Drinking comes to me in my sleep
I carry my child’s body to hole-in-the wall restaurants and ask aloud what your last meal would be. I am consumed and I am the consumed navigating a surplus. God had to keep his son from assaulting a second angel.
IF NOT FOR YOU
Eliot Cardinaux
poems
The Bodily Press, 2026
~
I want to be alive while sounding alive. In reading the work of Eliot Cardinaux, in this case, the poems in If Not For You, I am made a reshaped student of musical unease. Politically and personally worried, this verse takes inventory of its surplus absence to interrogate the defeated answer of its inquiry. If one’s own sadness sells to sorrow the powders of a depressed mime, then one must coin asking as a debt forgiven its rehearsal. These poems are angry and in love and know that to catch the dead at their name-calling our eulogies for urgency must overstay the overleaving and that our saying must keep talking to silence.
God’s plan is to follow them out of the garden. It doesn’t work, and now hunger is on the table. Cry where you eat. Have a mother.
The infant overcome by the loss of its first loneliness.
The existence
of an infant
overcome.
For us, for God.
Suicide is a shooting star seen by a child who cannot die. The mirror in my son's room is asleep and watched by god. I tend to my miracle headache with the peephole of a horse's eye. Order whiskey online by pressing a thumbnail of me as a nonbreathing infant. Meditation: the boy Christ writes his name late into the night of his mother's hearing loss. By morning, there are seven sounds for rest. Angels coding for people who've never been nude.
God crushes angels in a mirror.
A childhood haircut catches fire near my unseeable wrist.
That deer coughs up a string from your mother's stomach.
Doves
for less
solve
death
Reading younger writers is how I cry for my mother
I am in treegrief love with a being created by its kidnapper
