kingsoftrain

SIMPLE GOD EXITS CHILDHOOD

Lightning and earthquake feuding in an untouched doom where two angels, birthmark and bitemark, still dream of killing their tattooed sons. 

I know this place. Place is a bomb that other bombs find. 

~

The tattooed sons are in love. Son bitemark doesn’t have a tongue; birthmark does all the ironing. Their dead child speaks to them through a fishhook that is always hot. 

~

Faith is an eating disorder. Mothers faint in threes. 

I teach my brothers to suck in their stomachs and a junkyard refrigerator becomes our clock. We smell like a dead child. We smell blank. We search online for images of hands and for the word missingness. Flies made of wind and glass show us to our food. 

Our eyes go without.

~

Our invaders had no language. Your mother was suicidal until she told you how moved she was by her own birth. The needle had its moment of recognition. A fetus opened its mouth in a paint can.

Replacement can be a city. But here it’s a form destroyed for being described.

~

So many dead bodies, and no one has died. 
City of the predicted present.
The sons count hoofprints left on a whale.

~

Under the moon of a flat earth, they’re putting pills in baseballs. We’ve our choice of police siren. My Ohio horse could be your Ohio deer. We could be resurrected more than once to identify a child’s body. There is a language image does not know. Words sound different in hell.

~

I hate this city and its two sold houses. Every third angel is just a baby eating paper and being healthy for too long. Pain has a doorbell that turns blue when touched and another that turns blue when not. The last time you had sex this caterpillar had a ribcage. I don't always die. Sleep is the ghost of waiting.

~

Image is nothing more than the memory that our destroyers strip to.

I had an animal
that was naked
in dog years.

Bitemark speaks birthmark.

Keep amnesia young. 

~

Ask
the dark
the outside
gets nothing

Mad about bread
I broke
my birthmark

There was no bomb

A paper doll was shopping online
for a free
spider’s web

Our perfect blood perfect
bomb
weather

~

Bats lose their teeth over sister bitemark.

Blue 
here and there
skips

an apple. The bird

can’t get out
of the lake.
 
~

A thunderstorm turns on the microwave. We call it fixed and then listen all night to the bird in the broken dryer. We don’t blink for a year after a hand gets caught in a hand. We know it’s been a month since angel was on day two of having a ghost. Beyond that, the neighbor’s baby chooses one television over another. I can’t remember who I want to stop looking like. 

~

Birthmark and bitemark go as footprints into the dream of an Ohio bullet-hole. I want sisters but none of them remember being born. Sometimes when I turn off the oven

tooth and pill have the same ghost. 

I can’t say who death thinks it is. A swimmer distracted by water.

~

I drop my mother’s cup of fake blood as my father tries to find the movie scene that will give him his age. My thumb breaks in a past death. The mumbling of its break speaks a moral thing to the smallest body ever to be vividly isolated. I am hearing all of this through an eggshell that mom says belongs to the angel best known for keeping quiet about skin. Under my brother’s shirt there crawls a wasp that smells like god. None of the blood can be saved. 

~

A ballerina bites my ear. I play dead but am not recognized doing so on land by a swimmer. I started writing because people didn’t watch the movies I recommended. Being kind to your children won’t work. Give god hair. Tell god it’s human for tattoo. A ballerina bites my ear because a ballerina cannot scream. In every Eden, a set of false teeth. 

~

Real teeth, too, in Eden. I skip a rock and know it. Overhear with you how that baby isn’t going to shoot itself. Also overhear how terrible people often go to the bathroom more. Boy alone holds a dead rabbit over a junkyard toilet. Girl alone thinks it’s about to be alive. They’ll share almost nothing. A quick birth in a bitten place.  

~

I speak the names of my brothers into the book of bitemarks. I have more arms and they more muscles and they more issues with their legs. I am so poor that my work does all the work. My tongue does nothing. It’s not possible to be obsessed with sex. With death. You’re born with a mask that no one saves. Everything makes god sick. Stop being alone.

~

I can’t imagine
knowing
my kids
are alive.

Ask the angel of birthmarks
if god
is cruel.

~

There’s no horse that a horse can’t be. The egg filled with skin came after touch. Tattoo before birthmark. How many sons you suppose god killed before that shit took. I cry on my brother. A very long line of prose comes to me about his most lost mosquito. Most lost mosquito.  

~~~~~

SIMPLE GOD EXITS CHILDHOOD MACHINE

My handwriting is described as a suicide note written by a scarecrow and my brother’s as a tattoo scratched off by a god trapped in a silent ambulance. We’re on different parts of the baby. I cry my pencil into a detailed sleep. My brother cries himself to hell. I recall a same life. He recalls a current. The baby is our brother, then our sister, then both. We see it in pieces. Every creature knows how long we’ve been here.

~~~~~

EXIT

We moved, and they shot us.
We didn’t move, and they shot us.
We cried, and they shot us.
We slept, and they shot us.
We had children, and their children shot us.
We were childless, and their children shot us.
We bathed, and they cut us.
We cut ourselves, and they shot us.
In our dream, you wrote about us.
They shot us 
in our dream. Shot us in their.

