ethel cain, responsoria, etc

LETTER 1

Dear Ethel Cain

I’m in the afterhood of childlessness. No one is dancing. I say things above my dying body that sound final. A cigarette is a flashlight with a toothache. Look for whiskey’s underwater church.

LETTER 2

Dear Ethel Cain

An angel overcomes a severe stutter by playing musical chairs with two boys who years ago were struck at different times in the head by the same horseshoe. A stone thinks of a stone thinks of a. A line of computer code erases the rib of the snake it was written to memorize. I’m not telling you this any more than I’m.

LETTER 3

Dear Ethel Cain

Hell doesn’t have a language but everyone goes there to talk. Your ears are ears to my ears. I continue to want to die less than my children want to be killed. Yesterday was yesterday. I could afford a room in the aforedoom. The future is a rumor started twice by a violence we remember being able to stop. The poor play shape, touch, reentry. Find four hands.  

LETTER 4

Dear Ethel Cain

Knowing I have skin makes my skin stay put. I am perhaps in my last translated body and am maybe hearing creatures compare voice apps for crucifixion survivors. In the dream that cannot undream the dream of my assault, two men who share a neck find part of my stomach in my son’s brain. I was wrong. Everything I touch forgets being my hand.

LETTER 5

Dear Ethel Cain

I am maybe too high. I want to speak to how their nowness robs us of being present. I was giving head to seashells that heard the breaking knee. Or fasting in the pawn shop of my father’s early sleep. Anyway. Hearing an apple cry keeps the angel’s fossil dry. Nearer nostalgia I’m not to thee.

LETTER 6

Dear Ethel Cain

The surgeon puts an egg in my son's mouth then shoots herself. On earth, we refuse the naked. The angels think we're weird for losing teeth. The last time I wrote sick was the first time the television marked the last time we'd seen a bug. It's not true but here we say all circles are male. Longing is a cult created by birth. I don't care. Belief invented your mother and my. The past dies of narration.

LETTER 7

Dear Ethel Cain

A microwave in a wellness center is left alone long enough to miss a bible. Fate does its work early. Babies make loss fun again. I try with my gut health to stop time. Angels, born on, turn off. 

LETTER 8

Dear Ethel Cain

I lick sugar from the windshield of a deer-shaped car. Make a bird from a hunger ballon. Have an orgasm that belongs in a stomach to lovebombed plastics. Catch photophobia from the ghosts of angel suicides. Fix a machine with a drinking machine. Listen, glisten. Etc. 

LETTER 9

Dear Ethel Cain

An abuser loses their phone, their fingerprint. Longing faces its first deadline. The eating competition of our dreams is on its third snow delay. The work my body puts into me is killing my children. I think of that fingerprint for 100 years in sunscreen time. My skin turns white from being seen by a ghost. My teeth go grey. And comb their fear.

LETTER 10

Dear Ethel Cain

The lie of my childhood became a lie. Let's compare suicide notes. Turtle, ashtray, ghost. Time is an angel knocked unconscious by a star. I had an idea for a resurrection story but the 3D glasses failed lol. I remember your fake mother on the set of a zombie movie telling sex jokes for the dead. Confession number one: I was born without a missing finger. Our bathroom door falls asleep before we do.

LETTER 11

Dear Ethel Cain

I try to sing. I am not cold. Where deep designs of making hold.

LETTER 12

Dear Ethel Cain

somehow for both Aria Aber and Franz Wright it’s hard to have good brothers I can’t go a week without drinking because the week is from 1983 touch resurrects itself how lonely sleep is named after sleep my eyes fight over two memories a line of ants carry a lightbulb to god I pray in a bullet to a melancholy bee don’t be afraid there is no nowlife

LETTER 13

Dear Ethel Cain

Despair is a food group. I had to read the line again that said my brother’s hand was eating out an angel. Cannibals surprise their mothers in Eden. Is skin still the longest dream? My fake sleep is not your fake sleep. I thumb my own eyes in the shepherd machine.  

