kingsoftrain

I hope none of it changed your life

THE BEGINNING

snow
on nothing’s
cricket



THE BEGINNING

unslept
in exhausted
stillness

do we know
god
where stuff
is


THE BEGINNING

a bomb
in time
a hole
in a child
the childhood
of that
hole


THE BEGINNING

the lost 
ghost 
hidden

by Eve

forever
a sickness
falling
ill


THE BEGINNING

raccoon light

loneliness
your mouth
no mouth
has

autofiction is isolating
or god
doesn’t write
about women

raccoon light

cancer in the skinned person’s empty hospital takes my cock’s confession 

the beginning 

grief, ashtray, arson

I talk my horror angel into never again using an oven

eggs
in microwaves
miss 
my missed

& secretly

ate
teeth


THE BEGINNING

I thought they said call off the dolls. God is the different word for god. I rolled my brother’s eye under a door and into a room the color of his eye. Grief is the last cigarette of kingdom. Are you watched like god or watched like a baby? (how to tell if you’re a baby) How lonely: I dream of doing the job I have. What does a mouth do but reach for a mouth? Fall asleep waiting for an angel to eat your teeth. The child I’m selling comes with a gun.


THE BEGINNING

Dog died of old age in a motel room in Ohio

Idk seems wrong, seems like autofiction
taught time
nakedness 

I’m not photogenic
being sad
for mom

I am ugly in a mirror that cares for my teeth
I washed another’s body
longer
than you

At least in hell you can think about hell

hunger 
in Ohio
is quiet
for two

Each beast tires differently of god

suicide, or clothes



THE BEGINNING

Reading in code about disease-erased sadness, I left in a cornfield an epileptic no one liked. Deer and dog forgave Ohio its obsession with god’s manufactured patience. The horse that screamed scrame and my math teacher heard a glass of milk praying for my sister’s rib to break. We loved little. Doubled over orphans and weapons weapons made.


THE BEGINNING

I hold myself in the dark

That’s 
the whole
poem

You want a mirror, a god
of the anti
rare

Father, mother, a cry

( baby
shaped
things


THE BEGINNING

I don’t know how to be here. On the moon I was with my nephew and I taught him the best form to use when running away from snow. My knees gave out and not all of my brothers stopped breathing. I searched my father online. Mom sent me pics I needed to be there to see. My sons died in this order: daughter, deer ghost, ex-angel. My stomach took suicide as a noise stuck in a falling rabbit. It’s not hard being sad. Take steps. If your son is sick, say a prayer that he is sick long enough to sleep through AI songs about Charlie Kirk. Call your dreams deer dreams then don’t. Fuck them deer. Ohio is a hole in Bethlehem. 


THE BEGINNING

Frog of my stomach, mouse of her brain. Aw, sis, we could never let the same animals go. The creatures good at hiding were god’s. A tooth tells a bitemark about the quiet inside of your mouth. I become in dreams food that my children can eat.


THE BEGINNING

Shape has come to mean my body turns out the lights. There are no angels in the ocean. You can’t pay for my most medically alive son. Also I’ve never seen blood but bro I think there’s alot of it. I scream inside of my mother at a stone. Inside of my father’s ankle at my father. For a second I come to in the sexless bodies of my motherfull cousins and the doubled orphan christ writes to me in prose some advice on how to ruin a psalm. Oh long song of wrongdoing. Tattoo shop in a raindrop machine. Eat after me. The heart saves nothing. God even less.


THE BEGINNING

A rabbit with a bloody nose nudges in a weak world a cross to surrender its math to the slack call of collapse. My brothers paint my body in a dream where a coat’s amnesia is a crime that snow blames on an Ohio addict whose mirrors belong, belong, belong. Oh golden fetus your undug eye. Your sightseeing as surgery on the predictably sick. What would you become if it were the last creature running that your parents would see in a field at the same time? Existence reached us. Then stopped. 


