Dear Ethel Cain

Knowing I have skin makes my skin stay put. I am perhaps in my last translated body and am maybe hearing creatures compare voice apps for crucifixion survivors. In the dream that cannot undream the dream of my assault, two men who share a neck find part of my stomach in my son’s brain. I was wrong. Everything I touch forgets being my hand.

Dear Ethel Cain

Hell doesn’t have a language but everyone goes there to talk. Your ears are ears to my ears. I continue to want to die less than my children want to be killed. Yesterday was yesterday. I could afford a room in the aforedoom. The future is a rumor started twice by a violence we remember being able to stop. The poor play shape, touch, reentry. Find four hands.

Dear Ethel Cain

An angel overcomes a severe stutter by playing musical chairs with two boys who years ago were struck at different times in the head by the same horseshoe. A stone thinks of a stone thinks of a. A line of computer code erases the rib of the snake it was written to memorize. I’m not telling you this anymore than I’m.

Dear Ethel Cain

I’m in the afterhood of childlessness. No one is dancing. I say things above my dying body that sound final. A cigarette is a flashlight with a toothache. Look for whiskey’s underwater church.

Our nakedness had little to do with the most immediate creatures deciding not to **** us. Eating grew on the tree of loneliness. A cigarette is a star de-aged by god.

There was a second story told where Jesus got sick quietly and died watching his mother rub her wrists together. Angels want bodies they can leave.

My mouth somewhere open in the unmarked church of naming, I cover my face when I go to sleep. Each night god believes in you a star loses its memory of being seen. We don’t always know how to feel attractive and worried. Angels tell our toothaches to imagine a fly living too long with a small part of the sun’s brain. Your breast dreams of the hole in my lung. Eyes are on the way.