M L Clark

@mlclark.bsky.social

3161 Followers 2043 Following

Writer (SFWA), translator, humanist, general odd duck • 🇨🇦n in 🇨🇴 • avoids pronouns, they/them if key 🌈🌌

This little critter found a safe place to wind down for good. Only after death did I see her beautiful inner spots.
My sleepy little nocturnal companion is a dull rusty brown with faint eye spots over what has the appearance of a frown line while her wings are closed. About the size of my palm, and very fuzzy!
"Galileo Satellites" (2025) by Tokuhiro Kawai
I Put On My Socks in the Wrong Order and Now I'm Gonna Get Hit By A Car Neil Hilborn I think as I put on my boots anyway. I’m supposed to resist compulsions when I feel capable because it makes the misfiring neurons weaker, and today I’m feeling capable of lots of stuff, so I guess that means today I’m fighting my brain. When the brain says, “You’re gonna bleed out on the sidewalk,” I’ll say, “Then the grass will have something to drink.” When the brain says, “This is the day you go to the bridge,” I’ll say, “But there are so many bridges.” Nothing gets to want me dead and avoid the consequences. You’ll get the socks you get, brain, we’re going to the airport.
FLOWERS L. E. Bowman I like it when people brake for squirrels. When they scoop bugs onto napkins and gently set them outside. I like it when people put their shopping carts back and smile at strangers and hold open doors. I like the awkward run, the breathless thank you. I like it when people share appetizers and good news and book recommendations. When they get do excited that their hands become actors and their story comes out as a spark. I like it when people offer these bright, little flowers. these tender, yellow bursts.
Sam Neill in the 1998 miniseries Merlin.
The Past Stephen Dunn Herrings begin to glow just after they die, never while alive. When I read this I wanted to sit for a long time in the dark. Nothing in nature is a metaphor. Everything is. I thought both thoughts. And knew inexactly why I felt sad. Herrings dead and aglow-- I should have been properly amazed, the way anyone looking at a star would be, realizing it was years away, untouchable. Yet there it is, shining.
My mother says kissing a man without a mustache is like eating eggs without salt Which is a better way of saying--take the scenic route. Say I love you when it's true. Drive 12 hours just to touch. Buy kumquats because they're called kumquats. Call someone you love a little kumquat. Write letters. Recite poems. Be verklempt. Rise early to hunt the moon. Eat pastries whose names you can't pronounce. Astonish everyone. Haunt everything. Sing, even if poorly. Press the peek for zest. We're nothing but brief bodies. Hearts, fragile as parakeets. Spit, lios, and longing. All we've got is this skin. This necessary salt. By Joy Sullivan, joysullivanpoet on Instagram.
This is one of a few First Nations, Inuit, and Métis designs developed to centre and celebrate our history as a multinational, multicultural, and pluralist society.
Look at this handsome critter, hundreds of years old, found near Nunavut in the Arctic Ocean.
Kindness By Naomi Shihab Nye Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend. From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye.
At the grey of dawn fresh yellow lines stretch along the highway, incomprehensible. How can they share this world with all the latest videos of destruction passed around? Shattered heart emojis, hymns and anthems, vigil candles, Venezuelan flags. The rubble and the recoveries–some “miracles”, some merely limbs displaced from old homes. In parts of the world such scenes are made with intention. Politicians decide, day after day, to lay ruin to life. But in others this level of disaster arrives only indirectly: a savaging of the future one greased palm at a time. Yet for every rift that feels like the last, the worst; like the heart cannot bear another case decided against compassion, another culture making cruelty its native tongue, still there come these bloody morning-afters–rudely, impossibly–when fresh lines appear on the asphalt and the repair work of small foolish apes presses on.
An intense and dedicated crowd in the mall for this match. One of many scattered and packed groups.
An El Colombiano write-up about the disaster.
Time to make space on the fridge for her latest report card! Apparently it's a great one!
