The USS Spruance blew a hole in an Iranian cargo ship's engine room this weekend, and the redbuds kept flowering. Both true. Neither cancels the other.

Survival tactic for today: Before you open the news, put your palm flat on something cool — windowpane, mug, countertop — and count to eight. The body needs a ground under it.

Thistle & Moss survives because readers refuse to let it die. Make that refusal official. thistleandmoss.com/upgrade

Atlanta: 73°, sunny — dogwoods open all at once, white shocks above red clay.

Detroit: 44°, sunny — late frost on the grass, mourning doves arguing whether it's spring.

Kansas City: 73°, sunny — prairie grass bending west by afternoon.

New York: 50°, partly sunny — April hedging its bet, magnolias stubborn anyway.

San Francisco: 61°, drizzle — eucalyptus rising off Twin Peaks after a dry week.

Miami: 79°, partly sunny — sea-salt on the tongue before ten, first mosquitoes testing the air.

Tha an talamh a' dùsgadh — the earth is waking. Late Bealltainn now, light long on the red maples, clover breaking through every crack in the sidewalk where empire hasn't yet paved over the ground.

A Navy destroyer blew a hole through an Iranian engine room on Sunday, and the spray-tanned fascist announced it on Truth Social like a golf score. Brent crude spiked 7%. A fifth of the world's oil sits becalmed in the Gulf.

First time here? Start here.

Editor's note: We are being told the war and the incinerator are separate stories — and I refuse, on behalf of every reader who already sees the seam.

The USS Spruance — a guided-missile destroyer named for a Pacific War admiral — fired on the Iranian-flagged Touska in the Gulf of Oman early Sunday. Marines took custody. The vessel had been warned for six hours and chose the blockade anyway.

Al Jazeera live coverage

What they said: "If the deal isn't done, the deal that we made, then I'm going to take out their bridges and their power plants." — Donald Trump, Fox News.

That is a bankruptcy-file charlatan threatening civilian infrastructure on live television. The correct word for it is terrorism. A truth-murdering buffoon is running a blockade that has stranded hundreds of commercial vessels, spiked global oil 7%, and killed a French peacekeeper plus two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon over a weekend he spent golfing. His negotiators fly to Islamabad Monday — Vance, Witkoff, Kushner — a son-in-law and two sycophants sent to write a deal on a napkin he'll ignore by Wednesday, when the ceasefire expires.

The damage:

Iran has promised retaliation against what it called armed piracy.

No one ever died of being called an aggressor. Many have died of being one.

Solo, Indonesia — a pilot site — already has a smokestack. Surabaya too. The smoke is described in the national plan as electricity. The people downwind describe it differently.

Earth.Org full reporting

Evidence:

This is what the democracy-strangling parasite playbook looks like outside Washington — a court rules, a government shrugs, the smokestack rises, the poor breathe the difference. Corporations earn carbon credits for setting trash on fire. The industry calls it recycling.

Action: Support Aliansi Zero Waste Indonesia. Read the full Earth.Org piece. Share it with one person who thinks incineration is "green." aliansizerowaste.id

The land remembers what the regulation forgets, and what the land remembers is what the body breathes.

Someone is sitting up past midnight with a novel about a teenage ghost who died in 1473 and fell in love with George Sand, because April 2026 has been the kind of month that makes the living feel spectral. The book is Nell Stevens' Briefly, A Delicious Life. The reader is one of us.

Autostraddle's list

Stakes:

So here is what the authoritarian-wannabe tyrant crowd doesn't understand about banning these books from libraries in Tennessee, Florida, Iowa, and twelve other states this year: the queer gothic has never needed permission. It was written in ciphers, published under pseudonyms, passed hand to hand in Parisian salons by Djuna Barnes in 1936 and in prison cells by men whose names were classified evidence. You cannot ban a genre that learned to exist inside the crack where you forgot to look.

Movement: The American Library Association recorded 4,240 unique book challenges in 2024, 47% targeting LGBTQ+ content. Librarians kept shelving anyway. ala.org

We were always the ones writing the ghost stories, because we were always the ones being told we did not exist.

Jordan named the witness we are being asked to be. Not neutral. Not above it. She called the constitutional crisis what it was from inside the machinery charged with stopping it, in a voice carved from Texas courthouses and the conviction that words said aloud in the right room change what happens next. The witness is still required.

What are you willing to say out loud, to someone who can do something about it, before the next war starts?

Sit wherever you are. Feet on floor, palms where you can see them, shoulders one inch lower than you think.

The news ends here. What continues is older than the news.

Tha thu sàbhailte an-dràsta — you are safe right now. Your chest is rising and falling without you asking it to. Outside, somewhere on your block, something green is happening — a clover, a weed, a tree that did not ask your permission to bloom. The wheel is turning through late Bealltainn, and whether your body feels hollow or fierce today or some alloy of both that has no name yet, the earth is waking — slowly, specifically, without reference to any headline the morning produced.

