touch
has to be kind
twice
or else
nothing happens
to an earache
idk
pill
in a pawn shop
I’ve
all day
would die
of ceaseless
immediacy
Time starts in the brain
where it doesn’t
pass.
I warn god
of the images
you’re about
to see.
Ohio
is part
gasp.
In the dream, my son’s foot
comes off
with his sock.
We keep him clothed.
Grieve theft.
Distance in its little house
longer
than expected
DEATH STYLES
Joyelle McSweeney
Nightboat Books, 2024
I don’t know how it is that I know I’m not a great father. I’m not sure what I language. I bathe my 15 year old son or I tell my other sons to do it because my back hurts. This is enough non-fiction to be true.
‘like a star you fail to hide behind your signal’
‘the sea doesn’t even wait around to hear itself’
To write toward Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles feels rude. Loss is boring. This isn’t about loss. What a surging patience. What a hidden stoking of the white fire that depletes nothingness. What an interrogation of the silence that silences the math of quietude. This work is such that it might bring about, or deliver?, time. Time can’t have kids, but can’t keep itself from trying. Time gifts itself a lengthy privacy. I don’t know what time is to you, but do know what you are to time. Is there an aftermath of during? A before-death of being? I want to cry and do. I don’t want to cry and do. McSweeney watches what looks. Inventories the constant. What a locating work. Disorientation is in the right place at the right…well, fuck. Keep this work close. It goes the extra subtraction.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
Desperation catches a mouse that’s never moved.
Eyes
die
in open
space.
If your body is the body it came in
fuck
off. Nothing
changes my life.
Six months without seeing a spider. Eight dreams where I am strangled in the same house. Transition isn’t the right word, but it is exact. Pain isn’t pain until it wants children. Suicide is god learning to walk. Every bomb is imperfect. The wrong people live under brevity’s brief star. I love my body but at some point I am sold on soap. Look fucker. The human body is a paused magic. My son is dying and what matters is that three angels livestream surgery techniques from inside a tattoo shop vandalized by proverbs. There are stories you’ll have to tell death. Practice on wildlife.
as both
we thought it said
performance poverty
also
all those years
I was kind
I was tired
I can’t imagine
knowing
my kids
are alive.
Ask the angel of birthmarks
if god
is cruel.
Grief redirects the simulation.
Old
heavens.
kingsoftrain 