kingsoftrain

An arsonist's muted lightning. A crow without warning. An egg full of paint. All of my obsessions in one silent place. Spell mother: the mirror predicts my double's future. Each kid dies differently.

I can’t think I’ll know you from seeing you in a room. My eyes eat their own longing. Touch has starved every spider my hand’s become. Cain, Abel, cannibal. Ohio I tilt the blood balloon of my hearing over a swooning raccoon. Hop into my brother. Not when I’m dying.  

Jesus wakes up with a stomachache and all his guy friends laugh. Birth has three dreams about a door. I was so small as an infant I had to wear doll clothes. The size of your child changes bombs.

A deer eats three cigarettes and god has to deal with that erection.

This poem will mention god because I caught fish with people who are dead now.

I am naked in front of pictures that tell me boredom has many rooms.
My mother and my father are singing in a church that can’t sing.

I like to think of Jesus asleep on a crucifix in a missing wasp nest.
I like to think that because it puts that dude to sleep.

Circles from a childhood gun on my toy forehead…

You can’t drink on the moon.

Our eating hangs in the house of god.

Can touch
touch itself
to sleep?

No dog
is sick
in a dying
mirror. I age but fail

to pass
my son.

i.

left a hole
in a star
went back
to get it
a stiff
baby
was handed
to my mother

ii.

a dollhouse
you can go
online
to bomb

the dog
in its yard
too ashamed
to dig

I wanted to be a woman who owned only a swimsuit

Stones
eat
for so long
nothing

I had not become frostbitten in the correct way. The invisible were there to draw blanks on the legality of touch. Eden was to be a rehab for gods. Adam hallucinated that snake and Eve was just being nice. Suicide is the only dying that can change the past.

Dog won’t eat. Angel grows in a tree an arm you’d die to see. Goes death to sing to its one perfect ear. A spider dreams god from the mirror. Deliver my butcher’s baby. 

Two Open Doors In A Field
Sophie Klahr, poems
The Backwaters Press, 2023

I watched that movie about the recording of Springsteen’s Nebraska and that night had a dream about a unicorn machine that broke when it found a hidden program within itself that believed it could make unicorns real. I tried for the poem that wasn’t there and it took not even close to seven days. I impulsively then bought some poetry books by Sophie Klahr. Two Open Doors In A Field by Sophie Klahr. What conversational angelry is this. This is. Klahr is a poet of undiscovered repetitions. Is a field a prophet? Afield, a prophet. Oh dreaming eyesore. This verse motions to its movement to do loss with less. Longing is a road out of itself. We cannot win together the lottery of solitude but perhaps with an accurate ambling as voiced over a travelogue of punk plainness that eats nowhere’s breakfast we can, familiar foreign forensic, twice believe there is a sound that might de-crowd the precisions of myth. Death sketches the face of god. Tiny details are lost. Be alone, sure. But you don’t have to feel that you are. Klahr gives the flattening its uneven corpse. Seeing is watching and stillness a rent owed epiphany.