Losing dogs is good practice. In heaven, I look with Ohioans at ruined cars. I love Jesus for those few moments she went unnamed. I don’t see blood. I **** myself when my nose runs. When I say moon, put out on my brother a cigarette. When I write moon, become on earth the first to be invisible. Religion is apology and pain. The afterlife is a place for morning people to talk about death. Dear Ethel Cain, I don’t think letters help. I so try to not love poets, but they read aloud so nervously that books disappear from the bible. I keep in the same place coughing up anthill dirt. We can’t find the sleep god died in.

They found a dog on the moon with a mannequin’s hand in its mouth. They drew it together from memory but in the year it took them a photo of the dog had been taken by god. Art wants to invent time, all the time. In a poem for my mother, a baseball is being grown in a beehive. In a poem for my father, I eat an egg roll in a cornfield made of paper. In a poem for both, I am old enough to count the rings on the oven’s burners. Love changes love.

**** nostalgias accumulate in the sadness of new elations. I am photo deep in the longing you’ve abridged. Hands shrink with age. Facts wrestle me from the hair of god. You’re allowed to be a vibe. After kissing the salt from a dissolved rabbit mask, I see the redesigned deer of my disappearing. The writing stops but it can’t tell you.

mothered by a silent
shape my
mouth

The body’s been to the body and back. Catching fish presses the eyelids of god. I look at my brothers to see if our *** dreams have overlapped. I look at my brothers with the unmilked violence of nostalgia. A church painter works backward through the bible. The painter says if the mother’s nose is bleeding, find a baby to put under it. Does not say that touch returns in an image cooked up by the face of pain. Meanwhile a book as quiet as a book turns blue in the space between belonging to the strangled unhoused and beheading the hand that starts a fire with a nail. Meanwhile, the past. You’re never far from the unborn.

Tell me how your mother went.

We’ll say
the far
amen.

We’ll say
to dog
how hunger
is like snow
Hurry.

Y’all with your nakedness

deadnaming god
Y’all with your carpenter’s

voided
mirror

Idk

I miss my cousins.
I’ve lost my brothers.

The invisible
in Eden
who gets over
their surprise

Dear Ethel Cain by now abuse is nostalgia’s first job

I did not mean to pay attention to my life. For that, I am touchable and sorry. Not dying earlier is always the most cruel month. In school, in second grade, I wet myself two days in a row. I’ve never been able to scare the right people. During the assault, I spotted on the bathroom floor a pencil nearly sharpened out of existence. I thought of a star, a cigarette, and of a newborn being ****** back into its mother. I burned my face on a mask as something god could use when asked about my teeth.