birthplace 28 There is a deepness in me and there is a deepness in my brother. Some places exist only after you reach them twice. We listen to music, and god works on a cure. The slowing angels decide it’s okay to be seen. No one dreams underwater. Here is what to do if I live.
birthplace 27 Later I am talking story ideas with my son and he says the ghost and the zombie are the same person. He is angry and sad. Haunted and there’s nothing to eat. I’m not a storyteller. Geography is a cult. The cars here stopped running a few days after our last three dogs died on a movie set nowhere near a houseboat fire. Pretty recently touch is a way for the hand to stop remembering dreams. I tell my son before bed that sleep is the loneliest place. He doesn’t respond but in the story I have him say that we’re here to be godless. When he gets sick on an outside animal he's never seen, I look.
birthplace 26 The machine broke that was making blood Machine went everywhere Machine was found in the drinking blood New kinds of birds were found in the ocean Some of us were late we didn’t get to die (Old kinds of birds in god
birthplace 25 The violence did not survive the poem. I know you wanted to see god. My stomach didn’t actually become a star. I am not good looking and all this has been to say as much. Also, ghost, also. The angel’s diary is light on imagery. Hurt travels by not moving. Yes, they were nudes, but not until I put them face down. Someone had taken from you the only year you’d die.
birthplace 24 Swimmer’s ear. The far bone. God dreams of ants and surgery. I name a wrist but nothing scrapes mother awake. You’ll lose two kids and a garden.
birthplace 23 Ohio gives you a well-made baby and a dinner menu. Memory stops at a dog made of sticks. My stomach becomes a star.
ON THE LONG BLUE NIGHT poems, Eliot Cardinaux Dos Madres Press, 2023 ~ In some nearby deepness, language has forgotten how to understand the conversations between thunder and mirror. That nearby deepness could be singlehandedly so many that it might as well be predestined to be what belongs to poet Eliot Cardinaux in the precisely given away On The Long Blue Night. I question what nearby means and have to pick the echo that replies. But oh the echo that doesn't. If, of late, discovery is in a constant state of rehabilitation, Cardinaux gives us a verse embedded in what it recovers. Gives us a natural melancholy that separates moon and footprint might time pick different days to touch the earth. Gives us shrugged vulgarities of stonestruck awe might language learn eventually how madness cuts us short. This is a work and a voice afflicted with a great noticing, a hidden showmanship, a doomed unpredictability. A joy this tactile is frightening and freeing. I wrote the following note to myself in the reading, and then misread it, and then combined both, which are here: Your poem is in the room writing about the room I'm in. Many things are impossible. ~ reflection by Barton Smock ~ book is HERE
birthplace 22 Pain is death’s middle and only child. Ghost a light by which god reads. I piss teeth and call it discipline. You turn blue painting kittens on the bottom of a lake. Our fathers know each other as angels beaten for being in the wrong dream. Our mothers look alike at the same time.
birthplace 21 A spacesuit made of grief, sure. I don’t have the details. We lost a couple of our children and all the squirrels. There were screams I didn’t know were screams. A purse full of hands was asked to be a baby. Okay, said the baby. My blood eats awe.
birthplace 20 Your animals have forgotten what they can eat. God is selling fishhooks online using the screen name of a twin created through repetition. Sleep gets into your son’s hand. Your son plays dead, and touch believes.
kingsoftrain 