Letter 061824 machines made from abduction
Dear Ethan Hawke
The television is a monthless calendar. In the mirror, I am the only mirror to taste the blood of a ghost. I want you to know that time is safe with me. An angel’s eye fills with fog. These bodies aren’t doing anything.
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.
The body finds itself in a body. How unfair. How brief. My god, this movie. As in, Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw The TV Glow. As in, melancholy plays the long game. Schoenbrun is a giving artist, but knows no charity goes unpunished, nor stays self-harmed, nor arrives outer-healed. Brigette Lundy-Paine gives a searching, locatable performance, and Justice Smith carries everything- the physical, the spiritual, the voice, and the voice changed. Both are prayers of unanswerable theater. I lost something to this, and it lost it back.
We’re All Going To The World’s Fair has to it an unworried precision that had me thinking I might have forgotten to shut down, in another life, an electric toothbrush. If any pulse is taken, it’s the pulse of separation and director Jane Schoenbrun is songbook tender and secretly protective enough to hum the art of this film into the disconnected wrists of those whose online has no off. Schoenbrun and lead Anna Cobb make of knowing a current terror and no sky here falls that hasn’t been dropped. Cobb, with deadpan abstraction, gives a performance worth of sleep’s eternal jump-scare and works with the film outside of the film to put an end to vice-versa that we might more blankly keep those who are constantly notified away from those who appear by looking at the vanished.
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.
a human
skull
in an american
lake
waits
for the moon
With Deer
By Aase Berg
Translated by Johannes Göransson
Black Ocean, 2012
These holes keep appearing. In my shirt, in the ground. A hole can be almost anything glowing with shame. Aase Berg’s With Deer is dangerous. Especially on Saturdays. Saturdays aren’t real. Johannes Göransson’s translation of With Deer is an excitement. Excitement as tower, as ruin, but also excitement as satellite. It is thrilled to have enemies, is what I mean. No matter, no matter. The lookout’s grief blips through radar after radar. Radar, before. What a bronzing of sin. I carry a snake in an insect’s dream. I look like hell in the place where my intestines meet. Inside joke, outside sorrow. I don’t know where else it happens, this inventory of squirrel loneliness, this ghost reverb of haunted autopsies. These are landmark injuries. Go there, go here, as wax figure, as mannequin. Let burial go. And throb in some groundstruck ache.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
Letter 061524 words toward god and sleep and Aase Berg
Dear Ethan Hawke
I said this yesterday but I’m a fan omfg of remaining. Think A Midnight Clear. I don’t know what happened to Keith Gordon. Don’t tell me, and I promise I won’t AI that shit. I like to think he is okay. I did not see Mother Night and still regret it. Regret doesn’t go away, so again I’ve said something I didn’t mean. Don’t. Fuck I can’t write. Does everyone know? I said this yesterday but it keeps us awake that god can’t sleep. I think god saw the face of an insect and then made insects. Then made The Woman In The Fifth. I don’t know if you remember what I said about us only getting one simulation. And that was only yesterday.
Letter 061424 words toward my daughter getting married
Dear Ethan Hawke
A song played that made me forget a song was playing. I made my daughter laugh a couple times in a place that knew itself into beauty. There is always a church. A church near a church. I don’t really pray bc I pray all the time. My healthy sons sat with my sick son. I don’t mean to say it that way. Say, I say, to saying. It all felt very young. Very elsewhere. Elsewhere, the worlds of more. Beside me, my wife looked perfectly alone. I mean to say it that way. Alone in her own perfection. My sick son is not sick unless you account for healing. It was such a great day. It gave way, and gained. I hate the world, and days end. We only get one simulation. Run out of sadness.
Cadaver Of Red Roses
Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi
O, Miami (2024)
In the elegantly wrestled verse of Cadaver of Red Roses, poet Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi takes actual place and actual thing as a gift and re-gifts them as a fair and brutal math, a hungry and clawed-at grammar, a headlining and interrupted voice. Its anger illuminates hallucinations that are ever-present, and its peace reverses ritual might its purple prayer leave a mark looked for by a bruise. It says yes, and so what, and it sings home using the notes of the seriously remote. So sing, so look. Keep pace. Its portals have softspots for the void.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
