GRAPE CRUSH MARCH 2026
"Look, we are not unspectacular things." (Limón)
Hi,
I grew up paying attention to the moon because my dad did. For him, it wasn’t about the cycle or the season but the fact that it was always there. I’m really grateful that I had a dad—have, he’s still my dad—who continuously, patiently redirected me towards what is permanent.
It is easy to learn about different compasses and times, and to look out for friends on different calendars. Working in prisons and a middle school taught me this too. In my twenties, I paid attention to album release cycles and tours, and whether I should wear a scarf while waiting for the bus. In my thirties, I started being-with people who talked about the moon a lot. Whenever they said it was affecting their moods, I could hear it but never felt it.
This is a long way of saying that the last lunar cycle got me in the gut. I felt like I was wearing different glasses. Had something sitting on my chest in the mornings. I got foggy. If you did too, I hope you had people to be-with. If you didn’t, I hope you know they are coming.
I’m sure there were additional reasons, global and personal, why I felt that way, and eventually I’ll figure out the ones in my control. In my forties, I’m grateful to know I don’t have to pressure-cook the origin out of everything. In fact, I shouldn’t. Doing it too much takes you out of your own life. Anyway, I’ll keep going. You please keep going too.
Thank you for reading.
<3, Mairead
TOP FIVE MARCH 2026
Re-reading Blankets by Craig Thompson (Top Shelf, 2003)
My Blankets has lived on every single bookshelf in every single apartment I’ve ever rented. There is a Shrek-green prayer card from St. Ignatius Chapel tucked inside, so I must have read it in those pews, too. (I used to walk from my shifts at the Hugo House to Bauhaus for a coffee, which I’d drink on my way to the chapel, where I’d read, buzzing, for twenty minutes before walking to the bus stop home. I don’t mention these places to be nostalgic or old but because it is a gift to remember our patterns.) My copy is either from Quimby’s or working at Bandoppler Magazine, and in seeing what’s left on the Internet about that publication, I found this article by the great Jennifer Maerz. In it, one of the editors says that “Everything is buying and selling, sure, but what a magazine has the primary capacity to sell is spirit, ideas, language, and evolution and revolution of milieus—they can sell virtue.” I think—I know—I would have loved that idea then (we can’t not sell, so let’s sell goodness), but now it squicks me out, not least because there is no true community in it. Today I think a lot about how much different flavors of Christianity have impacted me (my politics, my aesthetics, my sense of love and the future); most of those thoughts are for the book I’m writing. Meanwhile, last week I re-read Blankets—Craig Thompson’s “illustrated novel” about growing up fundamentalist, being a brother, and falling in first love, as illuminated by fine, blue-black pen-and-ink and yawning stretches of open sky and snow. The wide-heartedness of the main character felt so true, so virtuous to me then (after spending the night, pants on, in bed with his girlfriend, then sprinting back to the guest room before anyone else wakes up, novel-Craig thinks, “Perhaps… instead of offering thanksgiving, I should be apologizing—praying for forgiveness. Perhaps I should feel guilty.”). Now, his heart seems hopelessly tender. I probably have other adjectives. (Young isn’t one of them; kids in particular are great at knowing what they want and how they feel.) I don’t mean any of this as a criticism of the book, which was illuminating, again; it’s a great human thing to re-read something that is so of its time, and you at that time, and especially if it helps you know it all even a little more truly. I do think, even if it isn’t a love I’d want, that a book about love is a book about love.
“Judith Slaying Holofernes” by Artemesia Gentileschi (c. 1620)
I saw this painting in 2013, when it was on display as part of Violence and Virtue, an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Nearly five feet tall, the painting features several kinds of red (blood, oil, velvet) and was displayed in a similarly red room. There are two women; one is Judith, holding a sword. The other, Abra, is holding Holofernes’ hands on his stomach, effectively pinning him to the table where he fell asleep drunk. Judith grips Holofernes’ hair in her left hand and a scimitar in her right as she beheads the general of her enemy army firmly and precisely—a stream of blood spouts from his neck onto hers. Descriptions of the painting frequently mention Agostino Tassi, a land- and seascape painter who r*ped his sister-in-law and one of his wives, while plotting to murder another. He r*ped Gentileschi too, and was imprisoned after a seven-month trial, which sounds like a neurologically exhausting amount of time for our girl to re-live a violent act. I remember visiting the museum on a slow day and facing the painting heart-forwards. It was so angry, made me so angry, and while I don’t believe in an-eye-for-an-eye, I did feel cooled, standing and looking at this plain scene in a quiet room. When I am angry now, reading peripherally about the Epstein files, I recognize that these angers are the same and wish I could leave the room again.
