From 57 letters to Ethan Hawke, or I wanted to stop saying god (self published August 2024):
Letter 061624 climate sameness
Dear Ethan Hawke
Palestine has entered my dreams. I see car accidents before they happen but can’t tell my children. I kill a grasshopper with another grasshopper then keep the second alive. I kill a rabbit. I’d never kill a rabbit. But it was in my house. If there are babies, amen, I sleep a little in my sleep. In my death. It’s hot here. It’s cold. Palestine is not a dream. We keep touching it. Our hands go online twice and the holy spirit tortures a photograph. It is cruel to dream after never once imagining. After being, for a whole life, human.
Letter 061724 when insomnia leaves listening to us
Dear Ethan Hawke
Last year, I was quiet for seven months. Movies came to me as bruises from the moon. My children hid and their hiding was a kindness. All sight was plain. I wore slippers and my heels set small fires. Pain sang to the stone that god gave a stomach a song so short that a butterfly became an angel’s erection. I wanted to laugh, but everything was funny. Many of the guns didn’t go off. I don’t think I will tell you about the guns. Our disappearance is occupied. And code for something else.
Letter 070324 the office of the lower body
Dear Ethan Hawke
We are this close to eating online a boneless god. It’s not hell, but there’s a neighbor boy who won’t stop putting wasps in his ear. Mothers can’t sleep if a shoe store is touching the earth and fathers strangle themselves long enough to win a fog machine. I buy a spider each morning from a child who tells me a spider is a button that a ghost can push. Death has a room nearby where blood doesn’t go everywhere. I put deer in front of most things now. Deer-hunger powers the angel’s flashlight. Deer-sorrow the boxcutter’s sex doll. Deer-deer the movies that remove nude scenes from other movies for not knowing the difference between the anorexic and the bulimic. Deer-mouth, deer-dream, etc. Remember our life.
Letter 070924 scene syndrome
Dear Ethan Hawke
In the dream I am scrubbing the floor of hell with donated blood. A phone is behind me somewhere playing footage of god two days ago eating a lightbulb but not faster than others. In the dream I ask you under my breath what it means. My mother and father make me sad. If you were them, where would you recover from a botched attempt to switch mouths? Would you both be in the same room? I have heard that angels throw their voices when they die and that they can die from seeing someone give signs in baseball. Ohio is gone for most of the dream.
Letter 072124
Dear Ethan Hawke
This hasn’t been a success. Time is the sex life of distance. Snake said nothing, but we’d all hear our own way into sound near the tree of loneliness. You name things to forget who you are. I played with my kids, then didn’t. Shaved my head when there was nothing to eat. The miracle should have been shrapnel to snow. Graves ache nowhere into being. With movies, the bleeding is internal. I hear an owl because that’s what it knows to be. God dies at the speed of god.
~~~~~
57
Letters to Ethan Hawke, or I wanted to stop saying god
letters 1-57
August 2024
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