Wendy's Thoughts Before the World Gets Loud
The sun came up over Atlanta at 7:06 AM and I could smell the drought in the pine needles before I saw the fire-danger bulletin. What got under my skin is that an empire is losing on three continents at once and the man running it is still calling it winning. Read it anyway. Pour something hot. Stay.
This newsletter keeps its lights on because a few thousand people refuse to let it die. If the rent on your conscience came due this week, try.
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Table of Contents
The Ground Beneath Your Feet — Weather & Earth
Atlanta: 87°, near-record sun, fire-danger statement — the drought is a political document now, and the pines know it.
Detroit: 72°, thunder and hail — the sky doing what the courts won't.
Kansas City: 85°, gusty thunderstorms queuing for evening — humid, bright, and the sirens haven't gone off yet.
New York: 88°, upper-level ridge, humid Gulf air pumped up the Atlantic seaboard — April pretending to be July in a black silk dress.
San Francisco: 70°, north wind, sunny — the rare afternoon when the fog takes a lunch break and the city notices its own shoulders.
Miami: 79°, sun and cloud mixed, a cold front stalking Monday — the water is already warmer than your blood.
The Part That Draws Blood
Three wars lost, one election exported and blown, and the Strait of Hormuz clotted like a femoral artery — this is the week Trump's empire stopped pretending it could count. The bloated grifter told reporters Saturday that it made no fucking difference whether America made a deal or not. Because we've won.
First time here? Welcome to The Daily Gathering.
Editor's note: Losing is a tell — the spray-tanned fascist has been one his whole goddamn life, and now the rest of us are paying the bar tab.
The Loser’s Math: Vance Does Not Add Up
Loser Vance to an Empty Audience
JD Vance flew to Hungary to campaign for Viktor Orbán and watched the opposition take a supermajority. In Tehran, the ceasefire reportedly required the U.S. to accept Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz. At home, the truth-murdering buffoon said the quiet part: whether we make a deal or not makes no difference, because we've won.
What they said: "Will you stand for freedom, truth, and the God of our fathers? Stand for Viktor Orbán." — JD Vance. They did not.
Matt Ford's piece in The New Republic names the machinery. Fascism is loser-logic dressed in gold leaf — the grievance-fueled certainty the world cheated you of what your genes deserve. Trump covers the Oval Office in gold ornaments and plans a triumphal arch in Arlington despite having won no wars. The bankruptcy-filing charlatan idolizes the Confederacy because defeat is his native language.
The damage:
Human cost: At least 2,076 Iranian dead, 26,500 injured in a war the kleptocratic cabal started and cannot finish.
Pattern: Orbán-worship abroad, Heritage-dictation at home, Strait-of-Hormuz shipping snarled — the global economy stabbed by a man who thinks a stab is a signature.
Action: Call your senators. Demand hearings on the Iran casualty toll. You do this. Today.
In the Kremlin they are laughing. In Budapest the opposition is measuring the curtains. New Republic
Microplastics Are Killing Us: Baby Formula, Medical Gear, Etc.
A premature infant in a neonatal ICU ingests up to 115 microplastic particles in 72 hours from her infusion circuits alone. The operating room where her mother delivered her sheds up to 9,258 particles per square meter per shift. These are numbers from a peer-reviewed paper laid beside another peer-reviewed paper, in a report the Plastic Soup Foundation released Wednesday.
Evidence:
Relationship breaking: Cardiac catheters, silicone breast implants, IV bags, paint, baby formula, children's building bricks — the objects designed to sustain life dose the body with PET, PVC, and polypropylene. The materials have always been ours. The damage is new.
Scale: The report pulls from over 350 peer-reviewed studies across five exposure categories. Microplastics sit in human blood, placenta, testes, Everest snow, and the breast milk of women who never asked to be data.
Expert voice: Martina Igini, writing for Earth.org, quotes the authors: a "pervasive, abundant, invisible, chemical-mixture-carrying" storm beginning before birth.
