Letter 080224 longer than sleep
Dear Ethan Hawke
It has always been the end of the world. Language says this and only this. Time was born in the middle of god. I have carried children from one car to another. Practicing and alive.
Letter 080124 scenography
Dear Ethan Hawke
My eyes eat themselves in a blood-filled apple. Doomscrolling is the face of god. Rain, pain, pine. The cops let him say mom.
Letter 073124
Dear Ethan Hawke
Pain aches for its desperate star. I crack a tick like an egg on the skull of this dead pup. I’d eat, but light hurts my teeth. My fastball when I had it was described as melancholy on paper. In person, a fat spider losing blood in a cheekbone. No matter. I am going to burn my poems while watching The Phenom. A tank will roll toward my birth and god will take forever to put on clothes. Ethan they are using sound to count bullets. Jesus got three days with his twin.
Letter 073024 I don’t think my brothers
Dear Ethan Hawke
God moves my brain but not before it turns the bread in my stomach black. I call it sleep, but it’s not sleep. My wife is tired and my cousins are sad. The lossless, also, grieve. I call it the present. I tell my sons that all slasher movies are about homesickness. They find a sweetspot in the volume. A ghost hears an angel. I underwater tell my daughter there is hope. Men and lonely men make the same loneliness twice. The science is silent.
Letter 072924 end machine
Dear Ethan Hawke
Adam, though soundproof, could not fathom the silence of Eve. I don’t brush my teeth when I’m sad. My son is a bitemark that thinks I’m a word.
Please join us next Saturday, 8/3, at 12pm EST for the 10th installment in the 'I Think I Can't Speak For Everyone Here' reading series, featured readers Crystal Stone and Lorcán Black.
Email bluejawedsnake@gmail.com for the Zoom info and open mic sign up.
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Lorcán Black is an Irish writer. His poetry has been published in The Tomahawk Review, Stirring, The Rush, Grim&Gilded, New Writing Scotland, The Los Angeles Review, Assaracus & The Stinging Fly, amongst numerous others. He has previously worked as a broadcast journalist as a radio newsreader, a print journalist and now works in higher education.
He is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and has been longlisted for the Black Spring Press Prize and the Two Sylvias Prize, and shortlisted for The Paris Literary Prize.
His first collection, Rituals, was published by April Gloaming Publishing in 2019. Strange Husbandy is his second poetry collection – a Forward Prize nominee & Poetry Book Society Recommendation – was published by Seren Books in 2024. He lives in London.
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Crystal Stone is author of six collections of poetry including Knock-Off Monarch (2019), All the Places I Wish I Died (2021), Gym Bra (2022), Civic Duty (2022), This is Not a Poem (2023), and White Lies (2024). Her poems have been published in numerous national and international poetry journals including The Threepenny Review, Salamander, poetry Daily and many others. She received her MFA from Iowa State University, where she gave a TEDx talk entitled ‘The Transformative Power of Poetry.’ You can find more of her publications at her website www.crystalbstone.com.
What a rewarding reading yesterday with Kristopher Biernat. The reading is available to be viewed on the youtube channel HERE
Previous readings:
4/21/24 Benjamin Niespodziany and NC Smock
4/28/24 Tom Snarsky and Darren C Demaree
5/18/24 Jay Besemer and Nadia Arioli
5/19/24 Pamela Kesling and Bee Morris
5/26/24 Alina Stefanescu and Dylan Krieger
7/7/24 Devan Murphy and William Erickson
7/13/24 Saba Keramati and Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi
7/14/24 Melissa Eleftherion and Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong
Letter 072624 the end I can see it
Dear Ethan Hawke
There is a church for lost parents that keeps catching fire. Arsonists come from all over. They go so hungry. They look through my phone and argue whether it’s the videos or the photos that smell like death. Dear dark rabbit. A frog can survive in the stomach of an angel.
Letter 072524
Dear Ethan Hawke
I am sitting on a diving board with a rabbit in my lap. Most of the rabbit is dead. I try with my shadow to moan through the water. A stillness stretches god.
kingsoftrain 