Tell me how your mother went.
We’ll say
the far
amen.
We’ll say
to dog
how hunger
is like snow
Hurry.
Y’all with your nakedness
deadnaming god
Y’all with your carpenter’s
voided
mirror
Idk
I miss my cousins.
I’ve lost my brothers.
The invisible
in Eden
who gets over
their surprise
Letter 030425
Dear Ethel Cain by now abuse is nostalgia’s first job
I did not mean to pay attention to my life. For that, I am touchable and sorry. Not dying earlier is always the most cruel month. In school, in second grade, I wet myself two days in a row. I’ve never been able to scare the right people. During the assault, I spotted on the bathroom floor a pencil nearly sharpened out of existence. I thought of a star, a cigarette, and of a newborn being sucked back into its mother. I burned my face on a mask as something god could use when asked about my teeth.
Letter 030325
Dear Ethel Cain
I have so much to say about my father that I love my mother. Poetry is the untruth that is so empty it symbolizes emptiness. Dear Ethel Cain. The angel has a microphone and a mask. And a condom we don’t know about. Distance is a pig eating the feet of god. Sound suns the pink husk of the creator’s gasp. Having lost my thirst, I confront the naming of my brothers by the drowned. Also, forgive the body for its success. Gone from the writing is the imagery that would bait the birthmark into the shadow of a star. Don’t forget to starve the fish.
I make in my writing such silly mistakes. Some people vote on who should be given the award for best cigarette burn, and some just smoke. Air is not in the air. I pluck a blue string and your paper cup turns the slow star of your mouth into a coin-sized hell. My son was born above an elevator. There’s nothing in god but a hummingbird and a trapdoor. Poor, other, birds. I don’t get the dark from my brothers.
God was in the room that was later turned into god.
Did your loved ones get out?
Jesus wore a spoon around his neck.
It helped him sleep.
Letter 022525
Dear Ethel Cain
Despair is a food group. I had to read the line again that said my brother’s hand was eating out an angel. Cannibals surprise their mothers in Eden. Is skin still the longest dream? My fake sleep is not your fake sleep. I thumb my own eyes in the shepherd machine.
Existence a distress signal
mimicked by those
visitors
looking
for the body
of god
Letter 022225
Dear Ethel Cain
somehow for both Aria Aber and Franz Wright it’s hard to have good brothers I can’t go a week without drinking because the week is from 1983 touch resurrects itself how lonely sleep is named after sleep my eyes fight over two memories a line of ants carry a lightbulb to god I pray in a bullet to a melancholy bee don’t be afraid there is no nowlife
in divine distraction
to worry
on the child’s
past
kingsoftrain 