From The Guardian: SpaceX makes largest ever stock market debut, making Elon Musk world's first trillionaire.
I write all my first drafts by hand if I can!
Going without Saying By Bernard O’Donoghue i.m. Joe Flynn It is a great pity we don’t know When the dead are going to die So that, over a last companionable Drink, we could tell them How much we liked them. Happy the man who, dying, can Place his hand on his heart and say: ‘At least I didn’t neglect to tell The thrush how beautifully she sings.’ from Gunpowder (Chatto, 1995)
"Girl in a Pink Dress" by Laura Wheeler Waring (1927)
"Secret of Mana" by Hirō Isono.
Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Is Not Breaking By Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons equals the collective weight of every animal on earth. Including the insects. Times three. Six billion tons sounds impossible until I consider how it is to swallow grief— just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed a neutron star. How dense it is, how it carries inside it the memory of collapse. How difficult it is to move then. How impossible to believe that anything could lift that weight. There are many reasons to treat each other with great tenderness. One is the sheer miracle that we are here together on a planet surrounded by dying stars. One is that we cannot see what anyone else has swallowed.
Mass is in session, or I would take photos inside the church in Parque Bolivar.
A chalk drawing of the famous Latin American comic Condorito.
Halfway home now, from the bottom of the metro line to the top.
Runners with some modern classic musical accompaniment.
Fruit trees and equivalent plants abound on the streets here.
A slice of ciclovía traffic, even though my phone can't capture the depth of vision I have.
Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America by Matthew Olzmann Tell me what it’s like to live without curiosity, without awe. To sail on clear water, rolling your eyes at the kelp reefs swaying beneath you, ignoring the flicker of mermaid scales in the mist, looking at the world and feeling only boredom. To stand on the precipice of some wild valley, the eagles circling, a herd of caribou booming below, and to yawn with indifference. To discover something primordial and holy. To have the smell of the earth welcome you to everywhere. To take it all in, and then, to reach for your knife.
A Poem for Someone Who Is Juggling Her Life Rose Cook This is a poem for someone who is juggling her life. Be still sometimes. Be still sometimes. It needs repeating over and over to catch her attention over and over, as someone who is juggling her life finds it difficult to hear. Be still sometimes. Be still sometimes. Let it all fall sometimes
Oh, hello giant stalk of aloe plant!
April 7, 1969 I feel so bad today that I want to write a poem. I don't care: any poem, this poem. Richard Brautigan
Earth, as seen from the far side of the moon.
I listen to the band practise for such events across the street all the time. They put on a good showing today!
The Thing Is Ellen Bass to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you down like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again.
This slice of our pale blue dot has a tiny lip of sun glare around its bottom-right curvature. It's mostly cloud and water, with a wide swath of dusty red-brown land to the lower left. Humans? Just a pesky nuisance you can't make out on this shot at all.
"On Letting Go" by Esao Andrews (2007)
Two paths and experience choices in my local park.
I had a long talk with the fish, myself. Finished with lime, double-fried plantain (patacones), a light mash of avocado with salt, garlic, and lime, and coconut rice cooked with panela. She seemed to enjoy her meal. Tomorrow, I have a black tilapia for her.
Local shoppers line up for fish to serve tomorrow and Friday.
Hilariously wrong AI interpretation of one of my stories, which was inspired by the movie Duel - if that gives you a sense of how wrong this is. "Not in My Valley" by M.L. Clark is a science fiction novelette published in the September/October 2025 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. The story is described as a "white-knuckle duel on an alien moon", featuring a character navigating a "seedling" planet populated by distinct native species, featuring a twist ending. Key Details regarding M.L. Clark's "Not in My Valley" Publication: Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September-October 2025 issue. Genre: Science Fiction Novelette (NT). Plot Synopsis: The story follows Glenn, a character who escapes a spaceship attack and lands on a "seedling" planet intended to be made habitable by humans. He encounters three local species—rockrats, crows, and weeds—and tries to survive and navigate the threat. Reception: It is described as containing a "white-knuckle duel" and a "surprising, but implausible" ending. Recognition: The story was listed on the ballot for the Analog 2025 Readers' Awards.
