to the goodbye
that created
distance
God is being tortured to tell us where we are
Letter 032725
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.
each letter
of this word
is silent
On a bicycle I was a priest. A girl who liked me told her father that her mother was dead. She gave me orange peels and said they were from a book she couldn’t read. I put them down my brother’s shirt then hopped on my bike. My brother said it burns it burns but not enough to put a wasp inside of god. I rode until my friends had daughters who shot them near cemeteries that were never used. There were days when I could string together days that I was well enough to drink. I don’t know that my sleep ever touched yours. If you can get the skin off that rock you can throw it.
I don’t mean to be hopeless.
I mean to be
hopeless.
Letter 032525
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.
Burn The Losses
poetry
Antonio Gamoneda
Action Books, 2025
Memory never has enough time. I finish reading Antonio Gamoneda’s Burn The Losses, so noiselessly translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Victor Rodríguez Núñez, and call a toast, then, to the brain of oxygen. With backstories seemingly visible to amnesiacs only, Gamoneda’s verse addresses the trivial recollections of our most urgent forgettings and de-creates in a more discreet afterlife a body plotting its revenge on any new constant restlessness. The skin is a flooded sorrow and the body agony’s breathing box. To swallow this, you’d have to believe the egg never went off and that the sadly chewed piece of gum in its yellow was real. Starve your disbelief. Starve mine. Let childhood burn me like a horse. Let this work, for what it strips from repetition, echo.
The angel of the zeitgeist thinks death is a lover of short films.
*
It was a game I played with my sons. Like this: It was cold, and my brother was dead. My brother was dead, and the music said drink. The music said drink, and I sang god down. I sang god down, and god bent himself to a moment in Palestine. God bent himself to a moment in Palestine, and he was othered by his own brain. He was othered by his own brain.
*
Time uses god to tell time.
I drink myself to life.
Nothing outside of Ohio
is there.
I Have Brought You A Severed Hand
Ghayath Almadhoun
Action Books, 2025
Ghayath Almadhoun’s I Have Brought You A Severed Hand, as woundedly clocked in translation by Catherine Cobham, changes the present without using time in a verse that pours milk over disappearing and reappearing blood. It is an absolutely beautiful, howling, undisguised, and sighing work, a pilgrimage of homage, an interest earned by yearning in nostalgia’s plastic cocoon, that pays with grey ransacked vividity the debts redacted from receipts of attention. Palestine is here, then there. As is Syria, Sweden, Germany. One can feel America pretending to be here, but love is too flooded a being. Language, too, is here. A light pining for glow. You can go home again, but cannot go housed. Almadhoun writes un- and re-policed in the nonfiction of the surreal, and hesitates so quickly one might go to pieces in a photograph of the lost lost. Saying a work is necessary is currently and old-head American. If I stop here, get this book. If I don’t, do the same.
kingsoftrain 