LETTER 14

Dear Ethel Cain

I have so much to say about my father that I love my mother. Poetry is the untruth that is so empty it symbolizes emptiness. Dear Ethel Cain. The angel has a microphone and a mask. And a condom we don’t know about. Distance is a pig eating the feet of god. Sound suns the pink husk of the creator’s gasp. Having lost my thirst, I confront the naming of my brothers by the drowned. Also, forgive the body for its success. Gone from the writing is the imagery that would bait the birthmark into the shadow of a star. Don’t forget to starve the fish. 

LETTER 15

Dear Ethel Cain by now abuse is nostalgia’s first job

I did not mean to pay attention to my life. For that, I am touchable and sorry. Not dying earlier is always the most cruel month. In school, in second grade, I wet myself two days in a row. I’ve never been able to scare the right people. During the assault, I spotted on the bathroom floor a pencil nearly sharpened out of existence. I thought of a star, a cigarette, and of a newborn being sucked back into its mother. I burned my face on a mask as something god could use when asked about my teeth.

LETTER 16

Dear Ethel Cain

I sleep in the sleep I’ll die in. My heartbeat says too soon, too soon. A hand on god’s eyelid. Nothing.

LETTER 17

Dear Ethel Cain

They are moving the body from star to star when a landmine made in a dot of blood yawns arisen somewhere in the white acre of my poet friend’s eye. Needing a past, my sister lets a snake eat her entire stomach. Father invents in the grey cinema a remote for loneliness. My friend becomes an angel obsessed with redhaired dolls. My father leaves the cinema wearing nothing but a seashell and spends the rest of his life dreaming of a doorbell that tracks decay. Three mothers we can’t place leave together for a nightmare where a fetus bounces into the back of an out of control pick-up truck. I keep changing what my mouth holds, but it all fits.

LETTER 18

Dear Ethel Cain

They pronounced my name correctly then killed my children. A shredded angel brought to god the blue arms of Ohio lightning. For too long, an infant heard itself think. God outlasted imagery. And gender, god.

LETTER 19

Dear Ethel Cain

I’m just 
not
that smart.

Rain, hide your mountain.

Star
keep safe
the volcano.

Star keep safe the volcano.

Hey TV, stop being lonely (no one heard)

What can death
see

from the moon…

After being born, you don’t know anyone for a very long time.

Stop looking at creation.

LETTER 20

Dear Ethel Cain

The mouth is the only wound denied entry into paradise. Each eye beats birthmark to the body. The angels find us, forget. A tooth like a ghost growing in a fog bathes itself in a window. Bombs, miss. Meat into dust, that virgin hoax. All but a pair of creatures know the truth. Our god taken by two kids who can’t move.

