Letter 062524 the rabbit’s dream of knowing magic
Dear Ethan Hawke
I am reading Vanessa Angélica Villarreal’s Magical/Realism and its propulsively engaged agonizing has such weight that one can hear lights pop distantly above its interrogated verse. Have you ever reappeared in front of a child who then puts bread in your hand? I eat like a ghost in fast food parking lots. I think of my father’s partner who was deported too many years ago. I drive like my mother. I can’t be elsewhere. My two older sons carry my youngest son everywhere. They place him across his mother’s legs which have both been tricked into falling asleep. A straight line weighs nothing. Nothing, also, when it weeps.
Letter 062424
Dear Ethan Hawke
There is a tooth you can put in your mouth that will let you see every ghost. Angels use more data than god.
Letter 062324
Dear Ethan Hawke
Most surgeons are addicted to standing in church. I am wrong with my entire body. I am at the point in my dying where I remember only those things that my children wanted to tell me. Angels stop appearing bc people aren’t where they should be. A groundhog’s heart turns into a star. I call this chapter groundhog pain. There are no doctors who specialize in tunnel hurt. Don’t kill the light. Make it sick.
God can’t critique everything
God can’t review everything
Letter 062224
Dear Ethan Hawke
I deleted this letter. This is the new one.
Letter 062124
Dear Ethan Hawke
Donald Sutherland to me is the last time I was afraid of long division. Eventually I took over my father’s handwriting. My footprint chooses a footprint then dies. I am stuck on a rabbit and then stuck on a deer. It’s all so lazy. I am a blood clot in god’s undetected loneliness. I watched an entire movie about a bomb and then heard a moviemaker hate me for watching it from home. They keep moving hell. Yeah you’re right, no letter yesterday. Something wasn’t there. I know that now.
The 'I Think I Can't Speak For Everyone Here' reading series is returning in July. Join us for the first July entry on Sunday, July 7th, at 3pm EST
Contact bluejawedsnake@gmail.com for the Zoom link, and to sign-up for the open mic
Featured readers will be William Erickson and Devan Murphy.
william erickson is the author of the collection you don't have to believe in the world (April Gloaming), which is neither a correction, nor especially true. he is watching a hummingbird. he is watching a hummingbird die. he is watching it fly away. william lives with his partner and two dogs at the bottom of Washington state.
Devan Murphy is the author of I’m Not I’m Not I’m Not a Baby (Ethel 2024). Her creative writing and visual art have appeared in The Iowa Review, Diagram, Pithead Chapel, The Guardian, ANMLY, and elsewhere. Originally from Northeast Ohio, she now resides in Pittsburgh. You can find her on Instagram @gytrashh.
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ALSO, upcoming in July:
Saturday, July 13th, 3pm EST: featured Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi and Saba Keramati
Sunday, July 14th, 4pm EST: featured Melissa Eleftherion and Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong
Friday, July 26th, 9pm EST: featured Marylyn Tan and Angelique Zobitz
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Previous readings HERE
Letter 061924 horrors
Dear Ethan Hawke
I don’t know why it would, but the eye keeps itself alive. The soul is god’s last radical permission. Symbolism a grave for an empty coffin. I’m tired. Not as tired as my clothes. Sound has arms. It can’t miss both.
Bluest Nude
Ama Codjoe, poems
Milkweed, 2022
The blue of childbirth, of snowfall. Blue the lost tooth of rainwater. Blue as it is pained into aching for ugliness. Blue as a shape that not so much shifts as moves in reverse to reverse. Ama Codjoe’s Bluest Nude is a cleansing work of saturation both transient and kept. It dances away and in place, as a spider’s dream twinning its silver invite between light and death. Redaction and revision refuse to share an afterlife, but meet in the mud as the clayed rendezvous of lyric and verse. This is the stuff of making. The body as a wordless spell. As nakedness stripping beneath an unfinished star. There is always an image one must entertain to be a form. Codjoe sees it, and sees it change.
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reflection by Barton Smock
kingsoftrain 