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.
~
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
~
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.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
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
kingsoftrain 