Letter 082424
Dear Ethan Hawke
I don’t give faith any space because the brain is god’s obstacle. I want to rewatch Wildcat. I thought my last letter would be my last letter. I mentioned my mother, but that’s the half of it. My aunt was young and I had only recently noticed. I have three dreams and drink the same in each. I read my father’s handwriting and it says longing is a paint or it says
long
pain. Weapons-makers don’t read poems and death reads too quickly.
Letter 082324 last future
Dear Ethan Hawke
I remember making from plastic my children’s memories. Ghosts were as new to me as hands were to angels. Line-breaks lived in a microscope held by my father to be the holder of god’s skin. I had an animal nearby and a book about its food. A mother until there was nothing to die of.
Letter 082124 resident, radar, residue
Dear Ethan Hawke
I’ll eat until my body gives my soul a ghost. An only child prays to an only child and witness murders its sibling observance. The colonizer’s playlist saves an influencer’s life. I don’t have a sister. In one of my wrists.
Letter 082024
Dear Ethan Hawke
Too often, god goes back in time. Dear AI, my son always dies. A boring place for this to end.
Letter 081824
Dear Ethan Hawke
Babies cry because it is too beautiful that everyone they know is alive. God is keeping us hidden. War is the creator of time. In Ohio a black spider faints in a box of baking soda and never wakes up. Fake and hospital are two kinds of snow.
Please join us on Saturday, 8/24, at 4pm EST, for the next installment of the 'I think I can't speak for everyone here' reading series.
Featured reader: Adedayo Agarau
Please email bluejawedsnake@gmail.com for the Zoom info and to sign up for the open mic.
Adedayo Agarau is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Cave Canem Fellow. His works have won or have been finalists for the 2024 Wales International Poetry Prize, 2024 Alpine International Poetry Prize, 2022 Brunel Poetry Prize and the 2023 Sillerman First Book Prize. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Agbowó Magazine: A Journal of African Literature and Art, and a Poetry Reviews Editor for The Rumpus. He is the author of the chapbooks, Origin of Names (African Poetry Book Fund 2020), The Arrival of Rain (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020), and For Boys Who Went, (Authorpedia 2016). Adedayo’s debut collection, "The Years of Blood," won the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize for BIPOC Writers and will be published by Fordham University Press in the fall of 2025.
Letter 081524 history, last
Dear Ethan Hawke
In the movie I am born and pushed into a softspot where silence is a mirror’s fossil. A deer and a horse enter Ohio wearing the same angel of oil. Before becoming thunder, the sex of a father’s southern ghost flashes god three times. Now swims in its eating of the present.
Letter 081524 Siberia
Dear Ethan Hawke
God makes more and more god. I know it’s not good writing. The hissing ghost goat bliss of it all. Dear Willem Dafoe, the children think they are children. Brevity’s last endeavor is death’s latest. In Ohio there will always be two siblings racing each other to a bucket of fake blood. I say two because I don’t know what language gets out of language. Saying has no heaven.
1/6/24
this dream where an owl as big as a mouse lives with a mouse in the mouse's hole and they share a scratched up plate that looks like something a microscope would eat off of and for once I don't really know who I am in the dream beyond maybe just in the theater making sure I don't drink too much because when I drink too much I miss scenes but inevitably I miss a few scenes and I come back to the mouse and the owl fighting over the plate and the mouse kicks the owl out and says this wasn't normal anyway and of course the mouse says all this without speaking and it's only when the owl doesn't leave that the mouse realizes the owl isn't real and the problem with this realization is that the mouse then thinks all owls aren't real and I can see where this is going and so can you and I told a friend about this dream and he said dreams don't usually have a moral or end that way and the real end of the dream is that I don't have friends and now we're both sad
2/25/24
okay so it's Sunday afternoon and I got gone a little early and this next week at work is gonna be A THING but I have some thoughts on thoughts that are inner and outer and they are about death and grandparents and marriages but I'm not sure that is going to be enough or even apparent BUT here I go...today I was trying to pick with my daughter a father/daughter song for her wedding in June and I KNOW it is a strange and gendered and traditionally odd thing bc we should ALL BE DANCING WHEN THOSE WE LOVE ARE LOVED but also fuck all that I just want to be face to face with my daughter while a cool song plays and that isn't wrong BUT anyway back to my original post point etc etc etc I lost sooooo much time last year and my daughter was in Ireland and I didn't want her to worry so I didn't really check in with her while I was sick bc I thought correctly she needed to be someone outside of her parents or something oh lord I am not being very progressive in my wording but STAY WITH ME so in thinking of a song I had Timmy on me last night and he was trying to fall asleep without having issues breathing and I somehow got on a strange groove of TikTok marriage toasts and I got sad bc everyone is rich and did alot of great shit with their daughters in other places and me and my daughter were always kind of in the same place doing the same things and that meant alot of toys and set-ups and battles and folk songs and me reading The Nation and The Weekly Standard to find some sort of median and GUESS WHAT there isn't one except to be an actual progressive and actual helpless progressive BUT ANYWAY it got me thinking about time and how time doesn't change except to say it's time to change and anyway our father/daughter song will be by Josh Ritter and I have to say something about me being sick last year and about Gen being sick this year and that thing is this...we are two different people who learn differently and have seen death on both sides and on the same side and she was there for me when I was sick LIKE REALLY FUCKING THERE and I will be there differently for her this year and I think that's why my grandfather died right after my grandmother bc they were there for every difference and worked really hard to make it the same for each other or something or something and after that my aunt died suddenly and she was if anything A DEFENDER OF FAMILY and I think she kept my grandparents alive long enough for them to be seen and that is an immortal thing how did this get here but also I know how this got here and am going to call it a place
My childhood was one of mothers and fathers singing in church, of outdoor dogs loyal and absent, of brothers keeping their teeth, keeping their promises, keeping score. So, a childhood of mimicry, closeness, and impermanence. I was cared for in small spaces and I worried about the bigger picture and who or what might take its photo. I wrote about death before death happened, and wrote toward faith while hearing the covered footfalls of god. Essentially, I copied. Then, death or the fear of death came for real where god did or would not. And, in that, my phobias, obsessions, and writings lost weight in a future based on past gravity. And, for it, were more seen. Purpose is abstract, but can render one precisely. I saw myself, and it was me.
I am drawn to blank space and, via poetry, I trade in how that blank space carries over from image into dream. Great avoidances, sudden things. The vulgar, the viral. I self-publish most of my work, and have had a few poetry collections published by presses. I am most excited at the moment about my collection ‘Wasp, gasp.’ which was just published in November 2023 by Incunabula Media, with cover art by my son Noah Michael Smock.
I am a father of four, and my youngest has a rare progressive disease called Vici Syndrome, so time is a thing that can go very backward very quickly. Self-publishing has given me the illusion of control over my hallucinations, and has allowed me to stop time with time.
To me, interrogating the following three things has guided me the most in clearing the correct space for my poems to land: God, death, and language. The existence and non-existence of all three is what allows those who are creator-less to create. You don’t have to know what you think. But you do have to give thought to its syllables and silence. As long as you’re still questioning, you’ll be able to creatively ask.
We do not live in unreal times. We never have. The animal kingdom kindly gave us, gives us, god. The absurd is a manifesto that the dream erases while protesting the afterlife of sleep. You've seen the bodies, gone, mid-ghost. My receipt is a rib, but which one. Surrealism steals the past from nostalgia. It's not an escape. It's a sustainable staying. A personal ruin that ruins nothing. My love for transformation is unchanged. Angels hate art.
kingsoftrain 