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.
I'm not
close
to anyone
Without Jesus I don’t think God recovers the password of every angel. I’m poor and I yell at people. Melancholy nonsense. It’s the blue comes inside the blue. A dove is bitten by a moth. A baby cries for a baby out. Language won’t tell you what to say. My cigarette has two dreams
plastic
and arthritis)
I eat until food touches food.
A real gun
should do more.
Your mother sleeps to mourn the secret ghost of your death
Horse
has its blurry
life
The killing, the movies, the drinking. A spotlight stolen by a man in a deer costume. My son saying he wants to live at home until his brother dies. God’s dream, too small.