Beautiful hour at the park. Just me and the birds!
I went over this whole newspaper, which is so full of local discussions about business, politics, health, a new conservation park, Semana Santa, etc that it just didn't have time for global events. The world is larger than we sometimes realize, consumed by strife in our corner of the woods.
Some lovely purple and white flowers in my barrio offer sustenance for some bees who put even my work ethic to shame. 😉
Love Poem for An Apocalypse by Dave Lucas I wish I’d met you after everything had burned, after the markets crash and global sea levels rise. The forests scorched. The grasslands trespassed. My love, it is a whole life’s work to disappear— ask the god with his head in the wolf’s mouth or the serpent intent on swallowing all the earth. Ask the senate subcommittee for market solutions for late capitalism and early-onset dementia. You and a bird flu could make me believe in fate. I think we might be happy in the end, in the dark of a hollow tree, a seed bank or blast-proof bunker, if only you would sing the song I love, you know the one about our precious eschatology, the one I always ask to hear to lull me back to sleep
The Friday edition of El Colombiano.
These are eco-friendly notebooks showing facts about turtles and humming birds. The tortuga carey and the barbudito paramuno, to be specific. I have nice handwriting, but I am a leftie and I will need to strike lines either way. But the notebooks are pretty for now!
Faith Ringgold, who died in 2024, used narrative quilts among other mediums to tell stories that emerged out of shared dreams and communal labour. She was a fierce advocate for inclusion and belonging in the art world, and beyond.
It's a lovely Sunday morning and the party tour busses, called chivas and traditionally used to help campesinos in remote pueblos get to and from town centres, are lining up on the highway by my home, ready to welcome boarders.
"Little Island" by A. J. Casson (1965)
We Have Enough Dead Friends Lena Oleanderson Come over. The doors are open, my flat’s a mess and so is my heart but the doors are always open. Come over. I will make soup, probably from frozen but the important thing is we will both eat. You don’t have to be dying, but if you are, or you feel like you are, or if living’s been hard, call me, and I will show up. It doesn’t have to be that bad, it doesn’t have to be bad at all, but if it is, please call. Do you want me to do the groceries? Do you want me to mop the floors? Do you need to be held; you don’t have to be dying to be held. If you want me to be there, I want to. I’m on the bathroom floor again, and breathing is hard, and eating’s been hard, and sleeping, the world is a laden thing rolling around on my chest lately. Just being alive is heavy tonight, but we have enough dead friends. Come over.
Study of a bird's wing, by Albrecht Dürer
View from near my home, asking me why I'm not running away from my desk full speed.
From Peter Harskamp's Women and Cats series. This time, the cat is more active and in control of the situation!
Musée des Beaux Arts By W. H. Auden December 1938 About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
An edible cactus! I didn't eat it, though.
My Life Was the Size of My Life By Jane Hirshfield My life was the size of my life. Its rooms were room-sized, its soul was the size of a soul. In its background, mitochondria hummed, above it sun, clouds, snow, the transit of stars and planets. It rode elevators, bullet trains, various airplanes, a donkey. It wore socks, shirts, its own ears and nose. It ate, it slept, it opened and closed its hands, its windows. Others, I know, had lives larger. Others, I know, had lives shorter. The depth of lives, too, is different. There were times my life and I made jokes together. There were times we made bread. Once, I grew moody and distant. I told my life I would like some time, I would like to try seeing others. In a week, my empty suitcase and I returned. I was hungry, then, and my life, my life, too, was hungry, we could not keep our hands off our clothes on our tongues from —2012
"This is my world", Ebuka Pascal Agudiegwu (2024)