birthplace 48 I never did write that line. God cried for a year. For what seemed like god.
birthplace 47 A ballerina in a married mirror smokes alone. Dreams of pinching her sister’s fog-eating baby. Fore pain, far skin. Image as a darkroom for deadness.
WEAPONRIES (i) He shot three of us in the stomach for throwing a snowball at his pick-up truck. None of us died completely. By none I mean a priest and a pilot are changing the diaper of an indifferent baby. By scar we mean we held sticks and surrounded the paw that our god had filled with fog (ii) It takes we guess three low-flying helicopters and a herd of wheelchairs to scare jesus away from eating the bomb that we made for men only dogs can hear (iii) By stomach I mean both field and church are empty and that whole meals reappear in the newborn’s outstanding loneliness
birthplace 46 Touch is a dress made of snow. God can’t sing. Me I’m lost in my frog-loss dream. Tired of touch and its touching machine.
birthplace 45 Heaven not there when I get there The study of your longest child At night an eyelid aches itself over a stone Sleep, the death of absence Lossology, the study of this isn’t The password I cry with
birthplace 44 God does not slowly realize he'll be found naked. Minutes go by in every place. No one has eaten.
birthplace 43 It was snowing. The baby was there even though it wasn’t its day. Mom was vacuuming. My hair was trying to burn. Your brother the anorexic was swearing he’d seen a frog turn to dust. My sisters argued over nostalgia and did not over time sensitive déjà vu. Touch came out of nowhere to die above an angel’s knee. Tornado, dad said, impossibly. His eye had crawled into something and he was looking for an image to get it back. Snow on our frogless loss. We made that rule about your brother.
birthplace 42 The baby with the headache. The pill popper’s crow. Some of these aren’t funny. Your cough digs a hole for your cough and I miss your laugh with mine. Look at that star. A cigarette burn kept alive by a spider.
The Long Run & other true stories Mishka Shubaly 2022 I circle this fucking thing and circle it later like a different fucking thing. I read half of it from my first copy, and the second half of it from my signed, second, copy. Mishka Shubaly seems a descendant of that writer one has probably read wrongly but that one has let go thinking correctly subconsciously that there’s another about to do it, not necessarily rightly, but separately with sadder madder swag. I made this a competition and oh well. My better angels are visiting family. Speaking of god, his ruining of the selfie is historic but not legendary. This thing reports, but drugs reportage, is direct, but overtaken and possessed. Shubaly is both an avoidant jokester and self-harmed other. He writes as one believing that the resurrected have been reincarnated as character actors. How unfair, how perfect. Read this book. It goes far enough, and it comes back. Pages 225 to 349, for me and my recency bias, seemingly recreate for the first time the how and the how of how the soundtrack kills the playlist. I felt like I ought to feel desire, writes Shubaly. Look, I don’t have a word to take, but the witness, here, proves proof. It won’t change you but changes itself. Thank hell. … response/reflection by Barton Smock
kingsoftrain 