I could touch this in my sleep. It hasn’t changed. Attraction is a hole that breathing can’t find. Your dark mouth kills circle after circle and nothing from before makes it back. Not the angel making helicopter noises at a second angel being grown in a bloody deer. Not the face that became a face after seeing god’s face in a toilet not made for gods. Not the children. And not the children counting how many children can fit in a tank. Promise me something. I will eat this entire room.
LETTERS TO APPLE-TOWN Poems- Eliot Cardinaux Bodily Press 2023 BE STILL: POEMS FOR KAY SAGE Poems – Nadia Arioli Kelsay Books, 2023 The poverty of presence. The precise unknown. Eliot Cardinaux is a poet of dual trinities asking to be made whole. In Letters To Apple-town, jazz makes nostalgia from a future it’s never been from. Whether it’s ‘the world against the world’ or ‘more memory than memory’, there is a finality to these restarted verses that makes the offhand feel instilled. In reading this book, I have also been moving through Nadia Arioli’s Be Still: Poems for Kay Sage and am taken, and very replaced, by the elegantly accurate mysteries herein that make now a poor substitute for the recent. Somehow past, somehow addressing a future that comes from the future, the poems here respond to what ransoms the eye with a vision that erases hindsight. I lost my place not because it was a dream, but because I was stopped in my tracks before I could hide my sleep. This is a deeply awake work about work undone and reworked. Use your best hands. The crossover isn't theirs, of course, and only partially mine, but I like to think I drink and strangers carry me home or at least point me to the same car that knows only for a moment where it is I live. I am broken in all places in a way I worship too quickly and birds open their eyes with their eyes. Where Cardinaux says ‘psychosis of signage’, Arioli says ‘gory miracle’, and I suddenly know which angel is an angel and which angel stands for god, and which angel is the third and only. If that makes sense, both these books are for you. And then, for me. And then, again, for you. Seek them out. Their findings matter. ~ reflection by Barton Smock
We live as if god could ever be homesick. When I’m not looking, my body ah fuck. No golden melancholy for the surgeon with crushed hands. Death needs dying to be real.
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.
Jesus lied about who he was, then god took him in. I fix my car with pain. I fix the showerhead, the cricket problem, my children with pain. Not place. Not with place. Place is a bleeding footstep. I will let you kill me. It will take three days. I won’t come back.
Please give my eyes eyes
birthplace 76 I finish inventing my body. Touch has lengthened the life of your wrist and shortened that of your neck. The three dogs sent to look for hell explode prematurely. I want to have these talks. Dog parts and lost hell. My hair dead longer than yours.
I’m not curious about the real world An animal in pain believes in animal pain Not unlike plastics nostalgia is found in god I am in the wrong house The family is dead The movers come
I was somewhere safe. My eyes went grey. God had simpler hair.
I too slowly stare. You’re not invisible
kingsoftrain 