No regulator has acted. Industry lobbies the EPA to delay. The bipartisan addiction to plastic packaging is a political choice that arrives in your bloodstream as a fact.
Action: Switch to glass for drinking water. Filter tap through activated carbon. Pressure your state rep on the Plastic Pellet Free Waters Act. Earth.org
Eastman Has Been Disbarred: Good Riddance to Bad Trash
The California Supreme Court struck John Eastman from the roll of attorneys Wednesday — the bow-tied law professor who tried to hand Mike Pence a pen and a plan to void an election. A $5,000 sanction. A five-year fight. One modicum of accountability against a man the authoritarian-wannabe tyrant already pardoned federally.
Stakes:
Pattern: Eastman was a clerk for Clarence Thomas and dean of Chapman law school until 160 faculty signed a letter demanding his ouster.
Timeline: 2020 memo → January 6 → Bar complaint (2023) → disbarment recommendation (2024) → final order April 15, 2026. The court denied his petition in silence. That's the elegance.
And then the BBC published an undercover probe revealing a "shadow industry" of UK law firms charging migrants up to £2,500 to fake gay asylum claims — staged photographs, fabricated medical reports, coached stories, seventeen-year-old scams. What the fuck does this cost actual queer people fleeing for their lives? Everything. Every real Ugandan lesbian, every Pakistani trans woman with screws holding her jaw together, now meets a Home Office officer trained to doubt her. Fraud is a weapon aimed at the people fraud pretends to impersonate.
Movement: Support Rainbow Railroad — they vet and evacuate genuine LGBTQ+ asylum cases worldwide. Rainbow Railroad.
To exist as queer is to be asked, over and over, to prove it. And still we walk into the room.
The Witness — What We Carry From What We Just Read
"Attention is the beginning of devotion." — Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays (Penguin Press, 2016)
Survival wisdom — how you carry this forward: Oliver wrote that sentence in a book about walking through woods she had walked for fifty years. She meant it as craft. We inherit it as survival. When a regime floods the feed with lies and the microplastics arrive in the placenta and the lawyers try to sell queer identity by the kilogram, the discipline that saves you is noticing — precisely, slowly, without flinching. Devotion begins where performance ends.
What did you notice today that you did not have the courage to name until a poet made you look?
The Turning — Where the Breath Comes Back
Sit down. Put both feet flat on the floor and feel the temperature of the room enter through your soles. Spring is here, but the floor is still cool — let that fact land in the bones.
The news has done what it came to do. The jaw is tight. The shoulders have crawled toward the ears. Anail — breath — is the oldest medicine the body owns, and it is always available, even when nothing else is.
The mind wants to keep arguing with the headlines, and it can — later, after the body has been allowed back into the room. Tha thu sàbhailte an-dràsta — you are safe right now — which is a small claim, and the only honest one available.
The Nurturing — Food As Medicine
Asparagus → roast at 425° on a sheet pan, olive oil, coarse salt, 12 minutes; the tips should char; the stems should still creak under the knife. This is the week the ground actually warms. Eat it.
Sprout garlic at home → store-bought garlic, wet paper towel, jar, windowsill; eight days to green shoots. One head, one dollar, one season of sovereignty.
Pantry quick meal — Lemon-Caper Anchovy Orecchiette: olive oil, garlic, anchovy, shallot, capers, lemon, parsley, orecchiette — 9 minutes, feeds four, $7 cart total. Nobody goes to bed hungry in this house because the week was hard.
The Breathing — Herbs As Curing
Motherwort (Leonurus cardiaca)
Pharmacology: Leonurine and stachydrine slow a racing heart without sedating the brain. Vagal pathway — cardiovascular and nervine simultaneously.
Use: Tincture, 2–4 mL in warm water, up to three times daily during acute political panic.
Caution: Never combine with warfarin, digoxin, or beta-blockers. Skip during pregnancy — it's a uterine stimulant by design.
Cleavers (Galium aparine)
Pharmacology: Cool, moving, lymphatic-decongestant. For a body storing what it cannot yet expel.
