I do a search for images of babies born without ribs and I don’t see what I want. An article scares me in 1983. Saying that thirst is hunger’s blue ghost is the same as wanting thunderstorm to be a strong password. I’m not on fire but my son is sick all the time. In my nightmare of plenty, sea creatures for the skinning of god pretend they’ve kept god young. A dead angel weighs more the more the news of its death is shared. Is this a love song? Sexting in the sex shop, no two phones can cry like me. Vexations pin the ghost spot where you cloned a sighing bee. Touch touches its exile and my stomach slurs like speech. Positionless you dial theft bereft of any thief. Yes and no. Yes and no. The angel is dead. Dead over here.
I came
to be noticed
but then
I was born
Seashells
dream
of milk
It’s not hungry.
I’m allowed to smoke.
I’m losing
weight
for two.
The rabbit of the void
and the rabbit
of the abyss
compare
dark
starvations.
The body doesn’t want what it wants.
I eat
and quit.
And that’s my life.
Gone
is the food
I imagined
for your brother's
hallucinations.
Adam is body, Eve is time.
Animals tell god everything.
All the future
in the world
is in
the world.
It’s over.
God
gets a message
from god.
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
kingsoftrain 