Letter 082524
Dear Ethan Hawke
The nervous systems of angels. A funeral for a cigarette. There are two Ohios. I am still in my singsong violence when my sister throws her youngest in front of an unmoving farm machine. Sometimes a year yanks a room from death. A wasp eats the shadow of a practice wasp. My wrist thinks I’m brushing its teeth and god is the child who survived my dream. I can’t fake sleep long enough to be healed.
Please check out today's reading featuring Adedayo Agarau in the 11th installment of the 'I Think I Can't Speak For Everyone Here' reading series.
Previous readings are here
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.
kingsoftrain 