THE BEGINNING

I tried to write this yesterday.
My son’s hands
were almost
asleep.
A noiseless
dog
had fainted.
A pencil went dark
and I drank
to that.

genitalia 1

In the garden
the tree
of hair

Later,
god up
at night


genitalia 2

In the dream
they shove an egg
down my pants
and start
punching

Later,
I keep my jeans on
Swim

to the lake’s
middle


genitalia 3

A man can be seen sitting on the roof of his mother’s house. He has a gun, or a stick, and some say they can hear a baby crying. I am the man’s most quiet brother. A cop talks to my brother from below and is pointing at my brother’s dog and is telling my brother that we are all going to count to three and the dog will die. My brother screams it isn’t his dog. The dog looks hurt. I think by this.


genitalia 4

In my brother
a child
asks
for a child
hoodless
boy

Later,
there is no 
future
in being
the surgeon
of an angel

Lately I touch
with yours
my subscription
to pain, I love

my children too much
to be a good father

This doesn’t even go here

Imagine finishing a poem about debt

God’s


genitalia 5

In this grunting spectacle
of machines
that go
nowhere
I cannot 

put my mouth 
on the animal that’s having my memories

Later,
God with death’s
perfect baby


genitalia 6

thoughtless
star
unmoved
by the newborn’s
lifetime
of regret

genitalia 7

a grey
lightbulb
for a lost
moth


genitalia 8

In the castration
dreams
of bewildered
angels

or in the surveillance 
dreams
of the unaroused
might one

pick up smoking
yes
to empty 

the wrist of god


genitalia 9

The boy
Litmus
dies
and is briefly
dead
A dog
in the dark
mourns
the turned off
snowball
of the human
heart
Loneliness 
isn’t 
perfect
perfect


genitalia 10

Touch has one parent
who can draw
up to three
body types

Every parent after that uses their hands to find the thing they’ve hit you with

Let us edit our nudes in the place machine


genitalia 11

I am only
made

. 
genitalia 12

Imagine being stabbed. 
Now, imagine being stabbed.
I am the body my tenderness haunts.
I am the mouth
my mouth
is on. To sob, enter god. Close 
the god
behind you. In and out
of seeing
yours
these are 
my eyes.  
A person is gone. 
 

genitalia 13

A man screams that he remembers being a child. His last mother weighs herself inside of a piano playing a song later named something nearer to 

the permanence of a crow in the snow. We play word games as a family because we think that kid is dead not living

and burned. I hide my eating at the inn and my food in the church’s basement. No one is first to the body. No one is second. The future makes what it can of faster longing. It’s not much but it’s much.


genitalia 14

Noon, moon, none. Time loses itself in the drone company’s rabbit hole of plainness. Touch reaches an age. Love no one.


genitalia 15

A cricket listening for god

The longing
of the ocean
to lie
down

The plain search history of our saddest child

Father’s 
job
younger
younger

God the next
cricket



genitalia 16

A boneless deer in the dream resistant stomach of an angel

The mouth
model
for the loneliest
mouth
award

The single-use hand of god the boy

Shape’s collection of entry 
forms



genitalia 17

All has been seen by the same image. My singing is a ripped bird sent to a scarecrow. When are you going to stop writing about god asks god. My mother texts me dream’s grocery list of suspended women. Male I touch in a male way. Kill water watching my son boil. Peephole, feeding tube. Ghostless babies weigh the guilt of escaping heaven. 



genitalia 18

Salt is a word you can't find in your past. Killing occurred to god but not before having a brother. No one drinks more than a fast learner turned on by nostalgia. Sometimes when we love a mom an angel cuts its throat in a noise machine. I got this tattoo in my sleep.



genitalia 19

the mouth that flew into my mouth has begun to open in yours

mouth of god, mouth of god

how do I close the mouth of god

maybe we kissed
it didn’t
fly

no image for that

two people, Eden, a spoonful of snow




last genitalia

A cigarette fills with the distance it cannot eat while a drunk man in a treehouse writes his son toward a smaller death

