a cigarette loses time in a church for anorexics
babies jealous of our sadness die happy
I am trying to say the next thing before you have a mother
what if not hurting your children is abuse
my last words depend on the password I remember
choose any parent to make my brothers cry
belief a skull faith a stone
toothache a worm worried about a star
no one likes me I love your poems
can worms worry
Memory stops eating in the afterlife of the past.
A cigarette can sometimes be a search party that finds nothing.
Angels change their sex based on the owl that hears them.
In church I break my fingers trying to open a baseball full of rice.
The breaking happens so silently we are noticed, say my fingers, by god.
Will my children see my body
touch sleeps in a blue mirror
I wrap a dead mouse in a blurry map and miss
three
of the four
children
that were me
super quiet parents
sometimes they kill every last
others
every
first
oh nursery of injured microscopes,
we only bomb those whose blood can disappear
when I don't hear from you, I don't think you're dead
I'll see it when I know it
in fact
I have
the words
with some distance
god
gave suicide
to a crisis
actor
I was sick and tried to finish a cigarette. Online at least I can speak my prayers to a god that leaves me godless. Any weapon you hold has been tested on a child. Any weapon you don't on a field of children put to sleep. I don't love my children because loving puts nearness on a map only angels can fold. I with them watch cringe compilations of miracles. They die but who's counting.
Climate change killed a ghost and every angel slept.
Animals hid their dreaming.
Microwaves
confessed
to hummingbirds.
Our longest death
remained a boy
his brain
god’s
now
You put your body
in which
day
I dip my body in a paint that makes rain cry.
Alcohol is a warden.
I read re-predicted nonfiction.
I miss
my mom
with god
with god
I miss
my mom.
What if all I’ve taught my children is how
to love me.
I want to touch all the writers
in the places
numbed
by what
they read.
I watch that one movie where you pretend to be
disabled
poor
my smarter
brother.
Possessed by return
god
is unbearable.
Imaginary
bombs
imagine.
BLOODMERCY
I.S. Jones
APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner
Copper Canyon, 2025
Ah what an urgent patience is given an anxious peace by the immediate vision of I.S. Jones as versed in holy thematics that pin nostalgia to a renamed surrounding. Our place in common is Bloodmercy, a ghost psalm that kings a father’s absence, and a landmark that earns its place with celestial hardness, wicked accuracy, and remnant reminiscence. Existence can’t solve the living. Twin butchers climb too high the tree of boredom. Bloodmercy is a work that occurs in the genesis of again. Oh how sound ages want. Oh how a mouth prays to itself to know its shape. Debone, in the reading, in the aftermath of Abel’s bent childhood of straightened witness, the belonged body. Killing doesn’t cure murder. Sisterhood is a shelter stormed by pattern. Abuse a scarecrow of bored angels. Violence leaves history to those arriving. What Jones reimagines beats us to the dream.
