kingsoftrain

Romantic Abjection
Danielle Chelosky
Far West Press, 2026

A vanishing diarist possessed of a spiraling insistence, Danielle Chelosky is a writer whose prose leaves one automatically and impulsively blue as it does this then does that then does its magical and melancholy things enough to trick a pony into being a whole other pony anxious it’s appeared without a trace. In Romantic Abjection (Far West Press, 2026) there is some third spell being sounded out by one scrawling fanfic toward the forms that distance makes from premade scratch. Time has a body it can’t use. Death is afraid of god in a way that sleep isn’t. Does touch survive suddenly or does it live forewarned? You’ll hear something, this I know. This I don’t: An angel prays more than once to unsee its ghost nudes. In Romantic Abjection’s now, a feeling is there for a sec and then there the second it’s gone. Please read near enough to Danielle Chelosky that you read their writing.

I can't read my own handwriting any longer. Your memory though is still the angel that can't kill itself. I am trying to be a single thing that a car can hit. Car made whole. I get on my knees and put my palm on a psalm. Being drunk is a belonging one hides from a loss that will never look. Sound a footstep god uses to scare the lonely. A fly exists to avoid fly sadness.

anybody can say what they did for a day

in the world I was crying alot and people started to like me

Birth is a kidnapping that leaves no one behind.

My loneliness has a past 
that yours
can forget. Oh

God.

I leave the car open and a neighbor sends their kid over to steal my alcohol. I let the kid get pretty far before pretending to point a gun at my head. The kid's head explodes a year from now. Your now, not mine. I'm not the father in every poem. It's okay to sleep like deer. Here comes that car, kid. My now is that fetus curled into a tire swing. The small amount of force you can't get back.   

I didn't build that

God, time, and touch are all I write about. Sleep covers each. This poem is for the nonconsecutive years my kids won’t have me. Angels were created when god asked an angel about addiction. I write about angels too I guess. Imagine caring about drugs in her system. I don’t look at stars but will when I’m dying.

I wish for you
that you can die
thinking
on your death

The movies

got away
some
went first
The writing

suffered
so what
I stayed

as sober
as a spider
in an appetite
not long
for god
and the writing

had a silent
mother
or went
in a mother

silent
oh most
thorough
of autofictions
oh doom
scrolling
son of my son's
suicide
have you a part

for the speaking
father
I'm not

here to be sad
I'm there
and my brothers

bike
up a hill
that can feel
an ant
die

You're the churchbell
of your dream