mark leidner

@markleidner.bsky.social

new book of poems “Elegy for Pangaea” out 9/15/26. pre-order here: https://fonografeditions.com/catalog/fono-46-elegy-for-pangea-by-mark-leidner

the same amount of flavor goes into every box of cheez-its and wheat thins. never buy the big family-size boxes if you care about flavor. the flavor is diluted to accommodate the larger amounts of crackers in the bigger boxes

If you use a Porto potty and that blue water splashes up on you, you are forever unclean. In a thousand years, archaeologists could dig up your remains and they would know. God will not let you in to heaven and the devil will not let you in hell. This is how ghosts are made.

umbrellas are brute force rain abatement instruments, as well as clumsy and hideous objects. remaining indoors, however, is relatively effortless and perfectly invisible. a profoundly more elegant solution to the generation-defining agony of precipitation

tricking my kids into becoming civil rights activists the way I became a chain-smoking alcoholic: by forbidding them to read the declaration of independence until they turn 18 and forbidding them to read the constitution until they turn 21

extreme pithiness has made me wordy. the things I say are so compressed, my interlocutors demand more context, making me say huge strings of words I otherwise wouldn’t say. I should’ve just said things regularly

if you memorize more digits of pi than someone, you should be able to criticize them, but if they later memorize pi to a further digit than you originally memorized, that should invalidate all your criticisms—until you memorize pi to an even further digit than them

Tom Hanks to star in Computer Man (2027) based on a script sold to Universal by David Koepp after an intense bidding war, about a man who is also a computer, but also, at the same time, a man, trapped in a maze that may or may not also be a computer. Spielberg to direct.

hey man is everything ok? I noticed you are an aggressively nice do-gooder who isn’t constantly explicating trauma, yours or others’, and is relentlessly offering to help anyone with anything they might need help with while remaining completely indifferent to what it might mean

“seas are for aquamarine things”—thing I dreamt the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff said when unveiling a new submarine prototype that was exactly like all previous submarines except it was painted aquamarine

hey man is everything ok? I noticed you were leading a few hundred untrained yeomen armed only with axes and shovels against the emperor’s professional army in an attempt to stop the construction of a dam along a stream that has for centuries supplied your tiny village with water

hey man is everything ok? I noticed you were crashing weddings and physically grabbing guests to tell them about the time you mindlessly shot an innocent bird out of the sky while aboard a ship, leading to phantasmagoric consequences that completely altered your perspective

dreamt sully sullenberger (as portrayed by tom hanks) and whip whitaker (denzel washington’s character in “flight”) became playable fighters in a new mortal kombat game. people were mad in the dream because they retired subzero and scorpion to make room for them

hey man is everything okay? I noticed you discontinued your CSA even though it regularly supplies you with a cornucopia of nourishing and locally grown organic fruits and vegetables that are objectively more flavorful than their supermarket equivalents

lost in the Backrooms but somehow my phone still works. watching Sully (the only movie I have downloaded on my phone) to pass the time. Tom Hanks’s performance is incredib—oh shit a giant Tom Hanks portraying Sully is coming hold on i gotta run through some labyrinthine corridors

tom hanks appeared in my dream last night to scold me for not watching sully more than once. I saw it in the damn theater I said diffidently. You could’ve streamed it too, he pleaded. I have kids, tom, I can’t be rewatching 10 year old films that aren’t even good. he began to cry

hey many is everything ok? I noticed you genuflecting in the grocery store in front of the ground beef and doing the sign of the cross in front of the buns in the bread aisle and muttering arcanely while swinging a censer of incense as you paced back and forth in the beer cave