kingsoftrain

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.  

Nude nostalgias accumulate in the sadness of new elations. I am photo deep in the longing you’ve abridged. Hands shrink with age. Facts wrestle me from the hair of god. You’re allowed to be a vibe. After kissing the salt from a dissolved rabbit mask, I see the redesigned deer of my disappearing. The writing stops but it can’t tell you. 

mothered by a silent
shape my
mouth

The body’s been to the body and back. Catching fish presses the eyelids of god. I look at my brothers to see if our sex dreams have overlapped. I look at my brothers with the unmilked violence of nostalgia. A church painter works backward through the bible. The painter says if the mother’s nose is bleeding, find a baby to put under it. Does not say that touch returns in an image cooked up by the face of pain. Meanwhile a book as quiet as a book turns blue in the space between belonging to the strangled unhoused and beheading the hand that starts a fire with a nail. Meanwhile, the past. You’re never far from the unborn.