My hands
cut little hands
in the dark.

In Ohio
where everything
comes from

I only 
watch
tv.

Shape is god’s campaign against touch.

Be longing.

There’s no horse that a horse can’t be. The egg filled with skin came after touch. Tattoo before birthmark. How many sons you suppose god killed before that shit took. I cry on my brother. A very long line of prose comes to me about his most lost mosquito. Most lost mosquito.  

telescope
where howls
the longer
eye, are angels

too hungry
is there a star
renamed
does every
empty child

have a stomach

fish
fishing
for grief
idk
I always
cried
near spiders
so made
to display
their hunger

I was interviewed for a podcast recently and was asked to speak on books that I would recommend and why and I failingly tried to explain what Ursula Andkjær Olsen had done to me with their books Third Millennium Heart, Outgoing Vessel, and My Jewel Box and in real life I pause often and am unprepared so just wanted to put this/these here as something that I said and meant to keep saying.

~~

Third Millennium Heart
by Ursula Andkjær Olsen
translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen
Action Books/Broken Dimanche Press, 2017

But the refining of loneliness has begun, it’s going to be a
 castle; it will become your castle that
 can later gain two towers, can later lose one,
 two walls. – {from} the section DARLING GLORIA

In reading, then re-reading, Third-Millennium Heart, by Ursula Andkjær Olsen, as translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, I scratched, beneath other penciled-in marginalia, two things: perhaps I have avoided myself into existence and he takes a holiday as something maternal to do with your time. This book has goals for its body language, and, with a claustrophobic sparseness, seems a first for finality. These are entries written in the surroundings of your outer-sibling, where a red pacifier suns itself in a dream some hole is having about my mouth. Your mouth. I don’t know. There is a nobody and, as a nobody, she will name identity. I think some of these passages, here, were changed by the reader.

As a thing propelled by its inability to continue, Third-Millennium Heart is a terrifying, and lovingly unreliable, work by a writer acutely aware of the obliviousness in self and in other. It carries itself with a chronological intelligence, is joyous, and deepens all things ahistoric with its unsleeping and uprooted verse. As a pair, Ursula Andkjær Olsen and Katrine Øgaard Jensen awaken the moment, are alive to scarcity.

~~

OUTGOING VESSEL
by Ursula Andkjær Olsen
translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen
Action Books, 2021

Proof, hosanna, proof. Oh, my discarded bits of avoidance. Is ghost still held as a breath in a being that cannot materialize until it's misplaced by our up and coming carrier? I think it's all there, all here, in the anti-instructional humbleharm and worldless afterlife of Ursula Andkjær Olsen's Outgoing Vessel. So bare and terrifying, so saturated and self-afflicted. I can't say what the verse here is cleaning, nor what the competing repetitions are being fed by, but it moves me to condone guilt and permit that I'm the youngest thing about myself. These are poetics that reject the reimagining of the under-imagined and instead chant themselves through songdoors might they create origins to be upheld by the pregnant deceivers of elevation. I might not have it right. What if renewal came first? Is there a machine built by grief that manufactures alienation? Crossed-over and crossed-out, this is scarily disappeared and necessary stuff. 

~~

My Jewel Box
by Ursula Andkjær Olsen
translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen
Action Books, 2022

While reading the mouth-bathed insertions as they are mid-written in Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s My Jewel Box, I have this dream in a later body where I can be seen watching my veins do nothing in the same lab where it was once proven that god was buried alive. What valid surrogacy is this? As translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, it is a surrogacy of photogenic pain and pain’s plural. Of struck snake and of birth being both have and have-not. Adornment and strangling, says Olsen, says Jensen, and slowly suddenness is everywhere. I can ghost people I've never met. In this verse, in channels of otherharm, dolls dream but only if you notice. Maps are made from the worry that one’s anatomy is disappearing, not as we speak, but as we are silent. Words mean what sounds mean. I sucked on a penny as a child and my salt brain loneliness called it fruit. Are these your cow negatives? Mask loses a tooth. Mask has a cavity. In the reading, I’m not sure that I’ve ever had an allowable blue thought. In the after, I’m hyperaware of time’s inability to be present. Somewhere in between, or in the during, there is a restart of an irreplaceable beginning and it is here the work makes vaccines of permission and recounts, perhaps, touch’s second chance. This is the third book in Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s trilogy, with the first being Third-Millennium Heart and the second Outgoing Vessel, each of which were also translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen. The body has a body it uses to find bodies. God will get his unneeded rest, I’m sure.

just a sec I will drink to the microwaveable brain of god

the water
it takes
to cool
god
most
kids
in the 80s
don’t remember
pain
but see
themselves
being struck
it even
looks cool
a mom
is sad
don’t
mom
be sad
moms
can’t see
like death
double
in the ocean

The insects stop eating.
We own very little.
We continually
own
little.
Our barking
dog
dies. Brings

as a bone
marooned 
in the paper 
dark

silence
to the moon. 

No one sees god
and god
not a soul
erasing 
in the past
the past.