Dear Ethel Cain

An abuser loses their phone, their fingerprint. Longing faces its first deadline. The eating competition of our dreams is on its third snow delay. The work my body puts into me is killing my children. I think of that fingerprint for 100 years in sunscreen time. My skin turns white from being seen by a ghost. My teeth go grey. And comb their fear.

Dear Ethel Cain

I lick sugar from the windshield of a deer-shaped car. Make a bird from a hunger ballon. Have an ****** that belongs in a stomach to lovebombed plastics. Catch photophobia from the ghosts of angel suicides. Fix a machine with a drinking machine. Listen, glisten. Etc.

Dear Ethel Cain

A microwave in a wellness center is left alone long enough to miss a bible. Fate does its work early. Babies make loss fun again. I try with my gut health to stop time. Angels, born on, turn off.

Dear Ethel Cain

The surgeon puts an egg in my son's mouth then shoots herself. On earth, we refuse the naked. The angels think we're weird for losing teeth. The last time I wrote sick was the first time the television marked the last time we'd seen a bug. It's not true but here we say all circles are male. Longing is a cult created by birth. I don't care. Belief invented your mother and my. The past dies of narration.

Dear Ethel Cain

I am maybe too high. I want to speak to how their nowness robs us of being present. I was giving head to seashells that heard the breaking knee. Or fasting in the pawn shop of my father’s early sleep. Anyway. Hearing an apple cry keeps the angel’s fossil dry. Nearer nostalgia I’m not to thee.

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.