I was writing in the dream to you about the dream. A quick note, really. How to replace a lightbulb. Treat a deer bite. How you should never let someone cut your hair while it’s raining. A little story about your mother selling baby teeth at the crucifixion. Not yours. See pic.
EASY TIGER
Evan Nicholls
Future Tense Books, 2025
I hold that Evan Nicholls is a scholar of deep sense. In poems and retitled images of original origin, the work as pasted into the copied beginnings of Easy Tiger is one or seven of an insistent reluctance to write what came before as a prayer overheard in a chapel erected in a field leftward of the anchored fact of our uselessness. I opened my gaze to the fish-caught world. I found my hopelessness still hopeless but tenderly surrounded by the brutally beheld. I’m not sure this is absurd. Nicholls plucks from our humanness its exiled objectifications and places them on a mood board for belonging to the extracted. Collage, sure, but collage rescued from its overlooked layering. Not just anything goes. This is sorrow cooking for a sadness that’s gained an appetite in a place voided of elsewhere. This is a comet losing god’s ashes. Blood gluing itself together in a pencil dreaming of a horse trying to sleep in a tree. What angel slang. What a deadline given to forever. Ah, Barton. Easy there brother. Anyway, imagine putting your finger on all the touch in the world. Then try.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
There are so many ways to drink and so many paths to your uncle sleeping in the second to last car on earth. Echo trails off to become a widowed expert on the reinterpreted dreams of its unmade phone. Eels translate for lightning. Children injure themselves in one vehicle accidents. In their small lives I hope their presence has understood an immoveable god. You keep a little water in the lungs of the doll.
my dear Ethel Cain poems were written to a void I believed in not to the abyss of past & present deepfake humanness & they started bc I miswrote Ethan Hawke in a word doc so for my record and the record none of that shit done under and in their real name then or now was or is ok
and I am going to keep them where they are, addressing the world as it wasn't
etc
I was suicidal for years in my mother’s field of melancholy jellyfish. Our past changes the sex of the wrong person. Even time believes it’s god’s addiction to time.
is there maybe
a way
to come back
from my living
a rare
disorder
wrapped
in a cigarette
safe
sad
a skin cell
dead
to the face
of god
an angel
designed
by an angel
a baby
walking
too early
an egg
cracked
in a star
please
can we put
in our arms, that
(something small
(that walked
AI ruins reincarnation. I have tried to be seen as blue without the choking. My son looks for his won body. His own. Sex breaks three lightbulbs in the chickenhouse. I first thought an erection meant something was trying to get in. I stayed up nights longing for the swimmer’s re-kissed ears. Is your mom happy? A ghost knows where it is by snowfall and by crushed cigarette. My dad was crying and I had to pretend I hadn’t sat on the arm of the couch weird. My son bites his arm then presses a button on his speech device that erases the words from a prayer uttered in a time machine. I didn’t kill myself bc I never did.
Two wasps spooning in puberty’s microscopic dream
A newborn’s eye as a moth
of blood
Glass of milk
afraid of god
Adam makes bread for his sons. A mosquito collects mosquitoes from Eden. Everyone I talk to knows my mother. Shy x-ray. Shy tadpole. Brain a headlight packed in snow. Sorrow is sadness that believes in the future. This is what I thought my blood was doing. The afterdeer of it all. So what. So what, angel. Your mime my abuser.
Churchbell, fetus, ceiling fan. A frog hops out of my brother’s dream and lives instantly. Seven men pull a child in all different directions out of a car perfectly owned by their wrecked father. If you don’t sleep, your body will remain too crooked to crucify. Many of my poems are not called cleaning my son’s back. Here we are.