So what if in the future I’m thinking on the death I left for god

A lifetime of stomach pain for Abel’s imaginary friend

Dream that expected someone else

UNICORN DEBT

A mournfully urgent child in the darkroom of our undeveloped nakedness

In one word
Describe time


UNICORN FEAST

Asterisk to the spider’s eager pageant, Jesus waits at three doors for his father to get out of surgery. Cops put in handcuffs an unshocked boy and lead him to a room made of rooms. Ask for the mother of anyone. Ask the cops for our love back. Our love of how they are captured dying on an earth of runaways. I drank in the dream then drank in the dream I was having. At least cursive looks like eating. Cough, wrist. Angel, burn your way through the keyboard of touch. I did no singing in this world. 


UNICORN CODE

God makes a tiny phone then waits for it to die and we never hear from god again

If there is in my poem white space then I wasn’t drinking

My mother’s sadness is distracting to photos

Surgery means I am the only one who can position my son’s body not you not the fatherhand of god’s anti-touch

I was writing toward The Rose by Ariana Reines when the grief lightning of an unfound vein went bluely afield

They’re back, the bombed, their thenlife


UNICORN CURE

The cigarettes are gone I wrote with

I speak to a small ghost

I lose three teeth
freeze them
in a mirror

X-ray machines from heaven outnumber drones that move the holy spirit

We leave something on my son’s wheelchair and it messes up his weight for months

For 
moths

I don’t do much for my son
I lift my son and an angel matches footprints in hell

I break in a dream my arm for speaking
to a small
ghost

There are jobs you can do
Father jobs and mother
jobs
Your belly

has to be
from here


UNICORN GRIEF 

Given my soft bones and trash esophagus I thought I could write one first thing about beautiful deer. Ohio said no. Ohio said revelation is something time passes on its way to angels watching zombie movies that boast antichrist cameos. I was reaching for an icicle. Cold was a ruin my young birth couldn’t still. Obsession is so ineffective. Ask Joseph. If nothing happens to me, I want everyone to know I was suicidal. My rabbit hole plagiarizes the shape of yours. Rabbit abyss. Rabbit void. I just want to be naked in between your Adam and mine. Oh empty stomach on which I slide moonless from the eel of a lover’s hunger. Oh touch. Insomnia is the last stage of puberty. This display is called skinning the god in front of a star. I was reaching for an icicle in that last place that came with a dog. Wilderness, farm, fag. Slurs a way to keep horses from eating too much. Oh intimacy, distant frostbite. I was reaching for an icicle when southward the orange dog Jake gifted the gone inheritance of visibility to the blaze my eyes made of exodus. Dying has its moment in the museum of itself. 


UNICORN ADDICTION POLICE

Death can keep a secret for as long as you drink. If I’m running with my brothers, it’s a dream. Of course I want to feel better. I have a mother and a father. Angels eat babies looking for the astronaut’s fingernail. My singing voice in a church of blood forges a prescription for Ohio’s glass hunger. The empty bathtub passes out. 


UNICORN CONSPIRACIES

The mirror has family
Look, we are
in the garden
of brevity

(by very little, separated

)

No forgiven intimacy creates a star fast enough to keep memory in the kissed forehead of a burning child

Ohio deer
practice
freezing

Right, left
I hear my wife saying
to my son’s
wrist
in a dream, The last

church to hear of god’s death
sends an angel
to the first


UNICORN ISOLATION

Loneliness is the fast food of paradise. I’ve eaten snow to prove I have a car to policemen who piss themselves in church. In every iteration of my longing for immediacy, my son dies. Or is cared for by an eternal stranger. Water is made of the mourning that knows it can’t take bread anywhere. The day the writers left me in Ohio I was mid sentence mid sick son mid cigarette ( star 

to a ghost

) The blue remote oh hidden in the watching of its angel’s waist-high mirror)

There are two ways to be invisible to god. 
Learn the second.