Anail — breath — one, then another, then the one after that.

Asparagus with lemon → Blanch 90 seconds in salted water until stalks bend but don't break. Ice bath. Dress with good oil, flaky salt, lemon zest microplaned over the top. April's first green — the body asking for chlorophyll after a winter of roots.

Sourdough starter from flour and water → Equal parts whole wheat flour and filtered water, fed every morning for seven days, kept on the counter. Three dollars of flour. Seven minutes a day. A woman watching flour bubble in midmorning light is what sovereignty looks like before corporations name it.

Garlic-egg-rice bowl → Hot pan, olive oil, four smashed garlic cloves, spinach, two eggs, finished over day-old rice with tamari and scallion. Seven ingredients, feeds four, under ten minutes. No one in this house goes hungry because the week was hard.

Skullcap (Scutellaria lateriflora) Pharmacology: Nervine acting on GABA receptors; for tension headaches and 3 a.m. wakefulness. Use: 1 tsp dried per cup, steeped ten minutes, up to three daily. Tincture 2–4 mL. Caution: Not in pregnancy. Never with benzodiazepines, barbiturates, or alcohol. Commercial product is sometimes cut with germander, which is hepatotoxic — buy reputable.

Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) Pharmacology: Cardiotonic; strengthens cardiac output, lowers mild hypertension, steadies grief in the sternum. Use: Leaf-and-flower tea, 1–2 tsp per cup, thrice daily. Tincture 4–5 mL daily. Caution: Potentiates digoxin, beta-blockers, nitrates. Do not stack without medical supervision.

Calendula (Calendula officinalis) Pharmacology: Vulnerary, antimicrobial, lymphatic — skin repair, wounds, topical inflammation. Use: Infused oil or salve for scrapes, minor burns, eczema. Tea (1 tsp per cup) for mouth ulcers. Caution: Skip if allergic to ragweed or daisies. Never on deep or puncture wounds — it seals skin over unresolved infection.

Somatic practice → Cold water on wrists and back of the neck for thirty seconds. Tha do chorp a' cuimhneachadh — your body remembers. The vagus nerve runs along the carotid; cold shocks it into the parasympathetic, which decides the difference between under threat and witnessing threat from safety.

Cognitive tool → When a headline lands in your chest, write it down on paper before you share it. Say aloud: this is real, and it is not happening to me right now. The second sentence is not a denial; it is a boundary.

Relational action → Text one person today whose name you haven't said in a month. Tell them nothing about the news. Tell them what you remember about the last time you laughed together. The reaching is the practice.

Barnes wrote this in Paris as fascism rose across the border, and she put it in the mouth of a queer woman standing at the edge of her own ruin. The sentence is itself a muscle clenched. To be skin about a wind is to be porous and continue anyway. To be clenched against mortality is to refuse disappearance one morning at a time.

What are you clenching against right now that you could, for the length of one breath, let go?

Three who showed up when showing up was the thing.

Barbara Jordan — First Black woman elected to the Texas Senate (1966) and to Congress from the Deep South (1972). Her 15-minute Nixon impeachment statement is still taught in rhetoric classrooms. She lived her last two decades with Nancy Earl; the silence around their partnership was Texas's loss, not theirs.

Djuna Barnes — Wrote Nightwood (1936), the novel T.S. Eliot refused to let go out of print. She once had herself force-fed so she could write the suffragettes' ordeal from inside it.

Patricia Highsmith — Wrote The Price of Salt under a pseudonym in 1952 because publishers demanded lesbian love end in death, suicide, or a return to men. She refused all three.

Bright Signals:

Cha sinne nar n-aonar — we are not alone. A Texas courthouse, a Memphis library, a Surabaya street — one line, ninety years, each woman refusing in her specific body to be the last to speak.

Highsmith is not asking whether love survives. She is asking whether the asking is the survival — whether a woman in 1952, writing these questions at a desk, trusted that somewhere in a future she could not see, another woman would read them in an April she had also survived. That trust is what you inherited tonight, and it is what you will hand forward.

What question, asked of yourself before sleep tonight, is the one you most need answered — and who will you trust to ask it with you?

Stand, if you can. Touch the ground with one open hand.

You carry what you carried in, and you carry a little more now. That is the day's honest weight. The redbuds will keep flowering through Thursday, the blockade may or may not end on Wednesday, and you will be in your specific body either way — feeding someone, reading something, refusing something, resting hollow and fierce until the hollow softens into the fierce.

Bi sàmhach agus èist — be still, and listen. The earth is speaking. The ghosts are reading. You are not alone.

The voices woven into this work:

🌿 Poetry and Feelings: thepoetmiranda.com
🌿 Personal Queer Journey: thistleandfern.org
🌿 Life Banter: brandonellrich.substack.com
🌿 Lisa's Porch Talk: wuzzittoya.org / wuzzittoya.substack.com
🌿 Presence Not Permission: presencenotpermission.beehiiv.com

Become a member: thistleandmoss.com/upgrade