M Quan Studios (Brooklyn, NY)
Lately on Sundays, I’ll grade at a coffeeshop then take the long way home. A few weeks ago, I wandered into a shop and found one of M Quan’s new indigo suns on a sale table. I love how it fits in my hand, wrist to the tip of my finger, the precision of the rays, the fact that the actual sun is bigger than all of this. “Sometimes,” Quan writes on her website, referencing a conversation she had with a First Nations artist, “when you look at the sky, it can cut straight to the bone.” I will always be a sucker for anything reminding me to look up and be human, not to mention the curved shapes and bold colors Quan uses: red, marigold, dust-purple, tooth-white, black. Brass, eyes, bells, rope. Her site is deeply resonant but often also irreverent; she says—and I agree—that you need both for either to be real. My new sun now lives on my bedside table next to a red lightbulb I use to read at night (thank you Joanie for the tip). M Quan Studios frequently posts seconds, samples, and odds here.
Three lines from “Dead Stars” by Ada Limón, found on M.’s bookshelf
My heart-friend M. has, like many of us, walls that are mostly bookshelf, partially crystals and skulls and photographs. I won’t tell you what else they have in their apartment, as that is an invasion of privacy, but I spent three nights there a few weeks ago, and now my whole nervous system is better. On one shelf there is a letterpress of part of an Ada Limón poem: “Look, we are not unspectacular things. / We’ve come this far, survived this much. What // would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?” Read the whole poem here.
Café Neckbeard: Irresistible, by Chris Bower (upstairs at Facility Theatre, Chicago)
My friend Chris Bower writes a series of plays about Café Neckbeard, a fine dining establishment that is, variably, cash-only or celiac-intolerant or open twenty-four hours, though consistently decorated with uranium glass and elements from Moby Dick (whales, desire, etc.). In this iteration, which we saw on Valentine’s Day, the café includes bouquets of celery, boutique coffee, an AI-generated television show called Truckhole, and, at first terrifyingly, the two mesh thermoplastic masks Chris actually wore while receiving radiation for throat cancer last year. In Café Neckbeard world, these horrifying objects transform from cells to ghosts to goldfish, which makes them temporary, which is a relief that made us all laugh. A hell of a “prop.” “This is a work of fiction,” Chris writes in his one-sheet program. “There are elements of truth in this but the stuff that troubled you is for sure made up and the stuff that really landed for you is totally true.” For better or for worse, I trust illness narratives rooted in chaos and harm reduction more than I do ones rooted in quests and restoration, because I think the former are hopeful, human, and beautiful, the latter fantasy. What a gift to laugh and cry through this play and hug my friend when it was over.
HEROES & FRIENDS
Rachel Camacho’s sharp, sparklng Pink Elephant is newly re-released from Button Poetry (link here). Reading it will obviously change your life.
Carolinia Ebeid’s second book Hide is finally, gorgeously out from Greywolf (link here). An honor to hear these poems in so many ways since we all moved to Denver.
Licorice recommendation: salmiak rocks from Licorice International in Lincoln, Nebraska (link here). Other favorites: schoolkrijt, black licorice caramel, salty carpet (!).
Morgan Ritter makes poem tags in Oregon, dedicated to her Grandpa Sol’s tailoring services he did while captive in concentration camps (link here). My favorite is forest and sea foam and says “There is an approachable door.”
STAFF PICKS OF THE MONTH
Sink or Burn by Cristy Road Carrera (100 Block by Row House, 2026)
One Sun Only: Stories by Camille Bordas (Penguin, 2026)
The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez (Firebrand, 1991)
THE BIG SHIP (WHAT I’M UP TO)
I’m reading with Danilo John Thomas and Scott Schwalenberg at Grapefruit Records in Omaha (1125 Jackson Street in the Old Market) on Thursday, March 27th at 7p. Less than eight miles from where I was born <3
I’ve been leading harm reduction / emergency response workshops for staff at a variety of places (coffeeshops, lending libraries, bars) here in town, for trade and in community. We start with a survey, and then I tailor the workshop to staff requests; most include crisis response, Narcan administration, and ear seeds. If you or yours would be into this too, send me a note.
MAY ALL BEINGS BE SAFE & HAPPY & FREE.
…remind me to tell you why my signed copy of Blankets has a very specific illustration on its title page.
licorice recs ! thank you <3