The Cut - ‘I Make the Place, I Am the Place’

In her 2019 book Silt: Prose Poems, Puerto Rican Jewish poet Aurora Levins Morales considers nature and its pathways and who owns them. She draws inspiration from the story of a congressman who, in the late 1890s, argued that Cuba was made from silt washed out from the mouth of the Mississippi River, making it American soil. That granular imperialism prompted Morales to do “poet research,” tracing the residue exchanged between the river and the Caribbean Sea. “What are we but the silt of each other?” she asks in the book’s preface. “Every molecule of oxygen we breathe has been breathed a billion times before by every other set of human lungs, has crossed the panting tongues of dogs and leopards and small jeweled snakes, fueled the tiny hearts of hummingbirds and the large hearts of gorillas, passed in and out of clouds and rain and waterfalls, risen up from the oceans into the planetary sky. To whom does it belong?”

See the winners of the 2022 Dog Photography awards. Prefer felines? Try these cat portraits. Madonna is going on tour, and she’s bringing the hits. Mayor Adams announced today that four public-health clinics in the city would provide free abortion pills by the end of the year. We should all really, really have four-day work weeks. And how to move in with your partner without losing your mind.

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