“for several weeks in the spring the poppies bloom: lovely, open-petalled white, pink, red, and magenta blooms, the darker colors indicating the ones with the most opium.”

“We came to a wide bend in the river, a stretch of good, flat growing land with broad poppy fields. The fields were neat and well tended, and the swollen bulbs beneath the blossoms on their long green stalks were dripping with dark-brown opium. A heady, acrid odor like stale urine hung in the air. Small groups of men and boys were in the fields, scoring the bulbs to bleed the opium. They stopped and stared at us when we drove past, and then continued their work.”

“The boy showed me how he ran his thumb over the oozing bulbs and then scraped the gooey brown opium into a glass he held in his other hand. When the glass was full, he emptied the contents into a large bowl.”

“In the main square in Tirin Kot, the capital of Uruzgan Province, in central Afghanistan, a large billboard shows a human skeleton being hanged. The rope is not a normal gallows rope but the stem of an opium poppy.”

from the new yorker, “The Taliban’s Opium War, ” by Jon Lee Anderson

“even this glass of water seems complicated now”

“Cassette Country“, David Berman

look at that kitty fat, that sumptuous, lavish kitty fat.

i love this picture. look at that belly! it’s so fecund, rich, pregnant…the abundance of our extravagance…it’s huge! As if her belly will fall off her body like a drop of sweat.