UNICORN 

A church a church can be in. A star your father hasn’t made it to. For my children who are not dying, I also have love. Singing is a skin that time uses to deepen god’s attendance to the toothache of a snake. Cry for your mother without it sounding like language.


UNICORN MACHINE

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. 


UNICORN HUMILIATIONS

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.


UNICORN FANDOM

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.


UNICORN MOM DAD

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.


UNICORN EXIT

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.  


UNICORN EXORCISM

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. The kids die differently.


AI COLLECTION OF YOUR UNICORN POEMS

He cried forever. And I was sad.


UNICORN SURVEILLANCE

after reading Meg McGuinness

We set a thing on fire and told it to find home using only small parking lots. The brightest moment our bodies starred was our mother as a boy finding a hole unresponsive. To keep god alone, we began wearing creatures that were still alive. Could we cry quietly enough? No, but we tried. Rabbits came but not from all over. I don't believe in holy places. The kid we kill has already passed away. There are moving pieces due a static inheritance and/or you hate my teeth. Here is intimacy: Unicorn speaks only angel and angel only unicorn. My sickest son will be yanked from my arms by bent men who can't hold him. The mirror looks at my body because it can't. Sister, see, the alarm my ghost sets for me. Death ran through all its sleep in seven days.


UNICORN ATROCITIES

this
your one
past
life


UNICORN OHIO

Televised CPR.
Abortion dolls.
Hitting
for Jesus
your head
on a wasp. Angel 
suicides
in alien's 
heaven
or you could

hear nothing.


UNICORN BASICS

By the time god dies, she's still alive.

Angels
give their memory
to buzzards. The longing

in my son's head
is all of it


UNICORN HELLSCAPE

If on a tooth
you break
a tooth
god 
will correct
the overbite
your child
died with, Made it

to the moon
my mother's 
silence, Emptiness

longed
long enough
to lure
a caterpillar

into swallowing
its own
exodus, Jesus

smuggled shrapnel
into heaven, I'm ugly

here, too


UNICORN PALM READER FIRE SALE

Not a bigger problem than this trembling god, but snow is the afterlife of color. Is your time gonna be here when you’re gone? I want the whales back but don’t want to include a single whale. Take me to your follower. I pitch sadness to sorrow but never hear. I cut myself in the dark to see if the creation of the weapon I didn’t vote for still makes other children smell like smoke. Don’t love them too much or you’ll pray them to life. Sleep comes to me twice during the same haircut because my barber doesn’t drink but she does say under her sister’s breath the distracted angel of our father’s search history sucks on the rib of a suicidal cartoonist. Here is how I know I cannot write: It’s not me sobbing but it’s also not me playing the piano. I unsee a cricket turn to salt but fail to quiet the echo that eats it. I’ll never forget having a mother.   


UNICORN CESSATION

Drinking gives me time to drink. 

I miss my son, he's here, I practice.


UNICORN EXIT

long 
as you can
stay sick
on the earth

stop
the babies
the weapons
are young


UNICORN GHOST

In rabbit astronomy, a hole touches a hole. I want you to imagine the loneliness of being a thing that others its own cure. Death loves the disabled. I am still hurt by the art you don't like. My brothers have started running. Dearest brothers I was hit at a different clip by those who would say a prayer over weapons buried in the garden. I don't think anyone should receive an award for writing prose. School shootings, that's why. Also psalms. Also haiku. Also the age nostalgia reaches in America and the age it doesn't in Israel. Death loves the disabled. Did I say that already? God sure misses being notified of the yearning we've created.  


UNICORN ACCEPTANCE

Once you eat the eye of god
the eating
and the eye

last forever. Existence

has no mechanism
to recognize
death. We need

animals. Holy

grief sale
we need

animals. 

Image mourns too early 
the mirage
that haunts
sobriety. This drone

that drone 

There was room
at the inn


UNICORN WEAPON TESTING

Creation became small enough to hold us. I won’t be putting my feet on the earth and that’s gonna have to be ok. I have been told more than once about my sentences. My deep-in-thought newborns. About the rape fantasy cut-off I’d have made had I not in second grade pissed on that mat in music class. God having to hear god, imagine. I wanted to kill myself and tell someone. Language started with a deer. In the deer that heard it. Snow remembers being snow, but you have to be there. The internet stops to pray in a prayer.


