My youngest brother sends me poems and they are bruises on a radar that’s having a secret nightmare and I am afraid that if I touch them they will be touched. I’m not an alcoholic. My food eats prayer to starve me. I haven’t heard too many in my family say Palestine and it makes me want to trick them into saying pain. I hate my son but in a very sonlike way. Others hate my son because they think he looks at the moon believing god made stuff. I haven’t been sleeping. It’s okay. My insomnia is a keyhole in the shape of my son’s access to angels. This is a death threat machine. A bomb scare machine. Tomorrow, fake the earth.
A white sock
cannot pray
for the rabbit’s
stomach.
Look at stuff and die.
Dictionary Of Bodies
Kristyn Garza
Gasher Press, 2024
Wreath, wraith. Define an identified body. Plot knows how I got here. Here is a place that houses the danced around thing. That languages lostness into being lifted from a touchless tongue. Here is Kristyn Garza’s Dictionary Of Bodies. Nuance of trauma, ghosted latticework. Somehow is, somehow was. Time is a time machine. Garza is a poet of the invitingly unexplained. Ask and answer kneel on the same knee. Prose assigns its invisible birthmark and invents independence. Saying and speaking have a long distance relationship with brief evocations. What work. Have surface, save face, and share a firefly.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
is my son
alone
ask
The disconnected god of blood
The wasp of loss
I don’t have your headache, kid
A cigarette looks for its teeth
Sleep
for the older
wrist
of proximity’s
nearby
ghost
Movies
lengthen god
Write high
God is still a child. No one knows how to help. Angels doing deer impressions think about stopping. Your mother and father are alive.
A horse and a moth pass through heaven where heaven used to be
All my friends are quiet
I dream in longhand. Watch slasher movies to control death. No I will not be doing anything for my mental health. God was the first weapon meant to heal time. We don’t all live here. Blood reads but not with all this blood. Be last, be small. Hide your stomach from emptiness. Check your children for bones. Hairdryer for pills.
kingsoftrain 