xii. I have three stories about god and one about death. How long until you're alone? When my shadow wouldn't open its mouth, light took the teeth of my ghost. Babies were heavier, then. Our cigarettes ate quickly in the dream that our eating couldn't have. Now there is a spider that can make a spider do nothing. A wasp that's believed its way into your thumb.
A thunderstorm turns on the microwave. We call it fixed and then listen all night to the bird in the broken dryer. We don’t blink for a year after a hand gets caught in a hand. We know it’s been a month since angel was on day two of having a ghost. Beyond that, the neighbor’s baby chooses one television over another. I can’t remember who I want to stop looking like.
Take 1 poems, Eliot Cardinaux Bodily Press, 2023 bodilypress.bandcamp.com ~ In my wanting to appear forever specifically to no two people, I go back and forth, or went, here beside, in hereafter, of the writing of Eliot Cardinaux, as it is, or will be, in the chapbook Take 1. First take. Or perhaps: First, take. Oh title, oh instruction. This white space of abundance. This absent plenty. If it's true that the same poem comes to all over and over, then Cardinaux writes to each of how to be, differently, again. In the reading, I wrote a note-to-self to maybe unselve: I long to be in the moment and also I pine to misremember, though I am suddenly wrong to have ever kept them apart. As such, I am still being struck by these thrice thundered poems, by how they hold, and give away, the optimistic loneliness of the unexpected. As in the joke where god tells crow "Crow, this is your last, warning.", the poem looks, and can only look, where it's already. ~ book, etc, is here
xi. Wasps at night. The heads of my brothers attached to my brothers. Time gives us god just long enough for it to get away. Sleep is for the perfectly made. Our crooked dog leaves our chewed-up place.
on the cross I get an earache
x. A son’s hair as a map eggs can’t use
ix. Talk about this whale in a way that mentions singing Not a specific whale just this whale There were two of me because I thought I was dying
viii. Hunger pains in a soft ambulance, Ohio has a few sounds left. Glacier, private prison, etc. The coughing animal, too, that like any good baby will become a small dog and spare the naked driver. Crawl with touch, touch. My eyes don't believe in the dark and death sees only god.
that I go from bowl to owl owl to bowl in this long unliving and be a touch emptied by your bowl of owls
Leave the poem whenever possible. It's about death.
kingsoftrain 