LETTER 21

Dear Ethel Cain

A spacecraft carrying blood for the animals god didn’t name loses power near the star of Bethlehem. Those on board have nothing to write with. It’s not the saddest thing, but has happened prior to there being sadness. Later, sound takes a chainsaw to the sound of a chainsaw. The world makes me afraid of movies.

~~~~~

RESPONSORIA

I said something perfect.
Your father loved you.

~

I swim and the body means nothing.
Nakedness. Hungry at its own feast.
I should’ve touched
more animals.
There are no bombs
if the dead give birth.

~

A sickness moving through the angels. One theory: Two guns in a dream tried to make a hand. A second: God had sex while pregnant. For the third, stay beautiful. Death thinks you’re still here. 

~

A movie died and I wanted to write better.
You put a lake in a lake.
Whole childhoods
of an angel
went nowhere.
I binged
for my brother
body horror
from an invisibly
watched 
loneliness.
Mom
gave us mom.

~

The last 
beast
I wish
we knew
the order

There’s a crow
crying shape
under my fingernail
that looks
if you look at it
like a map

Angels make little dares
beneath god’s blood
angels
make little dares

~

I want to drink and cook.
I want to watch movies and not drink.
I want my invisible teeth
abused
by color. 
I want my doctors to say seashell
scrotum
syndrome.
I want these meds to sadden drones.
I want fatigue. Hell’s rubber mirror.
I want my children to be so exhausted that they pray 
to a ghost 
that’s praying 
to them. 
I want your poems 
your shorter
poems
to drive 
death mad. 
I want to crucify my tongue. 
I want a wasp to crucify my tongue.
I want shape
to burn faster
than form. Nudes
to zoo
nakedness.
A fed raccoon.
Or a dog that believes.

~

A violinist puts a knife to the neck of a doll. 
Stop drinking.

~

No one told me I was crying. 
Here is what I thought:
It can’t get lonelier 
than the birth of god.
My ribs had a message
for a toothache. Babies 
are never 
young.

~

God is still a child. No one knows how to help. Angels doing deer impressions think about stopping. Your mother and father are alive.

~

My youngest brother sends me poems and they are bruises on a radar that’s having a secret nightmare and I am afraid that if I touch them they will be touched. I’m not an alcoholic. My food eats prayer to starve me. I haven’t heard too many in my family say Palestine and it makes me want to trick them into saying pain. I hate my son but in a very sonlike way. Others hate my son because they think he looks at the moon believing god made stuff. I haven’t been sleeping. It’s okay. My insomnia is a keyhole in the shape of my son’s access to angels. This is a death threat machine. A bomb scare machine. Tomorrow, fake the earth.   

~

My son is sick and I want a gun. I forget three times in front of a ghost how to vomit. We lie about déjà vu. I say dog. You, whale. The world destroys loneliness. 

My stomach travels 
with an angel 
back 
in time. 

I miss roadkill. Freeze my brain.

Death becomes death when it forgives god.

~

I will always know what you look like and it terrifies god

~

I die and look for my mother.
I die and look for yours. 

I die and my brothers don’t.
I die in Ohio to impress
with a bruise
an icicle. I die and my daughter

I die and my sons

I die
and which
of my sons

I die and god says 
that is not
salt
that is movie
salt

Death gets over nobody, I die

there

I die on somebody’s birthday

I die bc pretty
Because I can

I die where
I die with a rich interior death

I die for rich poets who’ve time to be good parents

Love dies from god

I die and see an uncle trying to drink his eyes back
I die and you can’t
I die in a shadow from three thumbtacks

meant
for the savior
of a self
harming sister

I die in my father’s dead rabbits
all of them
die once

~

The poem says so little. 

Food is a ghost that saves my mouth. 

Hi, all my gods stop dreaming at once. 

~

God was in the room that was later turned into god. 

Did your loved ones get out?

Jesus wore a spoon around his neck. 
It helped him sleep.

~

I make in my writing such silly mistakes. Some people vote on who should be given the award for best cigarette burn, and some just smoke. Air is not in the air. I pluck a blue string and your paper cup turns the slow star of your mouth into a coin-sized hell. My son was born above an elevator. There’s nothing in god but a hummingbird and a trapdoor. Poor, other, birds. I don’t get the dark from my brothers.

~

Tell me how your mother went.

We’ll say 
the far
amen. 

We’ll say
to dog
how hunger
is like snow
Hurry.

Y’all with your nakedness

deadnaming god
Y’all with your carpenter’s

voided
mirror

Idk

I miss my cousins.
I’ve lost my brothers.

The invisible
in Eden
who gets over
their surprise

~

Belief is the angel that can name its bones. In heaven, we learn where we first saw god. Franz I didn't know what I was reading. Sometimes it's my turn to be two animals. To sleep, I chain my dog to the axle of an overturned church van and enter the church. Franz, Kazim, Camonghne. I will probably tell you I'm poor then show you my collection of milk bottles still empty from the crucifixion. I don't have an Ohio dog. In Ohio, touch is the fast food of angels. I am sad of course about the van. The way it deered a deer to mock the runway of hunger's banged out gait. Here is how dumb angels are: they think the peephole my brothers use can hear death. Love dies so slowly that you think people love you.

~

Our dying reminds satan that god started too early. Angels have perfect stomachs. A friend of mine who doesn’t like my writing asks me for a suicide reading list. Gender is an insect that remembers being young.