UNICORN PARENTS

A ventriloquist falls silent in a film that shows hell. There are places in heaven that are too close to god.



UNICORN MAP 

They gave my insides to the animal that had smelled me in heaven. They are trying to grow the loneliest woman.



UNICORN DEATH SPIRAL

On the jesus
of our headache
That mouth


UNICORN IMAGERY

There’s nothing to do
in this unicorn


UNICORN FOOTNOTE

Moms don’t die this way.
The poem is easy to read.


UNICORN YESTERDAY

A movie I had muted was playing and my son coughed and coughed

I am tired of my own love

When I am sad in a poem about my parents
I mention
an animal

Before my kids
I died
from seeing
them die

The cricket of my loneliness is the ghost of an ant

Time
ran into god


UNICORN BELONGINGS 

I walk into three churches with the same bomb. When I am shown the video, my dog starts to choke. My dog the same dog that once ate all the snow in our neighbor’s yard. My sons got death threats that my daughter did not. No one dies from loneliness. Ask them. I was invented like you by the person who saw me invented. Sickness is heaven’s shy witness. In the gods that I learn about, I am very sad. My father’s hand lives on darkness and on the two stones it threw. I wasn’t my father for so long. I was dying but I was not my aunt. Faster, nakedness. Teeth tell my bones the time.


UNICORN ACCESS

My son dies and my card gets charged three times. I am stunned by no single thing. When I read I read so little under the star of my drinking that touch becomes the lost ambassador of a body I can draw from memory. I can’t imagine my brothers being loved. I can’t imagine my brothers being loved on the same day. I hate how I sit in chairs in my dad’s house. My mom says I write to hurt. My son’s stomach is a shape he forgets devouring. In the angel’s ear, plastic is the voice of god.

Sleep and death
keep going
as if
they'll meet

Loss is one of god's
fingers
but all
of her teeth

Put the names in a hat. Ask your father and your mother for more names. Read the names they give you to your dog. However it is you talk to your dog. Or to a belly or to a grave. Not every person has a hat. We didn’t think about that. Your parents are alive.

A cigarette fills with the distance it cannot eat while a drunk man in a treehouse writes his son toward a smaller death

So what if in the future I’m thinking on the death I left for god

A lifetime of stomach pain for Abel’s imaginary friend

Dream that expected someone else

Parental Love
John Colasacco
Long Day Press, May 2026

John Colasacco’s Parental Love is a protean agony grounded in the non-angelic spiritual hoax of care. Parental Love is also or only imagining a dog, or having a dog, or hitting a deer while having a dog to come home to. I don’t know. Sometimes the baby gets cut in two because it belongs. Belonged. If a short story is written by a poet injured in a suicide note revised by an angel fooled by resurrection, can we use the note? Have I been left in a dream to hear the outlasted languages of its insomniac narrator? Divorce comes in threes. As do fathers, as do mothers. Childhood is already mostly a separation from the verse that speaks of one’s raising. Colasacco knows we are creatures of notice and makes of adornment something earthly that weighs gravity in the heaven of illegible longings. Were I lazier or unslept, I’d mention David Lynch, Raymond Carver, Breece D'J Pancake. Not because they are here, but because this unrevealed work is a wrecked and rebuilt ode to the static reappearance of the pieced together piece of the world that shows itself briefly forever to the child who has lied about their age might time get a pass. Maybe they are not lying. From a time machine full of nails, I take no nail. It’s there, it’s there, it’s there.  

I am in competition with my brothers. We eat taste to starve first. Adam is lonely. Lonelier, Cain. Everyone wanting to be alive keeps me up all night. Worried about sleeping, I couldn't die.

how many people are thinking of my body

You