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
birthplace 41 My nakedness went on without me. I had kids who didn’t bleed. Kids who loved new skincare routines and passed away in white elevators. I miss you. Miss you second.
birthplace 40 Water erases the fiction of a sister’s legs. The bones of something break in an orange. In ours, Jesus gave birth on the cross. Talent wasn’t real was a mime on a mountaintop.
I am brother one and before I give this toast to brothers 2,3, and 4…it would be wrong of me not to mention the mother and father who gave their sons a place to play, a thing to worship, bodies to beat on, and a language to turn into slang. With that, to brothers 2 and 3, JP and Noah- thank you for fighting in front of me. I’m no peacekeeper anymore, but for a time I knew ferocity as a two-headed thing groaning toward a single and lovely event. Thanks for realizing you need each other because I need you both. Brother 2, JP- I’m glad you’re not alone and that you make people love you and that you cry sheep to the napping wolf and that you count me regardless of the sense I don’t make. Brother 3, Noah- nostalgia dictates that I take here a moment of silence for the number of times your writing, read aloud, made me believe that the dwindling attendance at our smalltown church lay solely at your feet and that one can wash a sound with body language. Brother 4, Jacob…man, thank you for waiting. wherever you are, you are waiting. Brothers get off a bus. Brothers come to the end of money. Brothers put off writing their shit poems. Brothers tell stories you have to reenact. It's terrible, but you wait. May apocalypse be the rumor you start in heaven. I love you fuckers. Now talk. Don’t forget me when I’m here.
birthplace 38 We switched houses with a neighbor once. There was a tornado and there was a fire and the devil got himself spotted. I can sleep anywhere but in a bed. You can tell by the smoke if it’s branch or ghost. You can make a dog outta pretending to throw. birthplace 39 Never makes the dream, the crow. Nor a chthonic darling in a house of snow.
kingsoftrain 