Letter 020925
Dear Ethel Cain
The surgeon puts an egg in my son's mouth then shoots herself. On earth, we refuse the naked. The angels think we're weird for losing teeth. The last time I wrote sick was the first time the television marked the last time we'd seen a bug. It's not true but here we say all circles are male. Longing is a cult created by birth. I don't care. Belief invented your mother and my. The past dies of narration.
Letter 020725
Dear Ethel Cain
I am maybe too high. I want to speak to how their nowness robs us of being present. I was giving head to seashells that heard the breaking knee. Or fasting in the pawn shop of my father’s early sleep. Anyway. Hearing an apple cry keeps the angel’s fossil dry. Nearer nostalgia I’m not to thee.
Letter 020725
Dear Ethel Cain
Knowing I have skin makes my skin stay put. I am perhaps in my last translated body and am maybe hearing creatures compare voice apps for crucifixion survivors. In the dream that cannot undream the dream of my assault, two men who share a neck find part of my stomach in my son’s brain. I was wrong. Everything I touch forgets being my hand.
Letter 020625
Dear Ethel Cain
Hell doesn’t have a language but everyone goes there to talk. Your ears are ears to my ears. I continue to want to die less than my children want to be killed. Yesterday was yesterday. I could afford a room in the aforedoom. The future is a rumor started twice by a violence we remember being able to stop. The poor play shape, touch, reentry. Find four hands.
Letter 020525
Dear Ethel Cain
An angel overcomes a severe stutter by playing musical chairs with two boys who years ago were struck at different times in the head by the same horseshoe. A stone thinks of a stone thinks of a. A line of computer code erases the rib of the snake it was written to memorize. I’m not telling you this any more than I’m.
Letter 020525
Dear Ethel Cain
I’m in the afterhood of childlessness. No one is dancing. I say things above my dying body that sound final. A cigarette is a flashlight with a toothache. Look for whiskey’s underwater church.
Our nakedness had little to do with the most immediate creatures deciding not to kill us. Eating grew on the tree of loneliness. A cigarette is a star de-aged by god.
There was a second story told where Jesus got sick quietly and died watching his mother rub her wrists together. Angels want bodies they can leave.
My mouth somewhere open in the unmarked church of naming, I cover my face when I go to sleep. Each night god believes in you a star loses its memory of being seen. We don’t always know how to feel attractive and worried. Angels tell our toothaches to imagine a fly living too long with a small part of the sun’s brain. Your breast dreams of the hole in my lung. Eyes are on the way.
No one
on the moon
gets dragged
by a train.
A star
milks
a split
baby. It’s noon
and you are choosing
nudity
for god.
The land is ours where we cry on stilts.
kingsoftrain 