Use: Fresh-juice infusion. Blend green tops with cold water, strain, drink 4 oz on an empty stomach.
Caution: Diabetics, monitor glucose — cleavers can lower it. Avoid with diuretic medications.
Milky Oats (Avena sativa)
Pharmacology: Trophorestorative for a nervous system scorched thin. Rebuilds the myelin the adrenals burned through.
Use: Tincture from fresh milky seed only — 3–5 mL twice daily, minimum six weeks.
Caution: Gluten-sensitive folks need certified gluten-free source. Effect is slow. Don't expect a rescue.
The Practice — Armor You Can Wear Tomorrow
"We are the ones we have been waiting for." — June Jordan, "Poem for South African Women" (1978), reprinted in Directed by Desire (Copper Canyon, 2005)
Moving forward — your armor for today: Jordan wrote that line for women who had marched on Pretoria in 1956 — twenty thousand of them, refusing pass laws. She meant it as an instruction, not a koan. The cavalry is you, the phone call you've been meaning to make is you, the fundraiser you keep scrolling past is fucking you. No one is coming. That is the good news. It means you cannot be stopped by their absence.
What are you willing to lose to keep the thing you say you love?
Heroes & Bright Signals — The Ones Who Showed Up and the Proof It's Working
They are not saints. They are the ones who kept working.
Mary Oliver wrote twenty-one books of poetry in a lifetime spent mostly walking the Provincetown dunes with Molly Malone Cook, her partner of forty years. She won the Pulitzer in 1984 and kept her ordinary hours until the last month she was breathing.
June Jordan published twenty-eight books across poetry, essay, and libretto, and founded Poetry for the People at UC Berkeley in 1991.
June Jordan: credit: poetry foundation
Marlon Riggs made Tongues Untied in 1989 on a $5,000 grant — a documentary so volatile PBS stations refused to air it. He died of AIDS at 37 with three more films finished against the clock.
Three people who paid attention. That is the whole assignment.
Bright signals:
Iceland approved 34 new permissible first names this quarter, two of them gender-neutral, pushed through by the country's queer youth council.
Scandinavian cities are planting Hylocomium splendens moss along highways — it stores heavy metals in its cell walls without dying.
Rainbow Railroad assisted 3,200 LGBTQ+ asylum cases in 2025 — the highest annual number in its history.
Gathering History — The Roll Call of Those Who Were Here First
The District of Columbia emancipated 3,100 enslaved people (April 16, 1862); Bayard Rustin organized the March on Washington (1963); Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera founded STAR (1970); the Combahee River Collective issued its statement (1977); ACT UP stormed the FDA (1988); the Supreme Court ruled for Obergefell (2015).
The ancestors are not watching from above. They are the bones the present is built on, and they are working through us, or they are not — the choice is the breath we take next.
The Carrying — What Your Body Knows When You Close This Tab
"Silence about a death, in the days when the men around me, including me, were dying, was the loudest thing in the room." — Marlon Riggs, director of Tongues Untied (1989), d. 1994
What you carry forward into the burning world: Riggs made his last films with a fever and a deadline nobody else could see. He filmed his own face in the hospital because he was not going to let silence have him too. The work is what survives — not the reputation, not the funding, not the applause. What survives is the sentence you put down for the next person who has to walk this road. You are the next person for somebody.
What are you willing to put on the record before the fever takes your hands?
Beannachd Dheiridh — A Blessing for the Road Ahead
Stand if you can. Touch one thing in the room — a doorframe, a cup, the back of a chair — and let your hand stay there a moment longer than feels necessary.
Beannachd Dhè ort — the blessing of the earth upon you — and upon the small distance between your two hands at this moment. Carry the news in one hand and the green of the new maple in the other; do not let either drop. The empire is loud and the talamh — the land — is older than the empire and patient with us still.
Bi sàbhailte. Bi treun. Bi maille rium. — Be safe. Be brave. Be with me.
✨ Who Is In The Gathering? ✨
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
