kingsoftrain

sacrifice 4

If you love your children for too long, they become lonely. Remembering everything is not enough. Update your isolations.

sacrifice 3

God
a mere
flare
Creation’s 
signal 
to Eden
of a typo
in its dark
message
Leave
under a corpse
of light no
cried out
thing

sacrifice 2

Two dreams: I was crying in a horse about death. The horse had branches for bones and had never been awake. I was in the horse because Jesus had seen my wrists. Suicide gets a stickman into heaven. A mother keeps earaches in her palm.  

Letter 041525

Dear Ethel Cain

I might be dying. It is rude to care for oneself when your kids make from children bombs that bomb. It’s not hard to be drunk. My blue mother lives on motherhood while worshiping in miniature the sleep of the lonely bear bought by our most eccentric celebrity. I’m not okay. I have to drive to work when at home my son is sick and my other sons aren’t. If I die, people will stop looking at me right away. My brothers aren’t on their knees with this. Dear star my abusers used puppies to touch my blood in black and white. You can’t deport a witch. A miracle. My nakedness shrinks death with a folk song about angels protesting permanence. The lie reached heaven and that dude set himself on fire to burn god with Palestine. Jesus rose but the rest kept their graves on earth. The minotaur fell out of love with a horse. Lightning left the moon to think on thunder. Lightning left the moon to think on thunder.

sacrifice 1

Heaven lasts as long as the dreams you show up in on earth. Dying is the insufficient décor of an offscreen world. Mary had a stalker.

When found by my children, I am the most lost of all fathers. Sex sounds like crying to someone crying. I want to drink with nothing in my stomach and talk to no one about art. I still have only five words for what my hands can do. In Ohio, either the box is the church or the pup is the church. In Ohio, animals think fire is the last supper of the afterlife. Look, I tire of both angel and ghost but of angel first. Younger I thought the bible had been written by my uncles. The fish is holy and the bread boring and unending. Caress the scales downward. By my uncles against their will.

Letter 041125

Dear Ethel Cain

Mom cracks an egg and says she is no longer holding onto the fingerprint of god. My brothers look at me as if they know how to erase my eyes. There is a problem in this poem that only a poem can solve. Death is death because it couldn’t sleep in heaven. Stones here are thrown because a stone can’t eat more than one bird. We listen to our fathers argue over whether or not ghosts are angels that are sexually active. Then to the same tooth for nine months. By the time we’re assaulted, we’ve not been uniquely suicidal. Echoes learn the wrong language.

If there is 
no god
I hope
there’s not

One is born 
with one’s
own language

COMMUNIONS (entries 1-10)

We had three good dogs. Three of my brothers shared a dress. Neighbors shook televisions to hear the ocean. Bones faked brokenness. It’s not hard to say it was real. In a city of bathrooms, puking is a language. Taking pills in a parked car shrinks god and/or roadkill. Sleep is smaller than an angel. Bodies eat pain. 

~

Rabbits stick to the tree of blood. I hear everything that I believe. It was snowing. Your father was choking. Bone, he said, in the bread. They don’t even cry.    

~

The hurt horse beats to the lake a delirious deer. Leave the deer out. Let it change color. Let the horse fill with mud so that when its neck breaks the neck of mud also breaks. Raise a frog an arthritic god. Scarecrow, crucifix, body bag. I laugh in church and in the motherless church of war. Brevity’s longest male. Meal. Male.

~

I can count on my teeth the number of your teeth gone soft in the knees of boys. There’s nothing you could’ve done to make me beautiful. The ghost of body image believes in one ghost. We’re all too young but see anyway the unfinished angel blowing on the stomach of christ. Mother from her father wants only the pea behind his eye. Distance is clickbait for god.

~

Teach the baby to suck in its stomach. Go bitemark bald to the burning of tire swings. Pretend you can be nostalgic in America. Do this by having at all times handfuls of woozy spiders that prevent you from making guns of your hands. Do this by drinking. I wasn’t worried but then my phone started working in a dream. In heaven, every mirror is an exit wound.  

~

I told the older kids it was in my ear. They shook me a few times and took turns looking. I rubbed my jaw as if to mark myself removed from the tender convincing of permanence. To each other, even now, they describe the wasp. Death makes god last longer.

~

I count the same money and think of my body. I send to a stranger a TikTok of a man crushing dried insects with a red rolling pin. I don’t watch anything anymore that requires sound. The last scream I heard was god’s and I named it god. The stranger messages me twice that they recognize the man. A lonely world, but for kids.

~

A ghost sets itself on fire with a cigarette once lit to mark the end of emptiness. No one cares about my body. Touch still doesn’t know that skin is the god of touch. I hide my daughter’s mouth in mine and wait for the angel of those on suicide watch to notice my teeth. The ghost is so still it’s looking at hell.      

~

( or maybe I hide my daughter in a ghost and these are the ghost years lost to the god of fast food whose son is a hunger pain whose son is a hunger whose son’s childishly staged crucifixion shocked time into a fomo that found eating to be a bone from an extra past where I practice chewing upside down get pregnant for no one

~

I am not going to tell you the name of the movie but 1983 I thought my mom was asleep and she thought I and our closeness got near enough to be seen watching the wrong murder put a lookalike in the right life anyway the past like your body is always new and before the eclipse I pressed a bottlecap into your thigh 

you will never 
know
what this
is about
but sing
fuck all
to your double

What if I am close to knowing
why
I have brothers

Life is the line drawn between death and death

Once I’ve seen your body I look at your body

~~~

CONSUMPTIONS (entries 1-7)

God died doing math in a nightmare. Not everyone was able to hide the body. Men without mothers bit themselves thinking it would lead to nakedness. Angels did the same but thought nothing. Fire chased an empty bus past the cemetery of the three things I couldn’t name. Into a small life of startled handguns, people in photos were born. Gameshows, I said plainly, above a hole the ground touches for being hungry.

~

God’s stomach is a cigarette trying to eat on the moon. I am asleep in my homage to sleep. In hell you have to give birth to everyone you’ve killed. You can’t have your kids.

~

I dream in longhand. Watch slasher movies to control death. No I will not be doing anything for my mental health. God was the first weapon meant to heal time. We don’t all live here. Blood reads but not with all this blood. Be last, be small. Hide your stomach from emptiness. Check your children for bones. Hairdryer for pills.

~

I wanted to smoke and look at water. I turned left at a tipped over gas can and walked until I heard fireworks. A small tv was showing god the hole it needed help making. A dryer with a baby in it was won by two mothers. They tried to scream. I made a sound and the sound stayed that way for good. I recognized my kids for years.  

~

Mother with her paintbrush and me with my fever. There are no miracles. There are no miracles because of what miracle does to memory. When I fall on the ice, ache takes one of my hands as a shortcut. Never reach god.    

~

Shape is the shape I must become to receive the world. There is no bomb called grief. No bomb child. The bells were rung I held my son. You can love your brothers forever. Thunder misgenders echo no more than once. Oh no Ohio forgiveness forgave forgiveness. What if you can’t stop writing this poem. My mother and father have the same password. Sometimes when I’m touching you I’m not. Touch tombstone for the mourning cosmos. 

~

The turtle dreams of strangulation in a green emptiness

A star is the graverobber of god

I texted the writers not all of them

Writing is sometimes being drunk while putting a mouse back together in a mountain

We can kiss here
is an eyepatch
for your moon
tattoo

I don’t know why anyone would want to see anything

What if his son
stayed put