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.
Letter 031825
Dear Ethel Cain
They are moving the body from star to star when a landmine made in a dot of blood yawns arisen somewhere in the white acre of my poet friend’s eye. Needing a past, my sister lets a snake eat her entire stomach. Father invents in the grey cinema a remote for loneliness. My friend becomes an angel obsessed with redhaired dolls. My father leaves the cinema wearing nothing but a seashell and spends the rest of his life dreaming of a doorbell that tracks decay. Three mothers we can’t place leave together for a nightmare where a fetus bounces into the back of an out of control pick-up truck. I keep changing what my mouth holds, but it all fits.
I don't need any of you.
I don't have details.
Our dying reminds satan that god started too early. Angels have perfect stomachs. A friend of mine who doesn’t like my writing asks me for a suicide reading list. Gender is an insect that remembers being young.
Belief is the angel that can name its bones. In heaven, we learn where we first saw god. Franz I didn't know what I was reading. Sometimes it's my turn to be two animals. To sleep, I chain my dog to the axle of an overturned church van and enter the church. Franz, Kazim, Camonghne. I will probably tell you I'm poor then show you my collection of milk bottles still empty from the crucifixion. I don't have an Ohio dog. In Ohio, touch is the fast food of angels. I am sad of course about the van. The way it deered a deer to mock the runway of hunger's banged out gait. Here is how dumb angels are: they think the peephole my brothers use can hear death. Love dies so slowly that you think people love you.
The shape you left open so you could vomit on your walk with god.
Our uncle's blood that went back in time to skip us.
Horse twilight. Bombed omens.
I took a toy car from the fire and put it on my wrist.
The far ambulance
of your drinking...
Name in Ohio
no one. Arson's
doxed
angel.
The angels let us drink for six days before telling us about god. Day seven, they give us each a son old enough to bite us on the arm. It’s a lot to process. This rabbit is all ribs. Eight is wasted on angels who miss their ghosts.
Letter 031125
Dear Ethel Cain
I sleep in the sleep I’ll die in. My heartbeat says too soon, too soon. A hand on god’s eyelid. Nothing.
Losing dogs is good practice. In heaven, I look with Ohioans at ruined cars. I love Jesus for those few moments she went unnamed. I don’t see blood. I piss myself when my nose runs. When I say moon, put out on my brother a cigarette. When I write moon, become on earth the first to be invisible. Religion is apology and pain. The afterlife is a place for morning people to talk about death. Dear Ethel Cain, I don’t think letters help. I so try to not love poets, but they read aloud so nervously that books disappear from the bible. I keep in the same place coughing up anthill dirt. We can’t find the sleep god died in.
They found a dog on the moon with a mannequin’s hand in its mouth. They drew it together from memory but in the year it took them a photo of the dog had been taken by god. Art wants to invent time, all the time. In a poem for my mother, a baseball is being grown in a beehive. In a poem for my father, I eat an egg roll in a cornfield made of paper. In a poem for both, I am old enough to count the rings on the oven’s burners. Love changes love.
kingsoftrain 