Meta Matters" in fictional_fans.

My poem "Find a Way Forward" has been published in first_nations_freaks. 

Extreme weather is exposing a dangerous flaw in modern buildings

Most of us don’t see buildings as life-support systems. But that’s exactly what they are. We sleep inside them, work inside them, shelter from storms inside them, and retreat to them when the air outside feels like an oven.

People spend 90% of their lives in buildings, and those walls, roofs, and windows act as a protective ‘third skin’ from the elements.


Shelter is a survival need. That doesn't just mean a place to stay. It is primarily about protection from threats such as sun, heat, cold, precipitation, predators, etc. If it doesn't perform those functions, it doesn't count as shelter. In America, shelter is classified as a paid privilege rather than a human right. That's a problem already, but in the future, it will lead to many preventable deaths.

( Read more... )

This is today's freebie, inspired by a prompt from gs_silva. It also fills the "ribbon" square in my 3-1-26 card for the National Crafting Month Bingo fest. This poem belongs to the series Alien Romance by gs_silva.

( Read more... )

The Poetry Fishbowl is now CLOSED. Thank you for your time and attention. Please keep an eye on this page as I am still writing.

Starting now, the Poetry Fishbowl is open! Today's theme is "World Cuisine." I will be checking this page periodically throughout the day. When people make suggestions, I'll pick some and weave them together into a poem ... and then another ... and so on. I'm hoping to get a lot of ideas and a lot of poems.

I'll be soliciting ideas for cooks, fusion chefs, immigrant cooks, eaters, farmers, foragers, food scientists, inventors, recipe writers, famous figures in food history, cooks of disadvantaged groups who should have become famous, superheroes, supervillains, failure analysts, ethicists, activists, rebels, other people active in the food world, cooking, gardening, harvesting, foraging, preserving, writing recipes, discovering things, decolonizing diets, building or using kitchen equipment, conducting experiments, observation changing experiments, troubleshooting, improvising, adapting, cooperating, bartering, taking over in an emergency, discovering yourself, studying others, testing boundaries, coming of age, learning what you can (and can't) do, sharing, fixing what's broke, upsetting the status quo, changing the world, accomplishing the impossible, recovering from setbacks, kitchens, restaurants, food trucks or carts, campfires, barbecue sites, laboratories, makerspaces, nonhuman accommodations and adaptations, picnics, grocery stores, farmer's markets, roadside fruit stands, U-pick farms, gardens, food forests, other places where people make food, world cuisine, ethnic cuisines, cookbooks, online recipe archives, permaculture, heritage diets, climatarian diet, traditional foodways, culinary archaeology, food sovereignty, drought-resistant crops, trial and error, ethnic spice sets, weird food, fusion food, secret ingredients, supplements that turn out to be metagenic, new ideas in cuisine, alternate agriculture, lab conditions are not field conditions, ethics of food, innovation, problems that can't be solved by hitting, teamwork, found family, complementary strengths and weaknesses, personal growth, and poetic forms in particular.

Currently eligible bingo card(s) for donors wishing to sponsor a square:

National Crafting Month Bingo Card 3-1-26

Among my more relevant series for the main theme:

An Army of One has to figure out how to feed a diverse, far-flung group of people who sometimes have special dietary needs.

The Bear Tunnels introduces modern principles to people in the past, including some aspects of food science.

A Conflagration of Dragons has the Six Races (plus the dragons) who all have different diets. This often poses challenges for the refugees.

Daughters of the Apocalypse has people trying to find and prepare enough food to survive, when city libraries are out of reach.

Fiorenza the Wisewoman uses herbs and healing foods to care for her village.

Frankenstein's Family features two scientists running a valley in historic Romania. Igor enjoys cooking and has gotten at least one of the werewolves curious about cooking the human way.

Hart's Farm is a community with food used as one of the popular bonding methods.

Peculiar Obligations combines Quakers and pirates in the Caribbean, among other groups and places, leading to a wide variety of foods.

Polychrome Heroics has ordinary humans, supernaries, blue-plate specials, superheroes, supervillains, primal and animal soups all of whom need to eat. Primal soups and high-burn soups often have special dietary needs. Comfort food and healing food are also very popular here. The Rutledge thread includes Kardal and his food truck Syrian Foods, along with references to Vermont, French, and hippie cuisines. Pain's Gray, Shiv, and the Finns are all fond of cooking too.

The Wandering features old people who drift back in time, the first of whom lands in Goa, India.

Or you can ask for something new.

Linkbacks reveal a verse of any open linkback poem.

( Read more... )